By focusing on women workers at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, this study seeks to understand why women were initially congregated in certain occupations such as clerical work and later moved into non-traditional jobs such as engineering and the sciences. Such an investigation requires careful examination of the changing attitudes towards female workers in technical or non-traditional fields and why and how those attitudes changed over time and the extent to which this occurred. It also attempts to identify areas of continuing concern. The study reveals that several factors contributed to the women's progress in the workplace. These included the rise of the second wave of feminism, the federal government's support for the new feminism, favorable U.S. Supreme Court decisions and the willingness of officials at NASA's Kennedy Space Center to implement federal decrees. In addition, the women's movement expanded its efforts to encourage women to gain the skills and education that were necessary to move women into scientific and technical fields, although recently that effort has reached a plateau. The research for this study includes employee data from NASA and KSC, oral histories with female KSC workers, articles from KSC's official employee newsletter, Spaceport News, websites, and other secondary sources about women in technical fields, women in the workplace, and the recruitment of women into the labor force. Data from NASA and Spaceport News articles was also compared with information obtained through oral histories, to determine if the official policies of KSC influenced the behavior of its employees. Attention is also given to the legislation and court cases that opened doors for women seeking new avenues of advancement and the extent to which these outside factors influenced changes in women's employment and opportunities at KSC. This study shows that the status of women at KSC changed along with the larger women's movement in America. Supreme Court cases and Equal Employment Opportunity laws helped women gain headway in fields traditionally occupied by men. Women received token representation at first, but later moved up in their fields and even became senior managers. This change took place over a long period of time and is still ongoing. At the same time, there is still strong evidence of backlash and some weakening on the part of federal government in terms of its willingness to support women's drive for equality.

The goal of my dissertation is to describe the history of the South Korean1 space program and to use it to offer some insights on reframing space history from a global point of view. South Korea is a new player among the space faring nations. While some of the necessary infrastructure was put in place in the 30 years after the launch of Sputnik, the country only really made a commitment space in the 1990s, developing rapidly to become a significant presence today. The launch of KITsat-1 (Uribyul-1, the first Korean satellite) in 1992 marks its first major achievement, after which it built up its technological capabilities in the space sector in a relatively short period. South Korea now has twelve satellites and operates several space projects, and successfully developed its first space launch vehicle, KSLV-1, also known as Naro, in 2013. Although KSLV-1 is derived from the first stage of the Russian Angara rocket, combined with a solid-fueled second stage built by South Korea, its successful launch was the crucial step for the development of the country’s civilian space program. South Korea aims to develop the first wholly Korean-made launch rocket, KSLV-2 by 2020, which will additionally be used to launch a moon orbiter later that year. Korea’s recent aspiration to space exploration can be seen as part of global narrative in which the conquest of space is not dominated by a few superpowers. Our understanding of the past half-century of space development is, however, still firmly rooted in the framework of the old Cold-War-centered approach to space history. Until recently, only large and powerful nations have been able to mobilize the resources necessary for access to space, so the early years of space exploration produced a simple narrative: a fierce space competition between the Soviet Union and the U. S., with a few countries following behind in a struggle to increase their presence in space. Yet emerging powers’ stories of space development were barely noticed in comparison with the abundant literature on the space history of the super-powers and the increasing literature on middle-range space powers. In order to situate the South Korean space program in this evolving global context, this dissertation attempts to answer the following critical questions: What is the origin of Korean space development? Why is South Korea a late-comer in space, and why is it becoming more active today? How have its motivations and rationales evolved in defining relationships with other countries including the U.S., Russia, France, China, Japan, and even North Korea? Why does it continue to emphasize the need for “Korean” technology in space? In essence, what is Korean about the Korean space program? I seek answers to these questions by examining the relationship between a “space program” and “the construction of national identity” in a political, social, and transnational context. Through historical analysis, I will show that South Korea’s space program has been primarily driven by nationalistic rationales implicit in the argument that space development served “modernization,” “self-defense,”, “economic security”, and “national prestige.” By tracing the multiple links between technological prowess and national imagination, I connect these four rationales using to periodization; 1950s~1960s, 1970~1984, 1985~1997, and 1998~2013. A close examination of the history of the development of space exploration in South Korea offers a fertile ground for exploring the question how the rationales of space development have evolved as the Korean state worked on nation-building in a global context.

