Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 88-108). / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Intellectual Property is an ideology of the late Twentieth Century which reserves property-like rights in information, so that creators may extract its economic value. Current American copyright law draws mainly from this concept; it has been constructed through history by negotiation between various established economic interests. Information Freedom is a competing ideology which has been successful in the software community. It emphasizes the dangers of over-propertization and the benefits of freely accessible resources, especially non-depletable information resources. Compromise must be reached in a practical (non-ideological) fashion in order to achieve the social goals of: production of creative content (encouraged by fair but not excessive compensation for creators); promotion of scientific, political, technical, artistic, cultural, and economic progress by removing obstacles to accessing content and taking advantage of innovations which change the status quo; protection of creative freedom; and ensuring quality and diversity in the content which is created. Civil disobedience as a means to achieve these goals may be counterproductive if it results in tighter technological restrictions on content availability or stricter legal mechanisms; legal reforms proposed by Lawrence Lessig and Jessica Litman are unlikely to be enacted. Internet-based technologies have strong potential to increase exposure to diversity, decrease costs, and improve the subjective experience for music consumers. Cheaper film-making equipment may have similar positive effects for motion pictures to a lesser degree. Internet bandwidth and other practical limitations suggest that immediate changes in video distribution and consumption patterns are more likely to be driven by the availability of Digital Video Recorders, or perhaps competing Video On Demand services. Different economic models which fund content creation may be appropriate for different applications, and may in some cases further social goals better than strong propertization. Alternative models include voluntary contributions (either from creators or consumers); indirect benefit by establishing reputation, selling related services, cross-promotion, or selling advertising; and public funding. The history of telecommunication, including the telegraph, radio, television, and the Internet, provides evidence that important uses for new technology may not be initially obvious, that the maturation of digital information technology and related economic models is just beginning. / by Christopher D. Beland. / S.B.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation follows British professors at Tokyo's late nineteenth century College of Technology (Kobudaigaku) and continues into the twentieth century with the Japanese students they trained. My first chapters map out an argument between British disciplines over Japanese 'adaptation' and/or 'resistance' to nature, a conflict driven by the development of the modem science of seismology in Tokyo. Seismology was a unique cross-cultural project - a 'Western' instrumental science invented and first institutionalized in a non-Western place. I discuss bow artifacts as diverse as seismographs, five-story wooden pagoda, and Mt. Fuji became 'boundary objects' in a fierce dispute between spokesmen for science and an over the character of the Japanese landscape and people. The latter chapters explain bow young Japanese architects and seismologists re-mapped the discursive and instrumental terrains of their British teachers, challenging foreign knowledge-production from inside colonizing disciplines. The text is framed around the story of the Great Nobi Earthquake of 1891. According to contemporary Japanese narratives, the great earthquake (the most powerful in modem Japanese history) was particularity damaging to the new 'foreign' infrastructure, and caused Japanese to seriously question, for the first time, the efficacy of foreign knowledge. 'Japan's earthquake problem' went from being one of bow to import European resistance into a fragile nation, to one of how to make a uniquely fragile imported infrastructure resist the power of Japanese nature. I critically re-tell this Japanese story as a corrective to European and American images of Meiji .Japan as a 'pupil country' and the West as a 'teacher culture'. "Foreign Knowledge" demonstrates in very concrete ways bow science and technology, art and architecture, gender, race, and class co-constructed Meiji Japan. Distinctions between 'artistic' and 'scientific' representations of culture/nature were particularly fluid in late nineteenth century Tokyo. Architects in my text often speak in the name of science and seismologists become an critics and even ethnographers. The narrative is also trans-national; centered in Tokyo, it follows Japanese architects, scientists, and carpenters to Britain, Italy, the United States, and Formosa. / by Gregory K. Clancey. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 1999. / Vita. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 254-273). / The dissertation is an historical study of the interactions between technologists and museums in the late nineteenth United States, the role of international expositions-such as Philadelphia in 1876 and Chicago in 1893-in these interactions, and the rise of technology collections in those museums. Through archival sources, as well as published primary and secondary source material, the dissertation examines the role of engineers and the public in creating technological collections in museums dominated by natural history specimens. It focuses on intersections between industry, engineers, international expositions, and museums in the nineteenth century by considering the cases of the Smithsonian's National Museum and the Field Columbian Museum. This research explores technology and its cultural roles, how technology related to or differed from other aspects of American culture, and how this may have precluded