The common us of social media in everyday life has raised questions on the possible impact it has on individuals’ wellbeing. This study was conducted to determine if there was a correlation between Instagram, a common social media platform, usage and self-esteem of college students. The sample population for this research was 95 undergraduate students at Mississippi State University during the fall semester of 2019. Data was collected via an online survey that included Rosenburg’s Self-Esteem scale and ten additional questions relating to the independent variables and Instagram. The independent variables of this study were the number of Instagram followers, the average number of likes on a post, the frequency of posting, and the pressure to post and the dependent variable was self-esteem according to the Rosenburg scale. This study did not find a correlation between Instagram usage and self-esteem.

This dissertation examines the structure of epistemological claims made about science within the field of science and technology studies (STS). The social constructivist invocation to put science in "context" necessarily implies a logic of justification. Made explicit, this logic of justification provides a basis on which to adjudicate meta-scientific claims. The appeal to context blurs internal and external references, offers an ontological starting point for STS accounts of science, serves as the basis for methodological debate, and refers to values which anchor a notion of scientific objectivity. Hence: Contexts are assumed to exist. Contexts can be accessed and demarcated from other contexts in which they may be embedded; as a result, contexts are not paradigm-bound. Since contexts exist, the elements composing them are taken to exist in some logical and ontological relation to one another. Contexts are taken to affect scientific practice. Since contexts affect scientific practice some logical and ontological relation exists among the elements of the context, a given scientific practice, and the world that practice describes. Contexts are taken as temporally stable; infinite regress is not an immediate consequence of a local explanation of scientific practice. Since contexts exist in a stable, ontological relationship to the scientific practice they interpret or explain, criteria for justifying one context-based perspective over another are necessarily implied. Contexts necessarily imply justificatory criteria and imply a means for adjudicating among contexts and context-based statements. Since contexts imply a logic of justification independent of the scientific practice being examined meta-scientific evidence consists of observation statements. Context-based observation statements can, initially, be adjudicated a priori. A form of meta-scientific realism exists. If a form of meta-scientific realism exists, we can determine which contexts explain scientific practice and which do not. As a result we have epistemological claims about science which can be adjudicated on realist grounds which are not just the product of designated contexts. The future of STS turns on articulating a meta-scientific realism in relation to scientific practice and truths about the world. Finally, I advocate a contingent foundationalism on which STS can be made relevant to an understanding of science and technology. / Ph. D.

Philosophy of technology (PoT) analyzes the nature of technology, its significance and consequences, and its mediation of human experiences of the world. Classical philosophers of technology describe mechanization as alienating: Technology causes humans to lose their connection with the natural world. Tehno-rationality replaces critical engagement and creativity. Failing to comprehend the essence/nature of Technology, and its consequences, portends disastrous social, political, and economic consequences. Such perspectives, however, neglect individual experiences of technologies. Filling that lacuna, contemporary philosophers of technology challenge the sweeping determinism of their intellectual forerunners and investigate how specific technologies mediate particular human experiences. Their descriptive prowess, however, lacks the normative engagement of classical PoT, and they emphasize micro effects of technologies to the detriment of macro implications. This dissertation describes an 'un-disciplined' philosophy of technology (UPoT) that unites the macro and micro perspectives by providing narratives of human-technology symbiosis and co-development. Un-disciplined philosophers of technology present posthuman and transhuman perspectives that emphasize the symbiotic relationships between humans and technology. Thus, they deny disciplined philosophy's first critical maneuver: define and demarcate. UPoT enables conversations and debate regarding the ontological and moral consequences of imagining humans and technologies as hybrid, co-dependent things. UPoT builds upon environmental and animal rights movements, and postphenomenology, to emphasize pluralist accounts that emphasize the dynamism of human-technology relations. UPoT argues we should imagine technologies as extensions/parts of living things: they do the shaping and are shaped in turn. I argue that such thinking reinforces the habit, already proposed by contemporary PoT, that emerging human-technology relations demand active interpretation and engagement because the relationships constantly change. Thus, we need to imagine a moral theory that best matches the hybrid/connected condition of the present century. Increasing automation in agriculture and surgery, for instance, exemplify technologies mediating human experiences of food and health, thus affecting how we understand and define these categories. / Ph. D.

