Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, September, 2020 / Page 229 blank. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 217-228). / Scientists in the late 1950s in the United States gained technological capabilities to test for signs of extraterrestrial life. While exobiologists developed visual techniques to detect whether sites beyond Earth might harbor microbes, "biosignatures," radio astronomers searched for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) in the form of "technosignatures." This dissertation explores how scientists since the Space Age have constructed experimental assemblages to imagine, relate to, and investigate the alien and exotic microbes -- unknown, indeed, as-yet-imperceptible, objects -- / through familiar sensory metaphors of seeing (exobiologists) and listening (SETI scientists). From historical material gathered at various D.C. archives, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Library of Medicine, I show how exobiologists' technologies of vision rendered anew images of the Moon, Mars, Venus, and the Earth from afar and at surface, affording scientists the ability to conceptually anticipate relationships between their world and others. Through a epistemic pratice I call "gaze-scaling," they yoked the concept of "island" to "planet," casting extraterrestrial sites as fragile laboratories of life that beckoned exploration. I next draw from immersive participant observation since 2016 to engage ethnographic sonar on the SETI group Breakthrough Listen based at U.C. Berkeley, California. I analyze how they construct criteria of intelligence through "experiments of anticipation" that are parametrized to hear from a commensurable subject. / I theorize "figures of listening" in both observational protocols and as a preemptive attunement to Other intention, acts that configure an alien who would be not just perceptible, but relatable. If exobiologists envisioned universal standards of biochemistry that would map life's common origins, SETI astronomers have traded on imagined superhuman characteristics of the alien -- more benevolent, wiser, and technologically superior -- to suggest human futures. I outline how the alien has been imagined through three potent analogical figures: as artifacts, animals, and angels. Furnished by feminist epistemologies and queer theories of care around multispecies becomings -- traditions that have persistently challenged ontological stability across species, gender, race, and spacetime -- / I theorize those analogies as acts of "reflexive alienation": a mode of worldmaking in which scientists imagine Others imagining them. Future-oriented extraterrestrial objects held in abeyance cultivate Earthly concepts of being.. / by Claire Isabel Webb. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS) / Ph.D.inHistory,Anthropology,andScience,TechnologyandSociety(HASTS) Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society

Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, September, 2020 / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 376-398). / Highly automated cars -- unlike robots in factories -- must operate in existing social spaces, which are complex and hard to control. Unlike household robots, these systems are also fast and dangerous. The fundamental problem of getting robots to interact in the world will be getting them to do the "right thing" -- according to developers, users, and societies. But what is "right" is a matter of perspective, and there will be many ways to achieve any particular robotic performance. Through ethnographic fieldwork at a site of robotic vehicle development, I investigate alternative strategies for robotic cars and discuss their social implications. Supported by a framework from multispecies ethnography and the practices of robot developers, I argue that robots do not see like humans or experience the world as humans do. But they must be explicitly made to think -- to represent the world and act in it -- / in ways that work for people, and obey people's intersubjective assumptions about how robots will act in a given moment. Faced with this difficult set of design constraints, developers seek to humanize robots to make them socially acceptable, or robot-proof the world to make it safer for robots, through four idioms or strategies of heterogeneous engineering: mapping and annotating, perceptual omniscience, AI decision-making, and human-in-the-loop supervised operation. Social scientists involved in the design process challenge and complicate these four approaches, and introduce a fifth one: humanizing robots by allowing them to communicate via external human-machine interfaces. These idioms form a language by which to characterize approaches to socially integrated robotic systems. The debates between them show that different humanizing idioms imply different perspectives on social order, what it takes to be a competent social actor, and how humans and machines can work together. / Each idiom imagines different kinds of future worlds in which robotic technologies come to coexist with humans, with vastly different political consequences. Social scientists are vital participants in the project of exploring the contours of these futures, and I suggest new approaches and open questions for the development of social scientists' engagement in technology development. / by Erik Lee Stayton. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS) / Ph.D.inHistory,Anthropology,andScience,TechnologyandSociety(HASTS) Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society