The research that forms this thesis is a portfolio of seven published papers together with a critical review, set out below, which gives a general overview of all the work. The work covers a period from the 1990s until 2008, with publication dates spanning a decade. The research has developed from an early interest in exploring the nature of landscape experience, responses to past and contemporary landscape designs, and what benefits people might gain from engaging with such landscapes. It has also reflected a desire to raise standards of scholarship and research in landscape architecture. The portfolio of work addresses three broad themes, interconnected but requiring different approaches in terms of method: the distinctiveness of place and design responses to it; design of public open space for the 21st century; and understanding people’s engagement with the natural environment. The research addresses the following questions and is presented under these headings, each representing a different strand or focus of attention. a) History, prototypes and local distinctiveness: what is the role of historic design prototypes in contemporary landscape architecture and how can an understanding of them enhance sensitivity to local distinctiveness in new design? b) Urban open space: how can an understanding of the history of landscape design inform the way urban open space is designed, planned and managed in the 21st century and what new paradigms might there be? c) Experiencing the landscape: how do people perceive, use and respond to green landscapes in their local environment, and what factors influence engagement with and benefit from such natural environments? The outputs in this portfolio are shown to have influenced other researchers as well as policy makers and practitioners; they are reflected in citations of the work and in government agency initiatives to develop new approaches to accessing the landscape. Finally, a conceptual framework is offered for understanding and responding to people’s diverse experiences of landscape.

In the late twentieth century, science and technology facilitated exploration beyond the Solar System and extended human knowledge through messages comprised of pictures and mathematical symbols, transmitted from radio telescopes and inscribed on material artifacts attached to spacecraft. ‘Interstellar communication’ refers to collective efforts by scientists and co-workers to detect and transmit intelligible messages between humans and supposed extraterrestrial intelligence in remote star systems. Interstellar messages are designed to communicate universal knowledge without recourse to text, human linguistic systems or anthropomorphic content because it is assumed that recipients have no prior knowledge of humankind or the planet we inhabit. In addition to tracing and examining the history of interstellar communication during the period 1957-1977, I present an overview of scientific research on ‘interplanetary communication’ with the supposed inhabitants of Mars and other planets in the Solar System during the first half of the twentieth century. I show that it was not until the late 1950s that space exploration research provided the resources for humans to engage in systematic attempts to contact extraterrestrial civilizations in other star systems. My thesis focuses on two interstellar messages incorporated on specially designed material artifacts –NASA’s Pioneer plaque and Voyager Record—dispatched from Earth on board space probes during the 1970s. I critically examine how scientists designed and mobilized interstellar messages both to convey meaning and simultaneously support rhetorical claims about the universality of science and mathematics. I analyze how situated practices, craft skills and graphical technologies associated with scientific research on interstellar messages were deployed by scientists to produce and disseminate knowledge and support the claim that science and mathematics are universal. I examine the histories of technologies linked to space exploration including radio astronomy, television, communication satellites and space probes, tracing how knowledge practices and discourse associated with these technologies are enmeshed with the history of interstellar communication. In particular, I explain how and why television and other display technologies were appropriated by researchers working on interstellar communication to create visual representations of knowledge. I argue that televisual displays and radio telescopes constitute graphical technologies or ‘inscription devices’ deployed by scientists, media producers and others to translate natural objects, agency and culture into legible forms constituted in and through inscriptions, predominantly pictures and mathematical symbols, that convey knowledge within communication networks.

The work deals with perception of space and orientation in the countryside in the Czech Lands from the beginning of the 12th century till the end of the 14th century. In the first part the author describes concrete aspects of perception of space in contemporary cosmological concepts. He defines the distinction between medieval view on space as a set of concrete places and the modern concept of absolute and unmarked space and analyzes reflection of concrete features of the medieval model in the texts from the Czech environment. As a part of analyzes of the space heterogeneity the author further deals with reconstruction of perception of woods as one of the types of medieval countryside. Historiography often attributes special position to woods in imagination of contemporary people. The author analyses existence of literal cliché presenting woods like hostile environment in narrative texts from the Czech cultural environment and the result is confronted with conclusions from interdisciplinary studies dealing both with the task of proportional representation of woods in medieval countryside and with it's development and with ways of economic use of woods. On this bases along with the interpretation of results from a specific analyzes of books of interrogation statements the author comes to the...

Through four case studies of technological systems - optical tracking of satellites, sounding rockets, instructional television through a geosynchronous satellite, and a launch vehicle--I explore the origins and development of the Indian space program from 1955 through 1976, a period critical in shaping the program's identity and its relationship to the state. Institutionalized, and constructed in different geographic regions of India, these systems were embedded in the broader political, economic, and social life of the country and served as nodes around which existing and new scientific and technological communities were formed. These organic, highly networked communities in turn negotiated and developed a space program to meet the social and strategic demands of a new modernizing nation state. That modernizing program was, in turn, embedded in a broader set of scientific, technological and political relationships with industrialized countries, above all the United States. The United States' cooperation with India began with the establishment of tracking stations for plotting the orbits of artificial satellites. Cognizant of the contributions made by Indian scientists in the field of astronomy and meteorology, a scientific tradition that stretched back several decades, the officials and the scientific community at NASA, along with their Indian counterparts outlined a cooperative program that focused on the mutual exploration of the tropical space for scientific data. This initial collaboration gradually expanded and more advanced space application projects brought the two democratic countries, in spite of some misgivings, closer together in the common cause of using space sciences and technologies for developing India. In the process India and the United States ended up coproducing a space program that responded to the ambitions of the postcolonial scientific and political elite of India. The global Cold War and the ambiguities, desires and tensions of a postcolonial nation-state vying for leadership among the newly decolonized states in the Afro-Asian region are critical for understanding the origins and the trajectory of India's space program. Without this political context and the construction of a transnational web of relationships, it is highly unlikely that the Indian scientific and technological elite, along with their industrial and political partners, would have succeeded in putting India on the space map of the world.

Orientador: Silvana Barbosa Rubino / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciencias Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-11T20:52:09Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Rosa_ThaisTroncon_M.pdf: 50983284 bytes, checksum: 4f4e471fa4aad8825ef37a590aedc697 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / Resumo: Esta dissertação investiga a questão da produção do espaço urbano, a partir das favelas e periferias, tomando como pressuposto entendê-la de forma indissociável da apropriação que se faz desses espaços. Propõe, assim, refletir sobre os fenômenos urbanos das favelas e periferias considerando a historicidade que seria própria à produção e à apropriação de seus espaços: estas são encaradas como processos históricos construídos por atores sociais reais, numa multiplicidade de relações, sob condições e contextos diversos e através de práticas cotidianas permeadas de constrangimentos, conflitos, disputas, negociações e invenções. Como ponto de partida, recuperam-se alguns dos debates sobre favelas e periferias no âmbito dos estudos urbanos, desde sua construção enquanto problemas sociais até sua transformação em campos e objetos de estudo, em categorias, conceitos e designações genéricas. Reflete-se, ainda, sobre a abordagem dicotômica da cidade que estaria na origem de tais conceitos, bem como sobre sua articulação com a construção temática das assim