the establishment of a national museum dedicated to mechanical arts, technology and America's inventor citizens, even while some engineers brokered a place for technological collections to develop. Despite objections and a lack of support from the higher administration within the museums, mechanical and technological collections developed. In an era of enthusiasm for technology, invention, and mechanics, forces outside the museums pushed the development of the collections. In particular, a group of engineers, as curators and exhibit designers; played roles in the celebration of technological achievement and at the expositions, in the attempts to establish mechanical arts and technology collections at the two prominent museums, and in the connections between technologists and museums that proved essential to the development of the collections. In addition, pressure from a public audience enthused about technology and machines aided such collections by influencing museum administration. This dissertation argues that engineers became mediators between the museum world and the world of engineering by brokering the culture of technology and securing a subordinate, yet permanent place for technology within the museum world. Key issues in the negotiation and brokering include the nature of the culture of technology, the professionalization process of engineers and their need for social status and cultural recognition, and the place of technology in nineteenth century lives and hierarchies. / by Linda Eikmeier Endersby. / 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 158-164). / Modern U.S. traffic safety policy is largely guided by three overarching principles that have influenced governments, industry, and community and citizen activists since the 1940s. The terms, education, engineering, and enforcement, detailed in the Action Program for Traffic Safety were developed by engineers and U.S. federal government traffic safety experts in response to growing concerns around rising traffic fatalities. In these guidelines, and the iterations that developed from them, responsibility for traffic safety shifted between drivers, policy makers, and the automotive industry. My dissertation examines the evolution of traffic safety policy, specifically looking at solutions to reach zero fatalities, over multiple decades. The traffic safety experts, including the auto industry, federal government, and community activists, striving for zero fatalities have reshaped traffic infrastructure, automotive regulation, and consumer perceptions of risky behaviors in an attempt to solve a major public health issue. Broadly following four themes, infrastructure, institutions, technology, and behavior, each chapter highlights how these actors mitigated risks and defined safety in order to find solutions to highway fatalities. To safety-concerned government officials and industry leaders, central actors in the development of federal traffic safety policy, traffic safety encompassed engineering, education, enforcement, citizenship, humanitarian, and moral issues. On the other hand, to women's community and activist groups, like MADD, traffic safety's focus was the education of drivers and pedestrians, and the prevention of crashes through educational and public health approaches. However, to working class white males, government mandated safety was viewed as an infringement upon their freedom as individuals to choose how to be safe and how to define their level of safety, regardless of its effects on others. Through analysis of these narratives emerges a more complete picture of the public health, education, and social policy implications of twentieth century traffic safety, the role of citizen activism in traffic safety policy development at the local, state, and federal levels, and the ways in which the traffic safety solutions have shifted over time. / by Renée Marie Blackburn. / 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, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 320-350). / This dissertation is an examination of intersections of race, pharmaceuticals, and heart disease over the course of the 20th century and today. Each of these parts has had a dynamic history, and when they are invoked together they provide a terrain for arguments about interventions in health and in justice in the present. An enduring aspect of discourses of heart disease over the past century has been articulating connections between characterizations of the modem American way of life and of heart disease. In that process, heart disease research and practice has participated in differentiating Americans, especially by race. This dissertation uses heart disease categories and the drugs prescribed for them as windows into racialized medicine. The chapters are organized in a way that is roughly chronological, beginning with the emergence of cardiology as a specialty just before World War II and the landmark longitudinal Framingham Heart Study that began shortly thereafter. A central chapter tracks the emergence and mobilization of African American hypertension as a disease category since the 1960s. / (cont.) Two final chapters attend to current racial invocations of two pharmaceuticals: thiazide and BiDil. Using methods from critical historiography of race, anthropology, and science studies, this thesis provides an account of race in medicine with interdisciplinary relevance. By attending to continuities and discontinuities over the period, this thesis illustrates that race in heart disease research and practice has been a durable preoccupation. Racialized medicine has used epistemologically eclectic notions of race, drawing variously on heterogeneous aspects that are both material and semiotic. This underlying ambiguity is central to the productivity of the recorded category of race. American practices of medicating race have also been mediating it, arbitrating and intervening on new and renewed articulations of inclusion and difference in democratic and racialized American ways of life. / by Anne Pollock. / 