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 209-228). / Caring for Star-Children: Autism, Families, and Ethics in Contemporary China studies the emergence and development of family caregiving for autistic children after 1982, when autism was first diagnosed separately in two cities in China. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork at municipal specialist hospitals, community child-health clinics, autism rehabilitation centers, and homes of families with autistic children across six provinces, this study explores how social stratification and the turn towards self-governance not only made autism as an epistemic object, but has intersected with that category to create new forms of inequality. In the absence of thorough and consistent state initiatives, moral economies around the child's potential have sprung up. / Such moral economies lead actors such as medical professionals, philanthropic and educational organizations, and elite parent-activists to prioritize the young autistic child's potential, and to urge parents to become behavioral therapists for their own children. Parents are urged to let go of the normative societal expectation of recompense in the form of elderly care. I argue in this dissertation that the directives around these moral economies fail to take into account the local and gendered inequities that both produce, and constrain, parental diagnostic and therapeutic choices for their autistic children. Autism's spread as a diagnostic category has paralleled other spatial and economic disparities across the country. / The economic reforms which began in 1978 and the devolution of many public functions to the purview of local governments have led to dramatic regional disparities with respect to economic opportunity and, the availability and quality of healthcare, education and social services. Where professional and parental elites in cities such as Beijing refer to autistic children through the valorized term "children of the stars" (a phrase chosen so as to reduce stigma), and are able to provide children in these locations with prompt diagnoses and early therapy, to date many healthcare workers and families responsible for nurturing children in less developed regions of China have not even heard of such a diagnostic category. Many families from rural or otherwise resource-scarce locations in China are not able to obtain a timely diagnosis, much less access therapy for their children. / In managing care in landscapes of great disparity, families are turned into diagnostic and therapeutic internal migrants, as they travel across China in search of the appropriate doctors and therapy. I argue in this thesis that the post-socialist emphasis on choice, rather than care, in fact serves to legitimize neglect of the autistic adult and mother of the child. Autism advocacy rights which fail to take into account local forms of stratification thus serve to broaden the burden of care upon families. / by Emily Xi Lin. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS) / Ph.D.inHistory,Anthropology,andScience,TechnologyandSociety(HASTS) Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society

Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2019 / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 155-169). / This ethnography tracks a diverse set of scientific practices that have developed new technologies for the conservation of artworks and cultural heritage. I examine how scientists in physics, chemistry, and biology have intervened in the restoration of artifacts ranging from faded abstract expressionist paintings to the crumbling clay terraces of an archaeological site. Reporting on archival research, interviews, and participant-observation, I juxtapose three case studies in the U.S. and Italy-two in which physics (Cambridge, MA) and chemistry (Florence) are conscripted into the realm of high modem art, and another in which biological knowledge (Milan) informs the preservation of artistic tradition and craft heritage. / In analyzing interventions in digital projection technology (light), nanotechnology (colloids), and biotechnology (microbes), I argue that scientists today transform artifacts of culture into instances of technoscientific nature through what I call the "technoscientific re-enchantment of art." Aura, philosopher Walter Benjamin once wrote, is the ineffable and singular charisma that confirms an artwork as "the original." He added that technological reproducibility through film and photography strips art of its ritualistic authority, liberating it of the fetish of authenticity. To the contrary, I find, technology today is enlisted as a mode of authenticity's material production. Art's aura, in the age of technoscientific reenchantment, does not disappear but rather, is re-valued through analogy-analogies made through the discursive and material practices that liken light to paint, the colloidal substance of the human body to that of artworks, and microbes to patina. / Laboratory scientists, I show, are recasting the materials of art and heritage to make the terms of their recovery amenable to technoscientific mediation. In so doing, scientists contribute to enduring ethical debates within art history and heritage preservation-debates about how to interpret an artist's intent and an object's pristineness or historicity. Finally, I explore a fourth field site, the Vatican Museums, as a framing device for understanding the stakes in contemporary conservation practice. Drawing on the anthropology of art and heritage, science and technology studies, and art history, I explore the multiple, ever-changing claims of technoscientific expertise over matters of the materiality, aesthetics, and history of artifacts. / Grace Kim. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS) / Ph.D.inHistory,Anthropology,andScience,TechnologyandSociety(HASTS) Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society

Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 260-277). / This ethnography tracks visualization and pedagogy in the burgeoning field of structural biology. Structural biologists are a multidisciplinary group of researchers who produce models and animations of protein molecules using three-dimensional interactive computer graphics. As they ramp up the pace of structure determination, modeling a vast array of proteins, these researchers are shifting life science research agendas from decoding genetic sequence data to interpreting the multidimensional forms of molecular life. One major hurdle they face is training a new generation of scientists to work with multi-dimensional data forms. In this study I document the formation and propagation of tacit knowledge in structural biology laboratories, in classrooms, and at conferences. This research shows that structural biologists-in-training must cultivate a feel for proteins in order to visualize and interpret their activity in cells. I find that protein modeling relies heavily on a set of practices I call the body-work of modeling. These tacit skills include: a) forms of kinesthetic knowledge that structural biologists gain through building and manipulating molecular models, and by using their own bodies as mimetic models to help them figure out how proteins move and interact; and b) narrative strategies that assume a teleological relationship between form and function, and which figure proteins through analogies with familiar human-scale phenomena, such as the pervasive description of proteins as "machines." What I find is that these researchers are not only transforming the objects of life science research: they are training a new generation of life scientists in forms of knowing attuned to the chemical affinities, physical forces and movements of protein molecules, and keyed to the tangible logic and rhetoric of "molecular machines." / (cont.) This research builds on concerns in the feminist science studies literature on modes of embodiment in scientific practice, and contributes to studies of performance in science by examining visual cultures as performance cultures. In addition, I incorporate historical studies of the life sciences to map the making of the protein-this intricately crafted entity whose forms and functions, I argue, are recalibrating scientific expertise, reanimating biological imaginations, and reconfiguring the very contours and temporalities of "life itself." / by Natasha Myers. / Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS

The purpose of this thesis is to show a transformation around the scientific revolution from the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries against a Whig approach in which it still lingers in the history of science. I find the transformations of modern science through the cosmological models of Nicholas Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. Since of the enormous content, I shall only pay particular attention to Copernicus and Newton in which the emerging sciences transformed the cosmos on what Alexandre Koyré calls from a "closed world to infinite universe". As an interdisciplinary approach, I used the methods and inquiries from philosophy and history to explain the cosmological transformation in the sciences. The first part deals on the philosophic content of Michel Foucault and Thomas Kuhn which help to provide insight though their systematic thoughts are incompatible. The second part deals in the historic contents from Copernicus' doctrine, De revolutionibus, to Newton's mechanics, Principia. My ultimate outcome is to demonstrate the multi-perspective dimension of knowledge in which interdisciplinary studies shows transformation of the sciences and its effects on history.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 241-252).

This is an invited paper for the Seventh International Conference on Computing Anticipatory Systems CASYSâ 05, Liège, Belgium. August 8-13, 2005. It is forthcoming in American Institute of Physics, Proceedings. In biological systems, the capacity of anticipationâ that is, entertaining a model of the system within the systemâ can be considered as naturally given. Human languages enable psychological systems to construct and exchange mental models of themselves and their environments reflexively, that is, provide meaning to the events. At the level of the social system expectations can further be codified. When these codifications are functionally differentiatedâ like between market mechanisms and scientific research programsâ the potential asynchronicity in the update among the subsystems provides room for a second anticipatory mechanism at the level of the transversal information exchange among differently codified meaning-processing subsystems. Interactions between the two different anticipatory mechanisms (the transversal one and the one along the time axis in each subsystem) may lead to co-evolutions and stabilization of expectations along trajectories. The wider horizon of knowledgeable expectations can be expected to meta-stabilize and also globalize a previously stabilized configuration of expectations against the axis of time. This recursive incursion on the incursive dynamics of expectations can be modeled using hyper-incursion. The knowledge-based subdynamic at the global level which thus emerges, enables historical agents to inform the reconstruction of previous states and to co-construct future states of the social system, for example, in a techno-economic co-evolution.

This paper discusses the uses of peer review for science policy and government funding (grant proposal evaluations) decisions.

This is a submission to the "Interrogating the social realities of information and communications systems pre-conference workshop, ASIST AM 2006". Digital photography has widely replaced film in recent years, yet there has been relatively little research into digital photography as a socio-technical phenomenon. This project examines the computerization of scientific photography among marine mammal researchers. Scientists studying marine mammals use photo-identification to identify individual animals (whales, dolphins, etc.) in their research, and have recently widely switched to digital photography. This study examines ways in which scientists' work practices, communication patterns, relationships, and behaviors have changed by applying Kling's Socio-Technical Interaction Network (STIN) strategy. STIN integrates the social and technical to develop a nuanced understanding of technology and extends Actor-Network Theory.