“Makers” around the world cohere in a digital and physical network of technology hobbyists. “Makers" are open-source hardware enthusiasts who use machines like 3D printers and laser cutters - manufacturing tools that have only recently become accessible to laypeople - to make things. “Makers" share a vision for a world where everyone would be able to make almost anything, supplanting top-down economic systems and channels of production. This ethnographic research examines a subset of the “maker” community: “makers” in “FabLabs” in Japan. These “FabLabs” are small workshops that house the machines that “makers” need and make them open to the public. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Japan, this dissertation argues that the network of people, spaces, and machines remains coherent not because of common cultural forces like capitalist ambition, religion, geographic proximity, or even nationality. Rather, the coherence is more precisely understood - in the frame of science and technology studies - by examining the cohesive force of newly invented rituals and “active” ideas that engender hope and spur action toward a shared vision. Furthermore, the FabLab community in Japan exemplifies a novel culture of expertise wherein laypeople call on experts as-needed to accomplish their personal ambitions, flipping the usual understanding of expertise as a guarded product of insular cultural systems. I examine this unique culture of expertise and outline types of expertise developing from this dynamic, disparate, and impressively coherent FabLab network in Japan. Drawing on my ethnographic observations, I argue that laypeople, still bounded by political-economic forces in Japan, nevertheless are exercising a degree of agency that was previously the domain only of experts in manufacturing. This action by laypeople is what activates sufficient cohesive activity to sustain the community in the absence of more traditional social cohesive forces.

This project explores the dynamics of medical innovation using the development of deep brain stimulation therapy in paediatric neurology as a case study. Ethnographic research was conducted with a multidisciplinary clinical team developing a novel clinical service that uses deep brain stimulation (DBS) to treat children and young people with movement disorders. Interviews and observations were carried out to identify key challenges encountered by team members, and to explore the way in which team members attempt to manage these challenges in day-to-day clinical practice. Four key challenges were identified: coordinating multidisciplinary teamwork, identifying suitable candidates for deep brain stimulation; managing the expectations of patients and families; and measuring clinical outcomes. By exploring the strategies used by team members to overcome these challenges, this thesis develops the Complex Model of Medical Innovation which challenges prevalent, linear ‘bench-to-bedside’ understandings of innovation. While scientific ‘discovery’ is one source of medical innovation, new therapies in medicine also emerge from technology transfer (the transfer of technology from one sector into another) and clinicians’ learning-in-practice (the ability of clinician to learn ‘on the spot’). Importantly, this thesis demonstrates that technology transfer, learning-in-practice, and medical innovation in general are shaped by various socio-political trends. The activities of the multidisciplinary team and their novel DBS service, for example, have been shaped by the evidence based medicine movement, commercial interests, and a movement that promotes multidisciplinary approaches to paediatric service provision. A consequence of these influences is that the team subjects their patients to a broad clinical gaze. Adopting the Complex Model of Medical Innovation has important consequences: First, it draws attention to the innovative activities of clinicians, activities that may be worth disseminating in other contexts. Second, it highlights the role of existing social and material factors in shaping the development of new clinical services. The social impact of new technologies will be influenced by these contextual factors and cannot be attributed to the technology alone.

The subject of this case study is the Vermont Agricultural Resilience in a Changing Climate initiative, a transdisciplinary research team at UVM that has maintained success in meeting research and outreach objectives despite collaborating in a way that does not follow any particular ideal-type transdisciplinary process. In following recent science and technology (STS) studies' accounts of cross-disciplinary collaboration, the hypothesis pursued is that the transdisciplinary study of messy or "wicked" problems like climate change brings forth an array of responses from researchers whose disciplinary backgrounds already position them to pursue their research differently, particularly when they involve outside stakeholders in a participatory action research agenda. When not addressed explicitly through the transdisciplinary research framework, these differences are likely to result in more subterranean or affective responses, such as ambivalence and equivocation, which may permeate the collaborative group process. Through a qualitative ethnographic approach, I show that transdisciplinary work is complex and situational, due to the topic itself in agricultural resilience and climate change, the affective nature of the collaborative process, the differences in disciplinary perspectives, the researchers' subjectivities, and the influence of outside actors in the initiative. I argue that transdisciplinary work must necessarily be challenging given the variety of heterogeneous forces at play, and that deeper attention to the situation elucidates underlying dynamics that are not addressed in the normal research process. This research contributes insights into the literature on transdisciplinary research on messy problems.

