Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 273-315). / This dissertation provides a multiscalar analysis of climate change solutions from the global South by investigating how bioscientists are leveraging postcolonial ecological legacies into the basis for what they envision as a sustainable future. In Brazil, scientists from different disciplines are reengineering sugarcane-a crop central to the colonial project-at molecular, organismic, and economic scales in order to expand biofuels as international energy commodities. I argue that biology has become central to what I call the plantation network: a postcolonial agricultural formation that includes laboratories as obligatory passage points in the growing of plants to meet human needs and desires, especially in the era of "sustainability" and "green capitalism." My research uses the plantation network formation to show that even though Brazilian scientists work under ethical and ecological threats posed by climate change, they also rely on Brazilian history, ideology, and cultural practices as they reshape life forms, landscapes, and labor in Brazil and Mozambique. This multisited analysis draws on ethnographic research conducted with molecular biologists attempting to create the world's first commercially viable transgenic sugarcane plant, biochemists working to develop waste-reducing fermentation technologies by using bioprospected "wild" yeasts to digest sugarcane bagasse, and a think tank of agronomic economists seeking to transfer a "Brazilian biofuel model" to Lusophone Mozambique. For these scientists, Brazil's long history of sugarcane is coming to center on ethoses and practices of what they call "sustentabilidade" (sustainability): a form of technoscientifically-aided industrial development that contributes to environmental wellbeing while maintaining the possibility of continued capitalist production for future populations. The dissertation examines "sustainability" as it has emerged in these sites by considering the plantation as a pharmakon-like entity: at the same time (1) a destructive nexus of social-ecological relations that has propelled the harmful, unjust conditions that have led to calls for "sustainable" practices and principles and (2) a redemptive space for ethically-sound renewable fuel and food production that scientists believe is central to creating a more just, livable world. I investigate how scientific practices related to ethically-rendered biofuels are motivating changes to the biotechnologies, production techniques, and locations of sugarcane plantations. / by Nicole Francesca Hayes Labruto. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 242-271). / by Brian O'Donnell. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2003. / "September 2003." / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 263-294). / This dissertation traces the history of shipboard command and control systems in the United States Navy from 1899, when the service first conducted experiments with wireless telegraphy, through World War II, the conflict which witnessed the birth of the modern shipboard information processing facility. It argues that early-to-mid twentieth century naval officers' development and employment of increasingly sophisticated shipboard command and control systems fundamentally altered the human experience of warfare at sea. Based predominately on archival research, Managing a Sea of Information follows a narrative format. It begins by examining the United States Navy's adoption of radio and challenges the notion that a conservative officer corps failed to appreciate the potential advantages of this new communications technology. The bulk of the study explores the Navy' s development of shipboard command and control systems from World War I through the beginning of World War II, focusing particularly on the efforts of operational commanders to maximize their capabilities through the adoption of devices, methods, and procedures for the collection, processing, and dissemination of information. These efforts gradually changed the nature of command at sea, from an environment in which commanders could make informed tactical decisions with relatively limited input from subordinates, to one characterized by epistemic actions and socially-distributed cognition. The dissertation concludes with a brief analysis of shipboard command and control systems during the Second World War, concentrating especially on the United States Navy's creation of the Combat Information Center (CIC). / by Timothy Scott Wolters. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 271-312). / Over the past decade, the prevention and control of seasonal and pandemic influenza has grown to be one of the largest and most visible public health policies. This dissertation considers contemporary influenza policy as a case study in what I call medical politics, in which a disease that for most people is rather unremarkable has become the focus of intense (and costly) public health campaigns based on a shaky scientific basis. The dissertation seeks to explain how this could happen. The first two chapters show how influenza and its pandemics are marketed through an appeal to numerous scientific claims. Drawing on governmental marketing materials, statements by officials, and policy documents, I try to let officials speak for themselves and, as much as possible, refrain from analysis. Chapter 3 tells the story of the 2009 novel influenza H1N1 outbreak, showing how official understandings about influenza were called into question by an outbreak far milder than experts had predicted, and discusses investigations which highlighted the role of industry in shaping influenza policy. Chapter 4 analyzes official scientific claims regarding influenza, and argues that degree to which influenza is a serious public health problem is actually unclear. Furthermore, influenza vaccine effectiveness has been vastly overstated, predictive models of pandemic influenza are demonstrably flawed, and officials conflate true influenza with influenza-like illness (ILl), an often overlooked but critical distinction which allows officials to mislead the public into holding false assumptions about the potential benefits of influenza vaccine. Chapter 5 highlights the centrality of "virus-centric thinking" and the ethic of "saving lives" in public health practice as important factors that help explain how such a situation can exist and persist in light of the evidence. Chapter 6 addresses the policy implications of the dissertation's findings. / by Peter N. Doshi. / Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS

Thesis: S.B., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 51-55). / The Visa credit card network and the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (Swift) network both provide a backbone for financial interchange across the world. Visa's network connects consumers, merchants, banks, and processors to ease the purchases of millions of consumer-facing products worldwide. Swift's interbank network connects banks, corporates, and other financial institutions to ease the flow of high-value, highly-secure international financial transactions. Both networks grew to become industry incumbents in the second half of the 20th century, connecting nearly every country on earth. However, the globalized networks differ in their organizational structures: Visa utilizes a centralized, U.S. focused, hub-and-spoke model; Swift uses a decentralized, transaction-volume neutral, point-to-point network. Although Visa's centralized network fosters innovation, standardization, and security, its U.S.-centered hub pulls the organization from global neutrality and aligns it with the United States on global issues. Meanwhile, although Swift's decentralized network nurtures technological localization-at the expense of technological standardizationits transaction-based global governing structure promotes a relative international neutrality among global organizations. This contrast between Visa and Swift-both networks that balance local and global, centralized and decentralized, and technical and non-technical tensions across the world-reveals the structural effects of worldwide networks, and how network system design impacts global stakeholders in the societies that they touch. / by Thomas C. Cowan. / S.B.

Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 244-268). / My dissertation explores how "anti-trafficking" has emerged as a global network of humanitarian professionals, law enforcement, and software companies collaborating to address the issue of child exploitation and trafficking online. I argue that the anti-trafficking network consolidates expertise through a shared moralizing politics of bureaucracy and carceral sensibility of securitization. This network mobilizes the issue of child protection to expand the reach of technologies of search and prediction, and to afford legitimation to a newly normalized level of digital surveillance. My findings are based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with the United Nations and anti-trafficking organizations in Thailand, with a child protection NGO and police in the Netherlands, and with software companies and law enforcement in the United States. I use two case studies to support my argument that the child protection movement has motivated the expansion of digital policing and surveillance: 1) image detection software developed in collaboration between social media and software companies and international law enforcement organizations; and 2) the design and deployment of a 3D moving avatar of a photorealistic girl used in a child sex exploitation sting operation by an NGO working with an advertising firm. I draw from queer feminist phenomenology to introduce 'proximity' as a governing concept for understanding expert sociality and digital surveillance. Child protection operates in a global affective economy of fear, in which the risk of violence is always anticipated and close. The new global policing network keeps exploitation proximate through the humanitarian ideology of emancipation that motivates child protection, and through publicity of technological campaigns, in order to produce public acquiescence to the spectacles of digital surveillance, shaming, and punishment. / by Mitali Nitish Thakor. / 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, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 317-336). / This study investigates the status of mathematical knowledge in mid-century America. It is motivated by questions such as: when did mathematical theories become applicable to a wide range of fields from medicine to the social science? How did this change occur? I ask after the implications of this transformation for the development of mathematics as an academic discipline and how it affected what it meant to be a mathematician. How did mathematicians understand the relation between abstractions and generalizations on the one hand and their manifestation in concrete problems on the other? Mathematics in Cold War America was caught between the sciences and the humanities. This dissertation tracks the ways this tension between the two shaped the development of professional identities, pedagogical regimes, and the epistemological commitments of the American mathematical community in the postwar period. Focusing on the constructed division between pure and applied mathematics, it therefore investigates the relationship of scientific ideas to academic and governmental institutions, showing how the two are mutually inclusive. Examining the disciplinary formation of postwar mathematics, I show how ideas about what mathematics is and what it should be crystallized in institutional contexts, and how in turn these institutions reshaped those ideas. Tuning in to the ways different groups of mathematicians strove to make sense of the transformations in their fields and the way they struggled to implement their ideological convictions into specific research agendas and training programs sheds light on the co-construction of mathematics, the discipline, and mathematics as a body of knowledge. The relation between pure and applied mathematics and between mathematics and the rest of the sciences were disciplinary concerns as much as they were philosophical musings. As the reconfiguration of the mathematical field during the second half of the twentieth century shows, the dynamic relation between the natural and the human sciences reveals as much about institutions, practices, and nations as it does about epistemological commitments. / by Alma Steingart. / 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, June 2007. / "May 2007." / Includes bibliographical references (p. 298-318). / This dissertation asks how the