chamadas cidade ilegal ou cidade informal, de forma a introduzir questionamentos sobre tais categorias e as práticas e representações que elas suscitam, uma vez que são ainda muito utilizadas nos estudos sobre o tema em pauta. Partindo do pressuposto de que tal abordagem, ao delimitar teoricamente fronteiras demasiado rígidas entre duas formas de produção da cidade, deixaria escapar as relações extremamente dinâmicas e móveis que caracterizam na prática tais fronteiras, a pesquisa sugere a existência de permeabilidades e cruzamentos entre os supostos pólos configurados pelos pares conceituais cidade e favela, centro e periferia, cidade formal e informal, cidade legal e ilegal, que muitas vezes as definições e estratificações categóricas parecem obscurecer. Nesse sentido, enfoca-se a trajetória do espaço urbano conhecido como 'Gonzaga', em São Carlos (SP), através dos tortuosos caminhos que o levaram desde sua emergência, em meio a loteamentos de periferia, como uma ocupação irregular de terra logo caracterizada como "favela" (a Favela do Gonzaga) até sua transformação oficial, após diversas intervenções públicas, em um "bairro de periferia" (o Jardim Gonzaga). A pesquisa realizada partiu de preocupação descritiva, privilegiando uma abordagem em profundidade que proporcionasse apreender como se produz historicamente um espaço como o 'Gonzaga': os vários atores envolvidos em tal produção, suas práticas e os recursos por eles mobilizados, as relações estabelecidas entre os mesmos, as diversas conjunturas que irão afetá-la, as transformações socioespaciais que a compõem. O estudo de caso foi realizado a partir da associação entre pesquisa documental e pesquisa de campo: utilizaramse como fontes privilegiadas de pesquisa, de um lado, séries de documentos oficiais - fundamentalmente atas e processos da Câmara Municipal de São Carlos - e, de outro, depoimentos orais de moradores e técnicos envolvidos no processo de produção e apropriação do espaço do 'Gonzaga'. / Abstract: This dissertation investigates the theme of the production of the urban space, from slums and outskirt neighborhoods, assuming that understanding this production must always come together with understanding the ways people appropriate theses spaces. Thus, it proposes a reflection about the urban phenomena of slums and outskirt neighborhoods considering the historicity inherent to the production and the appropriation of these spaces: understood as historical processes, built by real social actors, under a multiplicity of relations and diverse conditions and contexts, through everyday practices that are interlaced with constraints, conflicts, disputes, negotiations and inventions. As a starting point, some of the debates about slums and outskirt neighborhoods, in the field of urban studies, were recovered, from their construction as social problems up to their transformation into study objects and fields, categories, concepts, and generic designations. A reflection is made on the bilateral approach to the city that lies in the origin of those concepts, as well as on their articulation with the thematic construction of the so-called "illegal city", or "informal city", as a way to introduce questions about those categories and about the representational practices they elicit, considering they are still used at large in the studies in this field. Starting from the premise that from this approach one cannot visualize the extremely flexible and dynamic relations that characterize these borders, due to the extremely rigid theoretic limits it draws between the two forms of city production, this research suggests the existence of areas of permeability and crossingover between those two allegedly separated poles delimitated by the concepts of the dual pairs "city and slum", "center and outskirt", "formal and informal, legal and illegal city" that are so many times obscured by the categorical definitions and stratifications. Following this route, the trajectory of the urban space known as "Gonzaga", in São Carlos, is put into focus, through the winding ways that led from its appearance, among outskirt districts, as an area of irregular occupation that soon became known as a slum (the Favela do Gonzaga), until its official transformation, after several public interventions, into an outskirt neighborhood (the Jardim Gonzaga). The research had a descriptive intention, prioritizing an approach in deepness, which would allow us to learn how a space such as the "Gonzaga" is historically produced, noticing the various actors involved in this production, their practices and the resources they mobilized, the relations that were established among them, the diverse scenarios that would affect them and the social-spatial transformations thus caused. This case-study was performed associating documental and field research. Used as privileged research resources were, on the one hand, series of official documents - basically acts and processes from São Carlos's City Council - and, on the other hand, oral statements from inhabitants and technicians involved in the process of production and appropriation of the "Gonzaga". / Mestrado / Politica, Memoria e Cidade / Mestre em História