Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2010. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 279-293). / "Negotiating Nature" explores resource management in action and the intertwined roles of law and science in environmental conflicts in the Upper Klamath River Basin in southern Oregon. I follow disputes over the management of water and endangered species. I develop several themes: first, how these disputes demonstrate the growing connections between scientific and legal authority in environmental matters. This occurs because environmental laws often limit participation in disputes to those who can offer "scientific data" in support of their claims. I call this situation "scientific legality" and suggest that increasingly, one's ability to make legal claims is closely tied to one's ability to muster scientific authority behind those claims. Second, how the growing importance of scientific expertise in environmental decision-making has affected the ways that groups frame environmental claims. Third, how negotiations over environmental rights, regulations, and policies shape not only management efforts, but also narratives of environmental relationships. In Part One, I discuss the Endangered Species Act of 1973, which legally mandates that only scientific considerations can be taken into account in certain aspects of endangered species management. As a result, the Act has impacted the ways people frame claims about endangered species. I then discuss how the Klamath Tribes of American Indians have responded this situation, and the implications of this for presumed divisions between the environmental knowledge of scientists and native peoples. In Part Two, I examine a 1975 water rights case, United States v. Adair et al. I explore how the court drew on and reproduced prominent narratives of American Indian history, and the ways these narratives bounded the agency of the Klamath in relation to the environment and the colonial process. In Part Three, I examine a dispute in 2001 over endangered species. In this conflict, a dispute over policy quickly became a dispute over the scientific claims that legitimated the policy. Expert disagreement ensued. Although political explanations for expert disagreement were common, I suggest that a more underlying cause was the unavoidable uncertainties of ecological claims. These uncertainties were politically useful to those who wanted to stall management action and maintain the status quo. / by Nicholas Seong Chul Buchanan. / Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-83). / by Russell Brian Olwell. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 186-208). / by Rebecca M. Herzig. / Ph.D.

Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 309-328). / This dissertation examines the mutually reinforcing connections between science and law and their construction of pain in British regulation of animal experimentation. It investigates the Home Office's implementation of the Cruelty to Animals Act (1876), the first effort anywhere in the world to impose legal restrictions on vivisection, during the three decades following its enactment. The study ends in 1912 with the findings of a second Royal Commission that evaluated the workings of the Act. The Commission reaffirmed many of the Home Office polices regarding vivisection and their underlying premises. The Act mandated official supervision of scientific experiments that "calculated to give pain" to animal subjects. Implementing the Act therefore necessitated the identification and quantification of pain. This requirement created what I term the "bureaucracy of empathy," an attempt to systemize the understanding of animal suffering through administrative mechanisms. Practicing empathy was integral to some bureaucratic tasks, for example, attaching the right certificate to an inoculation experiment. Additionally, various factors including legal settings and scientific knowledge informed and situated this empathy with animals, when, for instance, an inspector drafted a report about mutilated monkeys while visiting a physiology laboratory. My analysis unravels that defining animal pain was often intertwined with the definition of an experiment. Law and science co-constitution of pain and experiments conditioned both the daily work of administering the law and the practices of experimenters. This dynamic led to the adoption of technologies such as anesthesia and pain scoring models, which provided legal-medical means to control pain in research and to ostensibly create a cruelty free experimental fact. A new pain-based ethical order was established, designed by law officers, civil servants, and court judges as much as by physiologists, remaking the relationships between experimenters, state representatives, and laboratory animals. / by Shira Dina Shmuely. / 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, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 216-226). / Pocket computers, called "smartphones," have become a part of everyday life over the past decade. Most people now routinely carry around with them millions of times more computing power than generated the Apollo mission to the Moon. They use it to access, process, and share information quickly and cheaply, in furtherance of the things people have long done: buying and selling, socializing, and so on, yet faster and across greater distances-characteristic of what we call "modernity." This has affected the ways in which people are working, and who is working, doing what, today. This thesis reports the results of a field study of one new kind of laborer who has been brought into work consequent to the smartphone: Uber drivers. The author conducted ethnographic fieldwork over one year in Boston, Massachusetts, and the surrounding area using ride-along sampling, participant observation, lengthy interviewing, and systematic coding in order to better understand a software-organized, person-to-person