This thesis explores how the complex interplay between gender and technology significantly shaped the popularization of commercial aviation in the United States during the 1920s and 30s. As technological innovations improved both the safety and efficiency of airplanes during the early part of the twentieth century, commercial aviation industries increasingly worked to position flight as a viable means of mass transportation. In order to win the trust and money of potential passengers, however, industry proponents recognized the need to separate flight from its initial association with danger and masculine strength by convincing the general public of aviation’s safety and reliability. My work examines the efforts made by industry executives, pilots, and popular news sources to remake the public image of flight by specifically positioning women—as pilots, wives, and mothers—as central to the popularization of commercial aviation. More specifically, this thesis investigates the ways in which female popularizers of commercial aviation effectively mediated the boundaries between technologies and society, and how women’s positions as technological boundary workers often required them to redefine the social meanings and expectations of their gender.

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Around the turn of the twenty-first century, universities in the United States extended their longstanding history of cross-border activities by not only moving professors, students, and scholarship abroad but programs and campuses, as well. This trend towards transnationalization has especially involved polytechnics due to international demand for American technoscientific higher education driven by markets that favor its perceived socioeconomic utility. Using a method called "focal point analysis" that builds on the approaches of microhistory, the dissertation argues that these transnational polytechnics are globally traded commodities as well as international sociotechnical systems. They involve diversely situated users who co-configure these systems and the cultural, economic, and scientific flows moving through them. By analyzing historical moments tied to four trans/national locations (China, Ireland, India, and UAE) and institutions (MIT, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, and NYIT) using a variety of online and offline archives, the dissertation shows how these users reengineer these contexts as well as globalization, the knowledge economy, and academic capitalism. as individual and group users reimagine their identities through engagement with transnational polytechnics, they also reconfigure the identities of these institutions and their contexts. The dissertation concludes that these trans/national users have blurred the national identity, financial imperatives, and scientific logics of the exported American polytechnic through stabilizing and destabilizing cultural configurations.

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This paper examines the education, events, and experiences of the Wright brothers in order to determine how they developed the necessary skills to engineer the first viable aircraft. Without high school diplomas, and with no advanced formal education, the Wright brothers were able to develop aircraft that far exceeded the capabilities of aircraft designed and built by professional engineers that had worked on the problem of flight for much longer and with substantially larger research budgets. I argue that the Wright brothers’ success resulted from their experiences in the printing and bicycle industries as well as their formal and informal educations at school and in the home. In the printing business it was their experiences designing and building printing presses, printing newspapers, and operating a job printing shop that taught them how to build machinery and work efficiently and methodically. These same skills were perfected as the Wright brothers managed their second business venture: The Wright Cycle Exchange.While working at the bicycle shop the Wrights learned to be proficient machinists as well as expert mechanics and frame builders. This industry provided them with many skills such as brazing and machining that would be directly applicable to aircraft fabrication. In addition to these skills, building bicycle frames and wheels taught them practical material limits and structural design that informed their aircraft design decisions. Moreover, bicycle design influenced their approach to aircraft control and aerodynamic theory that gave them an edge over other aeronautical experimenters in their race to the sky. When these skills were combined with their rigid religious upbringing, the Wright brothers were uniquely prepared to solve the complex problem of practical human flight. It was the combination of their fabrication skills, understanding of material limits, dogged determination, methodical testing procedures, and their unique approach to aircraft control that was informed by their experiences with bicycles that made them the first in flight.

This dissertation is a study of groundwork in Engaged Science, Technology, and Society (STS) research. Engaged STS scholars reframe STS knowledge and move it beyond the traditional scope and boundaries of the field. They use various methods such as critical participation, making and doing, situated interventions, and experimentation to critically engage with their fields of study. These scholars have evaluated their work within the context of the disciplinary outsider, described their use of high-level pragmatic frameworks, and used the arts to bring critical social issues to the public eye. Yet, when I decided to use STS engagement methods to bring visibility to the lesser-known communities in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Virginia Tech, I found a lack of work documenting the groundwork and experience of engagement. I could not locate groundwork regarding negotiation, designing the most appropriate intervention, collaboration strategies, or confronting my fears and doubts about being in the field. Therefore, in this dissertation, I identify and examine my engagement experience in three interventions within the ECE department to bring visibility to the groundwork of STS engagement. The limited-series podcast Engineering Visibility was a platform to bring visibility to the less dominant communities in the ECE department. Highlighting the experiences of women in engineering, the first-generation student, inclusion and diversity, and the non-traditional student fostered a shared identity and sense of belonging within the ECE department. On the ground, this project examined the need to protect participants' visibility through invisibility. Interventionist Protectivity conceptualizes how I combined trust, accountability, and social awareness to protect my participants' from social scrutiny. The second project was a seminar titled "Expand Your ECE Career." The seminar exposed students to a "broader range of careers" by challenging the traditional ideas of success. The seminar featured four ECE alumni with successful careers in law, finance, and fashion entrepreneurship. Additionally, this intervention pointed out the inadequacies of traditional forms of project assessment. I describe how I measured intervention success through other assessment methods such as "assessment per mobility." The last project was a data-driven white paper that translated the care work of the undergraduate academic career advisors and framed it to be understood by the ECE faculty. The care work done by the academic advisors was underappreciated in its connection to undergraduate student success. On the ground, I discussed the importance of identifying the advisors and the faculty's social construction to create an intervention that translated the advisors' work to be valued by the faculty. Lastly, I conclude with a discussion summarizing the overall lessons learned from the three interventions and discussing my experience of engagement. My engaged STS experience is discussed through my framing of the concept of self-confrontation and the work of avoiding the term of STS being deemed as useful. / Doctor of Philosophy / This dissertation is a study of groundwork in engaged Science, Technology, and Society (STS) research. Recent advances such as critical participation, making and doing, and situated intervention are reframing boundaries between knowledge and action in STS, offering scholars new approaches for improving scientific and technological communities. When I attempted to utilize these theories and methods in a culture change project, however, I found a lack of scholarship documenting the experience of engagement. How does one design the most appropriate intervention? What strategies are required to collaborate and negotiate? How do engaged scholars confront their fears and doubts in their communities and concerning the knowledge they bring back to STS? These groundwork questions confront both novice and seasoned STS scholars and are crucial to successful engaged scholarship, but they rarely are documented and analyzed. Utilizing a matters-of-care framework and self-reflective methods, I describe how and why I sought to change the culture of a large engineering department by making visible unseen and sometimes under-appreciated stakeholders. To do so, I created three interventions: a limited-series podcast to showcase the diversity of experiences in the department, an alternative-career seminar to redefine what counted as success in engineering, and a data-driven white paper to showcase the indispensable care work of academic advisors. I analyzed these projects' construction, application, and outcomes to highlight the complexities and significance of groundwork for STS engagement.