This thesis develops an ecological perspective devoted to the question of what, if anything, it means to speak of music ‘itself’. As such it seeks to enrich and further develop music-centred perspectives in the sociology of music. To this end, the thesis uses and develops a sociology of mediations designed to specify empirically the constituents of localized, emergent and performed configurations of “music” within the ‘classical’ music world. An ethnographically informed and practice-driven case study of viola and viola playing is used as a means to gain insight into the avant-garde of viola playing today and to follow the ways in which different protagonists constitute viola aesthetics. Considering the viola’s identity historically, in terms of both reproduction and change (specifically, the instrument’s shift from a marginal status to a position nearer the centre within ‘classical’ music), the study addresses instrument materiality and technologies, sound playing techniques, as well as, more globally, viola identities in relation to the instrument’s sonic features, repertoire, psycho-cultural and affective associations and meaning making in interpretation and performance. It is also shown how musicians deal with and ‘erase’ ‘limitations’ formerly attributed to the viola and make the instrument ‘work’ (through technological calibration in collaboration with instrument-makers as well as playing techniques) and thus correspond the requirements of contemporary music performance. Aiming to be a useful resource for violists, this thesis traces change but also identifies potential constraints produced by the past history of the viola upon the ways the instrument is seen, used and explored. The data for this study was collected through audio/video-recorded interviews with eight widely recognized highly-skilled violists, video-recorded performance and observations of viola lessons, and documentary analysis. This thesis highlights the importance of intermediate mediations that, situated in-between score and performance, affect how music comes to sound when played. It also outlines a grounded theory of the affordances of couplings made between players and instruments, so as to develop a performative idiom that considers representations, discourses and social construction, but also materiality, bodies and minds, internalization processes, practices. The thesis concludes by suggesting that a ‘strong’ cultural and musical sociology requires a relational and transdiciplinary approach and that this approach in turn helps to articulate an eclectic and hybrid sociology of imbrications, one that challenges intra-disciplinary divides.

The object of inquiry of this thesis is synthetic biology. In this thesis I ask what is this ‘thing’ that is synthetic biology (Latour, 2005) and what might it mean for synthetic biology to inhabit the world and to inhabit it well? Synthetic biology’s coming into being has been accompanied by a considerable amount of ‘hype’ and ‘hyperbole’ (Marris and Rose, 2012) – by what the philosopher Annemarie Mol (1999) would describe as a noisy ‘perspectivalism.’ My aim in this thesis is to contribute to the telling of different kinds of less-perspectival and less-technologically-deterministic stories about the development of this burgeoning approach to biological engineering. In drawing on a combination of empirical material from over 30 1-2 hour interviews with leading synthetic biologists and ethnographic materials generated from working alongside the UK’s Health and Safety Executive (the UK regulatory authority responsible for overseeing the development of synthetic biology), I aim to multiply outwards registers for understanding what synthetic biology is and what it might become. I highlight, for example, how synthetic biology is not simply a hubristic endeavour (Lewens, 2013) but is also about processes of learning and apprehension. What’s more, depending on how synthetic biology takes shape(s) in different practices, ‘time’ also becomes aleatory and freed from its modernist shackles (Serres, 2008). I use the lens of regulation as a means of addressing the question of what it might mean for synthetic biology to inhabit the world well. Synthetic biology’s regulatory provocations have been largely underexplored within STS and human geography literatures. The thesis is informed by and builds upon, theoretical notions of multiplicity (Mol, 2002) and of syncretisms (Law and Mol, 2013). The thesis contributes to a broader shift in social theory from critique towards compositionism and concludes by arguing for the development of a modest geography of novel biologies.

No description available.

Friction Bit Joining (FBJ) is a new technology used primarily in joining dissimilar metals. Its primary use has been focused in the automotive industry to provide an alternative joining process to welding. As automotive manufacturing has continually pushed toward using dissimilar materials, new joining processes have been needed to replace traditional welding practices that do not perform well when materials are not weld compatible. FBJ meets these needs perfectly as it provides strength as well as the ability to join materials of almost any kind.The purpose of this research was to explore different applications of the FBJ process. Traditionally FBJ has used a steel bit to drill through a thin piece of aluminum and weld to a piece of steel behind the aluminum. This research explored a different application of FBJ by using a steel bit to drill through multiple pieces of aluminum and weld to a small steel bit on the backside of the aluminum. The primary goal of this research was to answer two questions. (1) How does drilling impact peak weld strength and (2) Does an optimal shank diameter exist in terms of peak weld strength? As in other research, no universal parameters were found for optimization of lap shear, cross tension and t-peel tests. Drilling was found to be an important factor in peak weld strength. Number of flutes on the consumable steel bit was varied to see the impact of better and worse chip clearance ability. Increasing number of flutes was found to positively impact peak weld strength to a point. Optimal number of flutes was found to be different for each type of testing. It was found that there was an optimal bit head to bit shank diameter ratio that optimized peak weld strength. Again the optimal diameter was different for each test. Bits of different diameters were created and then tested to measure the impact of varying shank diameters on peak weld strength. It was found that there was a strength tradeoff between two localized joint areas in diameter testing. Decreasing the shank diameter increased the amount of overlap formed by the bit head over the top coupon. This shifted strength to the bit head region. While this strengthened the bit head region of the joint, strength was sacrificed in the bit-nut intersection. This tradeoff was consistently found in all test types.