Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 258-280). / This dissertation illuminates how expert labor makes a complex natural substance into a uniform global commodity. Drawing on both published sources and extensive archival research in the continental United States, in Scotland, and in Puerto Rico, it provides new insight into the workings of the empires of commodities that define modem capitalism. Chapter 1 shows that the notion that sugar has a single valuable molecular essence sucrose- has been used to explain its history as a commodity. Yet this essentialism is not a natural fact but a product of the political economy of the late nineteenth century itself. From the seventeenth century on, sugar production had relied on the experienced multisensory techniques of enslaved craftsmen. But after 1860, newly sophisticated factories began to appear throughout the Caribbean, producing sugar of unprecedented consistency and quality. Chapter 2 explores how the work of chemists was essential to managing labor within these new factories, whose owners attempted to eliminate the need for artisan work. Yet the more successfully chemists extracted sucrose from sugarcane, the more mechanical and obvious they made that extraction appear, and the more they effaced their own necessity. These efforts to use scientific expertise to de-skill sugar production were made possible, Chapter 3 shows, by the persistence of craft and cooperative production in Glasgow, where those factories' machines were built. Sugar engineering firms cultivated relationships with distant plantations, ensuring that draftsmen and engineers could design, maintain, and repair machines that would last many decades. It therefore shows how the devices that facilitated sugar's commodification have human histories themselves. Finally, Chapter 4 reveals how the valuation of sugar became a central political issue in the postbellum United States. The Federal government feared its means of enforcing sugar tariffs was being undermined by fraud on the part of Customs officers and by new forms of sugar itself. But supposedly objective chemical techniques were even harder for the state to supervise. In showing how powerful refiners shaped scientific practices to their own advantage, this chapter provides a new framework for historians' analyses of science, commodities, and corruption in the nineteenth century. / by David Roth Singerman. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS)

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, February 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 357-380). / This thesis is a historical and cultural analysis of the development of tissue culture, that is, techniques for growing living cells and tissues outside of the bodies of complex organisms. The development of these techniques represents an important epistemological shift in biology from in vivo to in vitro experimentation. This was not just a shift from use of a whole organ/organism to use of a fragment of the body, but a shift in the visualization and conceptualization of the body and its processes as they occur at the level of cells and tissues. Here it is argued that tissue culture was an essential part of a new sense of cellular life, not as a static building block of larger bodies, but as a dynamic and interactive entity which undergoes constant change, and is the functional unit of processes of growth, reproduction, aging, cancer, infection, and death. The thesis begins with an analysis of the work of embryologist Ross Harrison in growing isolated fragments of embryonic nerve tissue outside of the body in 1907. It follows the elaboration of Harrison's work by the surgeon Alexis Carrel, and the more general development of the technique over the early decades of the twentieth century. There is a close examination of the techniques for visualizing cellular life grown outside of the body, as well as the appearance of reactions to this form of life in a wider public culture. The methodological approach is a close examination of the material practices of tissue culture laboratories, and the images, ideas, and information about cells and their relation to bodies produced thereby. The movement of these ideas and images from laboratory to public culture and back is at the center of the final chapters, in which the history of the first widely used human cell line, HeLa, is examined, and more recent legal and ethical debates about the status and ownership of the Mo cell line. Rather than being a comprehensive history of tissue culture, this thesis takes historical episodes from this twentieth century biomedical practice to analyze the constitution of cellular life through the objects of tissue culture, and the ways in which these objects have been scientifically, technically, and culturally productive. / Hannah L. Landecker. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 250-272). / "Planting Improvement: The Rhetoric and Practice of Scientific Agriculture in Northern British America, 1670-1820," explores the history and cultural politics of environmental change in the British empire through a focus on rural land-use practices and the construction of scientific expertise in the cold temperate colonies of New England and Nova Scotia, from the late seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries. Improvement was an abiding mode of and justification for British imperialism through territorial expansion and early modern economic development. British American and anglophone colonists of a range of status positions embraced agricultural improvement, though to different degrees and in different ways. For all settler-farmers, improving extra-European land meant transforming native environments into neo-European agricultural landscapes that were aesthetically familiar. For elites in northern North America, agricultural improvement was additionally a science of the practical Enlightenment, which encompassed husbandry and horticulture, stadial theories of progress, and the objectives and methods of natural history, geography, and economic survey. By exchanging farming advice, botanical literature, and seeds, plants, and livestock with other naturalists and improvers in the republic of letters and scientific institutions in the region as well in England, Scotland, Sweden, Russia, and France, elites in New England and Nova Scotia took a uniquely scientific approach to colonial property development. By employing the rhetoric of science and flaunting their privileged access to transatlantic, European, and imperial networks, northern elites who formed agricultural societies, supported natural history professorships, and private, academic, or colonial botanical gardens, distinguished their land improvements from those of their neighbors. Moreover, they believed that scientific improvement could ameliorate the troublesome disadvantages of the region's nature-especially its climate, seasonal weather extremes, short growing seasons, uneven topography, and thin soils. / (cont.) Scientific improvement would erase the geography of difference which made their lands marginal to the real estate market, staple-crop economy, and migration flows of the British empire and the early United States. Because improving the landscape and environment promised to improve the people inhabiting them, agricultural improvement was also a program for social reform: northern elites crafted projects to employ 'surplus laborers'--especially Indians, Acadians, Jamaican Maroons, women, children, criminals, and the poor-in silk production or in the region's small farms. Yet the limits of the northern environment challenged the regional practicability of scientific agriculture as well as enlightened improvers' pretensions to universalism. I conclude by analyzing these broad ambitions in relation to northern improvers' allegations of widespread indifference (or their own failure to popularize) a scientific approach to agriculture. The study bridges the 'First' and 'Second' Empires in British imperial historiography and the colonial and early national periods in the field of United States history, emphasizing instead the solidarities that persisted among elite Americans, Loyalists, and Britons, through kin, friendship, and scientific networks, despite conflicting allegiances to the Crown or to the republican causes of the American and French Revolutions. / by Anya Zilberstein. / Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS

Thesis (Ph. D. in History and Social Study of Science and Technology (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, p. 395-423). / Trucking replaced railroads as the primary link between rural producers and urban consumers in the mid-twentieth century. With this technological change came a fundamental transformation of the defining features of rural life after World War II. Trucking helped drive the shift from a New Deal-era political economy-based on centralized political authority, a highly regulated farm and food economy, and collective social values-to a postwar framework of anti-statism, minimal market regulation, and fierce individualism. Trucking and rural truck drivers were at the heart of what I call the "marketing machine," a new kind of food economy that arose after World War II, characterized by decentralized food processors and supermarkets seeking high volume, low prices, and consistent quality to eliminate uncertainties from the food distribution chain. This marketing machine developed as a reaction against the statist food and farm policies of the New Deal. Government agricultural experts-economists, engineers, and policymakers-encouraged the growth of highway transportation in an effort to redefine the "farm problem" as an industrial problem, an issue to be solved by rural food processors and non-unionized "independent" truck drivers rather than price supports or acreage controls. / by Shane L. Hamilton. / Ph.D.in History and Social Study of Science and Technology (HASTS

Thesis (B.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 73-74). / The interplay of science, ethics, policy and society contribute to our understanding of and relation with human cloning. Genetic science and technology at the end of the twentieth century has permitted successful cloning of mammals and other animals. Such advancement has raised key ethical issues regarding the prospect of cloning human beings. Evaluation of these issues has led to policies aimed at regulating this novel technology. In tum, these policies strive to prepare our society for the scientific possibilities and ethical implications of human cloning. / by Faisal Reza. / B.S.

Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 319-331). / This dissertation engages with two analytical frameworks to explore questions of social transformation and structures of power in rural society in India. The first is a specific critique of various types of development discourse and development projects that have been elaborated by national and international elites during the last forty years, focusing on the dry land Malwa region in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. This includes a project to introduce soyabean cultivation to the region in the 1970s, which has been post-facto labeled as a yellow revolution, and a discourse which argues that providing market information through new information and communication technologies is empowering farmers. I argue that these projects and discourse have mostly steered away from engaging with the structures of power framing rural society, and thus, have failed to bring about much change in the condition of rural people in central India. The second analytical framework is a recovery and foregrounding of alternate arenas of struggle that rural people in the Malwa region have been participating in. The platform of democratic politics is one such avenue that marginalized groups have used to make demands upon the state to provide them with support and allows them to hold the state accountable for the same. Participating in cultural projects that question and subvert the forms of caste and gender based exclusion that frame the lives of people is another such arena which provides women and adivasis (tribals) with a language of empowerment. This research argues that for the language and practice of development to have more relevance to the lives of the poor and for it to engage with the deeper aspirations in their lives, the role of these political and cultural projects as vital platforms for rural people to exercise agency and bring about change, must be recognized. / by Richa Kumar. / Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 401-422). / by Wade Edmund Roush. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 209-219). / In this dissertation, I examine how the members of a distributed software development team (LC) operating entirely virtually for four and half years developed useful social practices to collaborate across time and space. Based on various communication data from LC, I analyze the communicative structuring of distributed work in members' daily practices. I show that "temporal flexibility," often mentioned as key advantage of virtual organizing, is socially accomplished through "boundary management," as members negotiate different temporal boundaries and learn and adapt to others' temporal patterns. Second, I identify dynamic coordination practices in LC that interweave multiple modes of communication and coordination in evolving work contexts, and demonstrate how these coordination practices facilitate temporal flexibility in LC. Finally, I analyze how members used the asynchronous communication medium of email to coordinate their tasks, using the notion of genre and genre system. / (cont.) My analysis suggests that communicating, coordinating, and temporal structuring are not distinctive activities, but are closely bound up with each other in a local practice; time, communication, and coordination are dynamically reconfigured over time, reflecting evolving work, social relations, and local contexts. Key Words: distribute teams, virtual teams, virtual organizing, technology-mediated communication, temporal flexibility, coordinating, communicating, temporal structuring, social practices, communicative structuring, genre and genre system, reconfiguration of time, communication, and coordination. / by Hyun Gyung Im. / Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS

Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 273-315). / This dissertation provides a multiscalar analysis of climate change solutions from the global South by investigating how bioscientists are leveraging postcolonial ecological legacies into the basis for what they envision as a sustainable future. In Brazil, scientists from different disciplines are reengineering sugarcane-a crop central to the colonial project-at molecular, organismic, and economic scales in order to expand biofuels as international energy commodities. I argue that biology has become central to what I call the plantation network: a postcolonial agricultural formation that includes laboratories as obligatory passage points in the growing of plants to meet human needs and desires, especially in the era of "sustainability" and "green capitalism." My research uses the plantation network formation to show that even though Brazilian scientists work under ethical and ecological threats posed by climate change, they also rely on Brazilian history, ideology, and cultural practices as they reshape life forms, landscapes, and labor in Brazil and Mozambique. This multisited analysis draws on ethnographic research conducted with molecular biologists attempting to create the world's first commercially viable transgenic sugarcane plant, biochemists working to develop waste-reducing fermentation technologies by using bioprospected "wild" yeasts to digest sugarcane bagasse, and a think tank of agronomic economists seeking to transfer a "Brazilian biofuel model" to Lusophone Mozambique. For these scientists, Brazil's long history of sugarcane is coming to center on ethoses and practices of what they call "sustentabilidade" (sustainability): a form of technoscientifically-aided industrial development that contributes to environmental wellbeing while maintaining the possibility of continued capitalist production for future populations. The dissertation examines "sustainability" as it has emerged in these sites by considering the plantation as a pharmakon-like entity: at the same time (1) a destructive nexus of social-ecological relations that has propelled the harmful, unjust conditions that have led to calls for "sustainable" practices and principles and (2) a redemptive space for ethically-sound renewable fuel and food production that scientists believe is central to creating a more just, livable world. I investigate how scientific practices related to ethically-rendered biofuels are motivating changes to the biotechnologies, production techniques, and locations of sugarcane plantations. / by Nicole Francesca Hayes Labruto. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 242-271). / by Brian O'Donnell. / Ph.D.