<p dir="ltr">In response to the escalating demand for proficient programming skills in today's technological landscape, innovative educational strategies have emerged to mitigate the challenges inherent in mastering programming concepts. Contextualization, a pedagogical approach embedding learning within real-world contexts, has demonstrated efficacy in enhancing student engagement and understanding. However, its implementation in programming education encounters hurdles related to diverse student backgrounds and resource-intensive material preparation. To address these challenges, this paper proposes leveraging learnersourcing, a collaborative approach wherein students actively contribute to the creation of contextualized learning materials. Specifically, we investigate the viability of implementing a learnersourcing workflow in an advanced database programming class during the Spring semester of 2022 with a group of 23 students enrolled, where students are tasked with generating contextualized worked-out examples. The results reveal that students successfully incorporated diverse contexts into their WEs, demonstrating the potential of learnersourcing to enrich educational content. However, challenges such as vague problem descriptions and formatting errors were identified, emphasizing the need for structured support and guidance. Self-assessment ratings tended to overestimate clarity and educational value, while peer assessments exhibited variability among assessors. Ambiguities in evaluation criteria and limited granularity of rating scales contributed to inconsistencies in assessments. These findings underscore the importance of addressing challenges in learnersourcing implementation, including providing explicit guidance, scaffolding support, and integrating real-time feedback mechanisms. Additionally, efforts to enhance the reliability of self and peer assessments should consider standardization measures and clear evaluation criteria. Future research should explore alternative approaches to improve the validity and consistency of assessments in learnersourcing contexts.</p>

We think of the lobotomy as utterly primitive and brutal; we shudder at the idea of it. The archetypal image of creepiness, violence, and unnecessary brutality was expressed in the book and movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. This procedure weighs heavy on America’s conscience but in 1945 the procedure was characterized as being as gentle as ‘cutting through butter’ and the therapeutic effect was described as ‘cutting out worry’. How did the lobotomy gain such widespread acceptance? One part of the answer is that Walter Freeman advocated for it not just among his colleagues, but through the popular media outlets of his day as well. In this thesis I will claim that, starting in 1936, Walter Freeman influenced the positive portrayal of lobotomies in the American press. He participated in visual culture that promoted a convergence between medical culture and the popular press by cultivating a representation of the procedure that could appeal to both. His tools included narrative accounts, images, and a public dramatization of himself that was hard to resist. I will show how these efforts were quite successful in the beginning, but that by 1947 he started to lose control of the perceptions and narrative he had worked so hard to construct.

<p>This dissertation explores the social history of genetic counseling in the United States between 1930 and 2000. I situate genetic counselors at the interstices of medicine, science, and an increasingly “geneticized” society. My study emphasizes two central themes. First, genetic counselors have played a crucial role in bridging the “old eugenics” and the “new genetics” as mediators of genetic reproductive technologies. Genetic counselors negotiated the rights and responsibilities of genetic citizens in their patient encounters. Discourses of privilege and duty were also extrapolated outward to public debates about the new genetics, demonstrating the highly-politicized contexts in which counselors practice and women make reproductive choices. Second, I interrogate the professionalization process of genetic counseling from a field led by male physician-geneticists in the 1940s and 50s, to a profession dominated by women with Masters degrees by the 1980s and 90s. This transformation is best understood through the framework of a “system of professions,” and counselors’ professional position between “sympathy and science.” These frameworks similarly structured the client-counselor relationship, which also centered on concepts of risk, the promotion of patient autonomy, and the ethics of non-directiveness and client-centeredness. These principles distanced counselors from their field’s eugenic origins and the traditional doctor-patient relationship. I emphasize the voices of genetic counselors based on 25 oral history interviews, and hierarchies of gender, race, and educational status at work in the profession’s history. A study of genetic counseling is an important contribution to the histories of health and medicine, medical sociology, bioethics, disability studies, and gender and women’s studies.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)