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, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 147-159). / My dissertation, "Changed Climate: Networking, Professionalization, and Grassroots Organizing in U.S Environmental Organizations," explores the efforts of four established U.S. environmental NGOs to change their organizational cultures and routine practices to develop grassroots activism for climate change advocacy. I find that although actors within and outside the environmental movement recognize a collective failure to influence the U.S. policy process on climate change issues, their organizations have been unable to adapt to the current political environment. My data derives from extensive participant observation, semi-structured interviews with organizational staff and experts, and statistical analysis of organizational efforts to recruit volunteer participants and develop their leadership over a two-year period. I follow four environmental organizations as they sought to create of a national climate-focused social movement. Working in collaborative partnership with other state- and national-level NGOs under the moniker of the "Climate Coalition," they initiated pilot organizing campaigns in June 2011 in three U.S. cities toward three intertwined goals of 1) building social movement power via local coalitions, 2) developing volunteer leadership capable of forging a social movement community, and 3) mobilizing the resources of that constituency in collective action to effect change. In Chapter 1, looking first at the network of organizations that comprised the Climate Coalition, I show that the network's novel configuration - a third party network administrator both coordinated the activities of the participating organizations and worked with them to set the network's strategy - produced rather than diminished the tensions inherent in inter-organizational collaboration. Turning next to the organizations themselves in Chapter 2, I explore the challenges of integrating new types of experts and expertise into existing organizational structures. In particular, I suggest that the focus on involving volunteer expertise through community organizing disrupted existing organizational notions of expertise and prevented large-scale organizational embrace of the movement building work. Finally, in Chapter 3 1 examine the experiences of the volunteers on one of the movement building campaigns, and argue that the role of the community organizer in cultivating and developing volunteer leadership is essential for understanding the long-term success of movement building work. / by Nathaniel S. Deshmukh Towery. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 139-156). / In this thesis, I examine two episodes in the history of quantum field theory using different research techniques and historiographic approaches. The first episode occurred during the 1920's and 1930's when quantum mechanics and relativity were being reconciled. I present some of the central developments of that episode using an approach that relates questions asked by physicists to the structures of putative natural kinds upon which they predicated their research. The second episode occurred during the 1960's and 1970's when important features of quantum field theory were given new interpretations that arose from the exchange of methods and insights between particle physics, solid state physics, statistical mechanics and physical chemistry. Research for the second episode was conducted in collaboration with other historians and scientists using novel web-based and database-backed research tools. / by Babak Razzaghe Ashrafi. / 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. 254-262). / Reproduction is a site for understanding the ways in which people reconceptualize and re-organize the world in which they live. This dissertation tries to understand the world of birth under the regime of closures and fragmentation that governs the lives of Palestinians. It describes how checkpoints, closures, curfews have come to characterize childbirth in Palestine. It illustrates how the changing infrastructure, economy and discourse around birth produce new experiences of life in the medical sphere and in a family. Oral histories, life histories, doctors', midwives' and mothers' accounts, news reports and literature speak of these new conditions and experiences of birth and life. The meanings and structures of medicine, family and motherhood are thus remade. Oral histories focus on a history of the health infrastructure and movements in medicine, in particular the sumud (steadfastness) movement and the popular health movement. They illustrate how the figure of the doctor overlaps with that of the political leader. They identify the new health infrastructures built to assist birth during the closure which have different politics than the earlier movements, marking the post-socialist age, but show remarkable continuities with them in their emergence, mobilization and hierarchies. These new infrastructures, economies and discourses produce changing stories about birth and changing subjects. I identify two genres of birth stories, the first, narrated by mothers and the second, collected from newspapers. The former is in the register of the ordinary. The mothers remember the space of the hospital, a socio-economic space signaling class, as well as the trip from home to hospital and back. The stories seem uncanny. Occupation, closures and warfare are simply part of the ordinary. By contrast, the newspaper birth stories are sensational. They tell of checkpoint and prison births, occupation, suffering and resistance. They speak of miraculous redemption but in opposition to mothers' narrations, they are familiar. Finally, listening to the inner worlds of birth-mothers under the impress of economic, political and domestic pressures this dissertation distinguishes "enclosure" as a worldview caused by occupation and family relations, thus re-evaluating meanings of family, motherhood and life. / by Livia Wick. / 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, 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.