United States physically built its global empire. Between 1840 and 1930, empire building involved the establishment of a network of naval bases and coaling stations. By focusing on energy, I reconceptualize the American overseas empire as neither inevitable nor geographically predetermined. I trace how coal shaped U.S. expansion, how this expansion influenced ideas about national security, and how these security concerns affected the global environment. Coal reveals continuities in American foreign relations that link overseas expansion to responses to the introduction of steam power into ocean travel. As the Navy sought coal, it progressively assembled the familiar contours of America's global reach. The dissertation addresses both global and local history. It shows how policy makers before the Civil War demonstrated tremendous creativity in initiating geological investigations, diplomatic arrangements, and commercial agreements in foreign territories. Between the Civil War and 1898, these approaches gradually gave way to a more singular effort by the Navy to control strategic ports around the world. Soon, coal was so central to the Navy that coaling strategy and technology formed a foundation for the education of elite officers at the Naval War College, where its study shaped the planning for future wars. Attention to Americans in Borneo, Japan, the Isthmus of ... / Peter Adam Shulman. / 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, 2011. / Page 689 blank. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 652-688). / Natural gas extraction in the United States in the early 21st century has transformed social, physical, legal and biological landscapes. The technique of hydraulic fracturing, which entails the high-pressure injection into subsurface shale formations of synthetic chemical mixtures, has been viewed by the natural gas industry as a practice of great promise. But there is another side to the story. The first half of this dissertation explores an innovative scientific approach to studying the possible deleterious impacts on human health and the environment of the release of chemicals used in gas extraction. Via participant-observation within a small scientific advocacy organization, The Endocrine Disruption Exchange (TEDX), I follow the development of a database of chemicals used in natural gas extraction, a database that seeks to document not only what these chemicals are (many are proprietary), but also what sorts of bodily and ecological effects these substances may have. I analyze ethnographically how TEDX transformed an information vacuum around fracturing and generated fierce regional and national debates about the public health effects of this activity. The second portion of the dissertation expands TEDX's databasing methodology by reporting on a set of online user-generated databasing and mapping tools developed to interconnect communities encountering the corporate forces and chemical processes animating gas development. Shale gas extraction is an intensive technological practice and requires the delicate calibration of corporate, governmental, and legal apparatuses in order to proceed. The industry operates at county, state, and federal levels, and has in many instances been able to organize regulatory environments suited to rapid and lucrative gas extraction. In the midst of such multi-scalar deterritorializing forces, communities may have little legal or technical recourse if they think that they have been subject to chemical and corporate forces that undermine their financial, bodily, and social security. ExtrAct, a research group I co-founded and directed with artist and technologist Chris Csikszentmihalyi, sought to intervene in these processes by developing a suite of online mapping and databasing tools through which "gas patch" communities could share information, network, study and respond to industry activity across states. Using ExtrAct as an example this dissertation explores how social sciences and the academy at large can invest in developing research tools, methods, and programs designed for non-corporate ends, perhaps redressing in the process the informational and technical imbalances faced by communities dealing with large-scale multinational industries whose infrastructure and impacts are largely invisible to public scrutiny. The dissertation describes one potential method for such engaged scientific and social scientific research: an iterative, ethnographically informed process that I term "STS in Practice." / by Sara Ann Wylie. / Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 485-497). / (cont.) In the process, this thesis intervenes in social theoretical debates not simply around the nature and production of knowledge and value, but also around the place of larger belief-systems - relating to religion, nation and ethics - in such productive enterprises. It simultaneously intervenes in conceptual debates within cultural anthropology regarding methodological questions that surround the undertaking of comparative ethnographic projects of powerful sites of knowledge production and value generation in a globalized world. / This thesis is concerned with tracking and theorizing the co-production of an emergent technoscientific regime - that of biotechnology in the context of drug development - with an emergent political economic regime that sees the increased prevalence of such research in corporate locales, with corporate agendas and practices. Hence biocapital, which asks questions of the implications for life sciences when performed in corporations, and for capitalism, when biotechnology becomes a key source of market value. The methodology followed in this dissertation is multi-sited ethnography. I study a range of actors - including academic and industrial scientists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and policy makers - in two distinct national environments, the United States and India, as they shape and come to terms with these emergent technologies and emergent political economies. I attempt, through such a study, to theorize biocapital, drawing primarily upon Marxian and Foucauldian understandings of life, labor and value, and upon literature in Science and Technology Studies, that has constantly drawn attention to the constructed, contingent and politically consequent nature of technoscientific activity. / by Kaushik Sunder Rajan. / Ph.D.