Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references. / This study brings together science and technology studies, political anthropology, and Latin American studies, by studying the practices and political reasoning of neoliberal networks in Peru. It analyses the extension of such networks by studying the relationships and subjectivities cultivated under two contemporary state-led projects: an initiative promoting intellectual property rights among traditional artisans as tools for rural development, and a national effort to encourage the uptake of free/libre and open source software based resources. Promising to modernize government and prepare citizens for the global, information-based economy, these projects frame their reforms as new, contemporary models for economic development. This work demonstrate how key to the success of such projects is the remaking of rural and urban citizens into "free" and modern individuals who are able to independently self- realize using the tools and logics of information networks. It argues that such plans rely on the ability to bring diverse actors - including state planners, transnational corporations, traditional artisans, rural communities, urban technology experts, and transnational activists -- into strategic alliance, or what can become coded as relations of promiscuity. What brings these partnerships together and seduces such disparate actors into alliance isn't so much the promise of increased technology access. It is instead the promise of "freedom" and the opportunity for diversely situated subjects to realize themselves as "modern individuals." / by Anita Say Chan. / Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references. / by David A. Mindell. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2007. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 278-289). / This dissertation is a multi-sited ethnography among marketers, consumer-patients and psychiatrists in the U.S. It explores the recent history of styles of pharmaceutical advertising that have come about in response to FDA regulations and ethical issues raised by patients and the press about how the pharmaceutical industry shapes drug research. Specifically this dissertation explores the role of direct-to-consumer drug marketing (DTC) in the consumption and experience of antidepressants, including a cultural shift in the U.S. towards how the consumer negotiates new ethical injunctions to manage his or her own identity through pharmaceuticals. A key focus is how marketers carve out their own ethical niche from which they innovate on ways to persuade consumer audiences with scientific facts that double as public relations. This dissertation gives special attention to how individuals encounter and incorporate the putative neuroscience of DTC advertising of antidepressants to negotiate their personal knowledge of illness, and to manage their identity, everyday practices, and professional pursuits. From these ethnographic encounters I have identified "illness," "fantasy," and "capital" as three key themes for my analysis of DTC marketing. In turn I have combined the very different literatures on illness (which address patient advocacy movements and health care seeking and questions of how medical diagnoses can be deployed as social norms), fantasy (which address psychoanalytic conceptions of desire and self, as well as semiotic understandings of consumption), and capital (which address health care market competition, and negotiations with the FDA over truth in advertising). In sum, this dissertation offers a thick description of "ethical identity management" in the contemporary landscape of U.S. pharmaceutical consumption. / by Nathan P. Greenslit. / 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 247-274). / This dissertation tracks what happens when biology, that is, both life forms and knowledge about them, becomes the object of security. While increasing global traffic has led to a greater degree of movement of people, animals, plants, and microbes, biosecurity measures are concerned with regulating circulation and seek to work against such possibly homogenizing forces by both documenting and maintaining the distinctiveness of life forms in different places. Through ethnographic research in Mexico, I track the social logics, scientific practices, and institutional forms that underwrite biosecurity in three areas: invasive species control, emerging infectious disease research, and the use of transgenic organisms. I examine how conservationists working in Mexican settings - particularly on islands - alternately protect or exterminate the various life forms they encounter; how microbiologists and immunologists studying infectious diseases in Mexico make claims about the relationships between environments, bodies, and viral ecologies; and how ecologists regulate the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and turn them into bureaucratic objects. All these projects entail defining "native" life forms and establishing what is unique and valuable about Mexican biology. By bringing together this assortment of interlocutors and research sites I map how biosecurity projects establish the ways that a shared biological substantiality connects the nation and how human and non-human life forms are incorporated into political identities. Through these projects scientists produce knowledge about Mexican biology (including who or what is included or excluded in these populations). As this knowledge in turn informs political efforts to improve human and ecological health, biosecurity projects become ways in which science and the nation in Mexico are coconstituted. I address the production of biosecurity in two canonical places of science, the lab and the field, and I argue for the importance of a third scientific space, the office, a space where scientists engaged with bureaucratic processes and shaped the administration of Mexican ecosystems. Further, I argue that in Mexico biopolitics and biosecurity are no longer only about the regulation of human life, but have been extended beyond the human to encompass animal, plant, and microbial worlds. Mexican biopolitics have become multispecies projects. / by Emily Mannix Wanderer. / 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, 2005. / Also issued in a 2 v. set, printed in leaves. / MIT Dewey Library copy: 2 v. set. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 518-545). / This is a study of Japan and Taiwan's different responses to the expansion of the global drug industry. The thesis focuses on the problematic of "voicing," of how a state can make its interests heard in the International Conference on Harmonization of Technical Requirements for Registration of Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH). The ICH is a unique project that facilitates the formation of a single global market by creating universal standards for clinical trials and drug approvals. Tracing, through "slow motion" ethnography, step by step, why Japan claims a racial difference requires additional local clinical trials with "Asian bodies," this thesis rejects conventional interpretations of protectionism for Japan's resistance to globalization. It argues that more than protectionism is involved, and that a rich ethnographic understanding of Japan's medical infrastructure is required to understand the claim of biological, cultural, and national differences, as well as biostatistical arguments about the ambiguities of "extrapolation" of clinical data from one place to another. / (cont.) The inherent ambiguities of efforts to create "bridging" studies as a temporary solution to these problematics created a deadlock in the ICH, and provided an opening for Taiwan, another Asian state, which does not enjoy formal recognition from the world, to speak for itself to this conference, and to create the fragile, but politically critical, possibility of becoming a clinical trial center for Asian populations. The language of genomics and biostatistics become in the more recent period the vehicles for both Japanese and Taiwanese efforts at "voicing" their concerns. Both genomics and biostatistics look different in these contexts than they do from the United States or European Union. In sum, (1) Japan's and Taiwan's response, as well as "global ethnographic objects" such as the ICH, provide important tools to rethink the comparative method as well as universalizing claims of harmonization. (2) Race, culture, and the nation-state are transformed as categories through the contemporary reworkings of genomics and biostatistics. (3) The thesis demonstrates that abstract accounts of the spread of clinical trials and resistance in various parts of the world are not to be trusted unless they include detailed probings of local understandings, identity issues, and problems of voicing. / by Wen-Hua Kuo. / 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, 2009. / Page 414 blank. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 401-413). / This is a story about technology, users, and music. It is about an approach to the design, manipulation, and arrangement of technologies in small-scale systems to achieve particular aesthetic goals - goals that are at once subjective and contingent. These goals emerge from enthusiasm for technology, for system-building, and for music among members of a community of users, and the promise of the emotional rewards derived from these elements in combination. It is a story about how enthusiasm and passion become practice, and how particular technologies, system-building activities, listening, debating, innovating, and interacting form that practice. Using both historical and ethnographic research methods, including fieldwork and oral history interviews, this dissertation is focused on how and why user communities mobilize around particular technologies and socio-technical systems. In particular, it concerns how users' aesthetic sensibilities and enthusiasm for technology can shape both technologies themselves and the processes of technological innovation. These issues are explored through a study of the small but enthusiastic high-end audio community in the United States. These users express needs, desires, and aesthetic motivations towards technology that set them apart from mainstream consumers, but also reveal important and under-recognized aspects of human relationships with technology more broadly. Covering the emergence and growth of high-end audio from the early 1970s to 2000, I trace some of the major technology transitions during this period and their associated social elements, including the shift from vacuum tube to solid-state electronics in the 1970s, and from analog vinyl records to digital compact discs in the 1980s. I show how this community came to understand technology, science, and their own social behavior through powerful emotional and aesthetic responses to music and the technologies used to reproduce music in the home. I further show how focusing on technology's users can recast assumptions about the ingredients and conditions necessary to foster technological innovation. / by Kieran Downes. / 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, 2010. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 312-340). / This dissertation argues that alongside the dominant discourse occurring in and through media in the midst of immense transformation, social networks and affiliations provide a vital translation of science in varied vernaculars such that climate change is becoming invested with diverse meanings, ethics, and/or morality. Based on ethnographic research, this dissertation analyzes such processes of translation and articulation occurring among five different discursive communities actively enunciating the fact and meaning of climate change through their own vernaculars. The five groups are: 1) Arctic indigenous representatives that are part of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, 2) corporate social responsibility activists working with Ceres 3) American evangelical Christians active in the nascent movement known as Creation Care, 4) leading science journalists, and 5) scientists who often act as science-policy experts. This dissertation tracks the formation by which evidence comes to matter and have meaning for groups, and the ways in which this process transforms the definition of and questions posed by climate change. It posits that climate change constitutes an emergent form of life replete with multiple, competing instantiations that feed into, configure, and continually revise definitions of and models of/for climate change. Such articulations and attempts at defining climate change are full of friction as epistemologies, forms of life, advocacy, and expertise evolve and bump up against one another in a process of socialization, negotiation, and meaning-making. In this framework, climate change is a simultaneous intellectual, scientific, and moral challenge - it is both a problem of assessing what is happening, what might happen, and how to act in the world. The presentation and circulation of information provide only partial answers. Partnering facts with multiple codes for meaning, ethics, and morality delineate what the stakes and risks entail, articulating rationales to act. These diverse partnerships produce attendant translations, assemblages, modes of speech, and material forms of training and disciplining that enroll scientific findings and policy aspirations. / by Candis L. Callison. / 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, 2013. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 255-288). / Beginning in the late 19 th century, changing conceptions of relatedness between people and other animals -- and animals' assumed capacities for, or susceptibilities to, mental or emotional distress-- were influenced by debates over what it meant to be both human and sane in Britain and the United States. Through a historical, partly-ethnographic, investigation of animal insanity in various times and places in the Anglo-American world from the late I 9 th century through the early 21st, I argue that identifying animal madness, insanity, nervous disorders, anxiety disorders, phobias, depression, obsessive compulsivities, suicidal behaviors and more, has not only served as a way of affixing meaning to puzzling animal acts, but has been used to denote borders (or lack thereof) between certain groups of humans and certain groups of animals. As with other divisions, such as those hinging on race, gender, nationality or class, ideas surrounding which humans and which other animals could experience particular forms of insanity have been used to justify certain forms of treatment (or mistreatment), to rationalize needs for confinement or freedom, or to determine what sorts of people and other creatures were deserving of rights and to what degree. I suggest that the history of attempts to identify certain emotional phenomena such as melancholy and suicidal behavior in horses and monkeys, to, more recently, obsessive-compulsivity in parrots and PTSD in military dogs, demonstrates that other animals have acted as mirrors and proxies for disordered Anglo-American minds for more than a century. Drawing upon archival sources, published literature in the fields of ethology, psychology, psychiatry, psychopharmacology, and the veterinary sciences, as well as environmental history, history of medicine and animal studies, combined with interviews and participant observation, I argue that attempts to locate insanity, mental illness, dysfunction and "normalcy" among nonhumans has had wide-ranging effects on diagnostic and therapeutic practices in humans and other animals alike in the United States and Britain. / by Laurel Braitman. / 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 157-162). / Early 20th century America is a critical context for understanding industrial innovation. Departing from a focus on innovation itself as manifested through the creation of new products and consumer opportunities, this project focuses instead on an important infrastructure for innovation - academic-industrial cooperation. Its particular emphasis is on the Mellon Institute for Industrial Research and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Mellon Institute, an independent nonprofit entity devoted to the promotion of industrial research, contributed not only through its novel scientific work, but also through its efforts aimed at engaging broad audiences through popular writing. As a competing model, this dissertation also examines interdisciplinary laboratories and administrative structures at MIT to argue that these schemes for academic-industrial cooperation that began as an informal series of ad hoc arrangements between researchers and corporate partners were increasingly formalized and centralized into a unique educational model that combined fundamental science and industrially relevant research. Rarely used archival materials are drawn on to argue that "narratives of progress," shared stories and rhetoric that were conceived for, and deployed in the service of, a particular idea of creating a better world through the enterprise of science were essential components of institutional and industrial change. Mechanisms for academic-industrial cooperation, no matter how well organized or funded, could not stand alone without a foundational narrative to give them broader purpose and context. Building on an institutional approach and employing a novel analysis of narrative as text, the built environment, and exhibit, this study offers new perspective on sites of academic-industrial cooperation as institutes for innovation. / by Ellan F. Spero. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 310-337). / This is a study of the role that the interpretation of material evidence plays in historical consciousness and social memory. It consists of three case studies from the Chilcotin Plateau in the west-central part of present-day British Columbia. In each, a conflict in the mid-1990s over the nature of the past and its relevance for the present allowed underlying stories to emerge. As different groups struggled to control the fate of the region and its resources, they invoked very different understandings of its past, understandings based in part on the material traces that they found there. Taken together, the case studies illustrate the fact that there is an extensive division of interpretive labor when it comes to the material evidence of the past. Like other kinds of labor, this interpretation takes part in a political economy. Studies of material evidence are done to further the interests of individuals or groups, are valued and exchanged with one another, and are important in the delineation of property rights, the enforcement of laws and the justification of ideologies. What emerges is not an authoritative or univocal environmental history of a place, but rather a contest to find a past which will be usable in the present and future. The constant interpretation of material evidence allows people to situate themselves with respect to place, time and other people. / by William J. Turkel. / Ph.D.