labor market in which the person who does the labor also brings the capital in the form of a vehicle used to provide transportation to other people. The first chapter of the thesis provides a typology of Uber drivers based on semi-random sampling through ride-alongs. The second chapter describes collective action that was undertaken by Uber drivers at Boston's Logan Airport in the form of a strike against the algorithm, which was an effort to induce the software to perceive an (artificial) driver shortage, leading to an increase in the price of fares. The third chapter offers a theory of the structure of Uber as an organization that mobilizes labor by using software to facilitate economic transactions that are triangulated between two users and the firm. The chapter also explains how this structure was particularly apt at mobilizing large numbers of people to carry out "regulatory breach," as they worked as Uber drivers doing the equivalent of taxi or livery work without complying with any of the applicable legal regulations. The final chapter explains how analysis of the field data, in combination with the new theoretical insights of the thesis, drives a conclusion suggested by the thesis title: that Uber has made a digital working class. / by H. C. Robinson. / 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, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 252-261). / This dissertation examines the history of shark-human interactions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It argues that the mid-twentieth century onward saw a series of conjunctures -technological, cultural, and scientific -that thrust sharks and humans into unprecedented levels of contact. This led to both a rise in preoccupation with sharks, and an emergence of new stakeholder groups that sought produce knowledge about them. The conflicting definitions, attitudes, and responses to sharks presented by these various groups are linked to greater trends in science, culture, and society. In particular, the way humans write and think about sharks and other man-eating predators has deep links to the position we see ourselves occupying in the environment. Further, anxieties about sharks are strongly tied to the complicated cultural relationships that people have with the marine environment, both as a place of wonder and terror. Lastly, sharks also allow us to examine the technologies we use to tame and navigate the ocean, as the shifts that brought humans and sharks into closer proximity were intertwined with new technologies that changed the ways humans interacted with marine spaces. Each chapter presents case studies from the United States and South Africa, juxtaposing the responses by each region. The opening chapter charts the rise of shark attack numbers in the mid-century. It traces the impact of highly publicized shark attacks in the U.S. and South Africa in the 1950s, which resulted in differing approaches to combat the threat of shark attack. Chapter Two explores the intersections between popular depictions of sharks and changing perceptions of shark behavior, centering on the ur-text of shark literature: Jaws. Chapter Three traces the advent of shark tourism, and examines the controversy surrounding white shark cage diving in South Africa. Chapter Four explores the response of Cape Cod communities to an influx of white sharks into the region, drawing parallels with earlier historical examples of predator eradication and conservation. The dissertation thus argues that studying shark-human interactions allows for the interrogation of divisions between myth and science, experts and laypersons, popular culture and scientific knowledge, humans and the environment. / by Michaela Jane Thompson. / 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, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 263-285). / This dissertation is a study of emergent economic forms of life. It investigates recent remakings of economic existence and modes of disseminating these forms of life, and does so with particular reference to the crafting of electricity markets in the United States. It draws on more than a year of fieldwork among experts and users involved in electricity exchange. The experts and users among whom I conducted participant observation include computer programmers who assist companies that trade in electricity markets by collecting information and making trading suggestions, electrical engineers who design new infrastructures such as electricity markets for buying and selling electricity in bulk, psychologists and social scientists who study people's electricity consumption behavior to generate economic technologies to save money to users and providers of electricity, and citizen groups based in West Virginia and rural Illinois that organize against electricity markets' exclusion of consumers from decision-making mechanisms. Bringing questions of economic anthropology to bear upon the emergent literature of the anthropology of infrastructures, I propose that new economic forms of existence often come to being though infrastructure building and maintenance. For the last 20 years, experts of diverse technical backgrounds have been reprogramming the electric grid to allow for enhanced calculative choice and competition - principles at the core of the neoliberal agenda. I demonstrate that people who do not necessarily concern themselves with the formal study of economics often take the lead in creating and propagating wide-ranging economic emergent forms of life, such as neoliberalism, across the social field. To zero in on their work, I develop the concept of "techno-economics": an approach that understands commodities, whether they are living nonhumans such as livestock or inorganic processes like electricity, as more than passive receptacles of human design, and locates humans within their efforts to commoditize and marketize unruly objects, like electricity - a commodity that cannot be stored in warehouses or shipped on highways. Anthropological studies of the techno-economic, I suggest, are best equipped to make connections in ethnographic representation between otherwise disparate nodes of social life, like expertise and wires, law and steel, and finally, economics and electricity. / by Canay Özden-Schilling. / Ph. D. in History and Social Study of Science and Technology (HASTS)

Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 252-257). / With the emergence of biomedical technologies, human body parts from living or dead donors have become commodities in the international networks of trade. This dissertation tries to understand religious, political and ethical discourses on this emerging economy and how it creates its subjects in Turkey. By drawing analogies from the early days of anatomy and mental health practices and by using a three-fold-corpus (state, body and law) as a framework, it illustrates how the state, the religious law on the body, and social inequalities turn some subjects to objects of this biomedical practice while extending life for others. Life histories, oral histories, doctors' and patients' accounts, media reporting, urban legends, cinematography, theater, poetry and literature speak of this new biomedical life. The meaning of the cadaver, the brain-dead body, and the living donor are reevaluated. The personhood of suicides, the homeless, the poor, the mentally ill, the immigrant, and women are all questioned with the redefinition of boundaries of life and death. Biomedicine effects this kind of social change. / (cont.) A cultural history of this production sheds a light onto how Turkey has become one of the centers of organ trafficking in the Middle East in the 1990s, how doctors generate biomedical politics inspired by their American or European counterparts, and how patients, who have acquired kidneys, rationalize and legitimize the world they live in while they seek for "a second life," "a humane treatment," and social equality. Simultaneously new definitions of the human, the person and the self emerge as a new body is reconstructed with parts originating from another human being. It is the history of the biomedicalization of the self. / by Aslihan Sanal. / 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. 426-437). / This dissertation focuses on the pursuits of a particular subset of automobile users: hot rodders, those who modify their standard production automobiles for improved performance. More specifically, this project examines the history of the speed equipment industry - the aftermarket subsector which manufactures high-performance products for hot rodders - from its infancy in the 1910s through the mid 1980s. The thesis begins by examining the role of technological enthusiasm in the early growth of hot rodding, focusing in particular on the ways in which this enthusiasm led a handful of individuals to begin to manufacture high-performance parts in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. After tracing the wartime experiences of these industry pioneers, the project then explores the ways in which, in the midst of America's postwar affluence, the spectacular growth both of the high-performance industry and of hot rodding itself helped spawn the youth-oriented musclecar movement upon which the Big Three would later feed. In its examination of the 1940s and 1950s, the dissertation closely examines the evolution of this industry's production methods in an attempt to understand the manufacturing dynamics of a market-sensitive, flexibly-oriented, late-twentieth-century industrial sector. / (cont.) The thesis then explores the ways in which this industry dealt with automotive safety and environmental legislation in the 1960s and 1970s. It concludes with a discussion of the fragmentation of the hot rod market during the 1970s and 1980s, analyzing the manufacturing and marketing challenges this change has wrought. This project sheds new light on the history of the automobile in America in four main ways. It highlights the survival of a flexibly-oriented, consumer-driven automotive industry in the shadow of the Big Three. It emphasizes the lingering importance of technological enthusiasm in the evolution of automobility. It uses the experience of the speed equipment industry to reexamine and revise our understanding of the relationship between the Big Three and governmental regulators. And, finally, it challenges the longstanding notion that the automobile had become a 'black box' by the 1920s, documenting the extent to which the social constructivists' 'end-user interpretive flexibility' has instead remained quite strong throughout the history of the automobile. / by David Nicholas Lucsko. / Ph.D.in History and Social Study of Science and Technology (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. / The rhetoric and apparatus of national security have played critical roles in American controversies over animal and human experimentation from the dawn of the Twentieth Century to today's "War on Terror." Drawing on archival and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) research, this dissertation traces how American partisans in the enduring vivisection controversy have sought to mobilize national security concerns to tar their domestic political adversaries as enemy agents of foreign enemies from the Kaiser and Hitler to Stalin and Al-Qaeda. Further, this study explores how these efforts have intersected with issues of gender, slavery, and the pathologizing of political dissent, as well as campaigns for the absolute freedom of research, the functioning of Nazism and the Holocaust in the American political imagination, civil liberties in the Post-9/11 world, and ongoing debates over animal rights, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and domestic terrorism. / by Ryan Noah Shapiro. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS)