This thesis looks at defiance in civil society and aims to contribute towards a deeper understanding of contestation against regimes that restrict the expansion of the political playing field in sub-Saharan Africa. It also analyses the role of contemporary African activists in these contestations, and examines why some social contestation process are successful and others not. The role of Mozambican activists from aid-supported NGOs in relevant political movements between 2010 and 2015 is a key issue. The first part of the thesis offers a theoretical overview of civil society as contesting actor in Africa and Mozambique, and outlines the construction of concepts of civil society latency, defiance and co-construction through a theoretical framework that draws on the literature on moral economy, social movements, contentious politics, the public sphere, power and competitive authoritarianism. Analysis of two contrasting civil society organisations, the LDH (the League for Human Rights) and UNAC (the Mozambican Peasants' Union), aims to give a better understanding of public spaces for participation and defiance, and to follow the movement of activists from urban areas towards traditional indigenous sectors so as to ensure that vital issues for communities are brought into the public sphere. It also looks at the neutralisation processes suffered by organisations that offer support and/or directly organise contestation of government initiatives and policies that have a negative impact on the population. The case studies draw on research over a period of three years in the city of Maputo and the provinces of Nampula, Cabo Delgado, Tete, Zambezia and Manica. They examine the reasons for contestations around land issues between 2010-2015, focusing on peasants' and NGOs' resistance to the ProSAVANA agrarian development project, and on urban protests against abductions and against the 2012-2015 return to civil war, investigating the role of European donors and government in the near destruction of one of the most well-known NGOs in Africa.

Thesis (Ph. D. in History and Social Study of Science and Technology (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, p. 426-437). / This dissertation focuses on the pursuits of a particular subset of automobile users: hot rodders, those who modify their standard production automobiles for improved performance. More specifically, this project examines the history of the speed equipment industry - the aftermarket subsector which manufactures high-performance products for hot rodders - from its infancy in the 1910s through the mid 1980s. The thesis begins by examining the role of technological enthusiasm in the early growth of hot rodding, focusing in particular on the ways in which this enthusiasm led a handful of individuals to begin to manufacture high-performance parts in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. After tracing the wartime experiences of these industry pioneers, the project then explores the ways in which, in the midst of America's postwar affluence, the spectacular growth both of the high-performance industry and of hot rodding itself helped spawn the youth-oriented musclecar movement upon which the Big Three would later feed. In its examination of the 1940s and 1950s, the dissertation closely examines the evolution of this industry's production methods in an attempt to understand the manufacturing dynamics of a market-sensitive, flexibly-oriented, late-twentieth-century industrial sector. / (cont.) The thesis then explores the ways in which this industry dealt with automotive safety and environmental legislation in the 1960s and 1970s. It concludes with a discussion of the fragmentation of the hot rod market during the 1970s and 1980s, analyzing the manufacturing and marketing challenges this change has wrought. This project sheds new light on the history of the automobile in America in four main ways. It highlights the survival of a flexibly-oriented, consumer-driven automotive industry in the shadow of the Big Three. It emphasizes the lingering importance of technological enthusiasm in the evolution of automobility. It uses the experience of the speed equipment industry to reexamine and revise our understanding of the relationship between the Big Three and governmental regulators. And, finally, it challenges the longstanding notion that the automobile had become a 'black box' by the 1920s, documenting the extent to which the social constructivists' 'end-user interpretive flexibility' has instead remained quite strong throughout the history of the automobile. / by David Nicholas Lucsko. / 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, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / The rhetoric and apparatus of national security have played critical roles in American controversies over animal and human experimentation from the dawn of the Twentieth Century to today's "War on Terror." Drawing on archival and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) research, this dissertation traces how American partisans in the enduring vivisection controversy have sought to mobilize national security concerns to tar their domestic political adversaries as enemy agents of foreign enemies from the Kaiser and Hitler to Stalin and Al-Qaeda. Further, this study explores how these efforts have intersected with issues of gender, slavery, and the pathologizing of political dissent, as well as campaigns for the absolute freedom of research, the functioning of Nazism and the Holocaust in the American political imagination, civil liberties in the Post-9/11 world, and ongoing debates over animal rights, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and domestic terrorism. / by Ryan Noah Shapiro. / 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 260-266). / Evidence from history, archaeology, and the social sciences suggests that making models of the world has anchored our understanding of it since the earliest days. From models of deities, dwellings and weapons to molecules and planetary systems, models have been tools for thinking and imagining, as well as planning and building. Though there are many possible definitions, a digital model is understood here essentially as a miniature virtual world-a distillation that captures the essence of some aspect of the larger physical or imagined world-which provides a vehicle for virtual exploration or manipulation of that world, and a focal point for debates about its nature. This dissertation explores the communities engaged in making 3D digital models used in computer animation-globally dispersed communities linked by their professional tools and practices and their shared use of algorithms to sculpt geometry in the spaces of the machine. My research builds on the work of historians of computing and computer-aided design as well as insights on objects and their meanings by scholars such as Sherry Turkle, Peter Galison and Loraine Daston. To this conversation I contribute a view of digital models as meaningful objects, both tactile and evocative, around which conversations on expertise, craft, nature and representation coalesce. I draw on the work of Merritt Roe Smith on the contributions of government funding to innovation, and David Kaiser's work on the role of representations in circulating professional identities and shaping professional communities. Finally I draw on the work of those who have thought deeply about creativity and digital design tools and practices, including Rudolph Arnheim and Malcolm McCullough. I have also benefitted from Lev Manovich's work on software in the evolving field of digital humanities and software studies. I base my understanding of 3D modeling practices on a series of interviews conducted with a widely-dispersed community of artists, programmers and technical specialists who collaborate, sometimes over great distances, in creating 3D models for the entertainment industry. I argue that the idea of 3D modeling was shaped by the intersections of contrasting styles of abstraction practiced by artists and engineers. The interactions of present-day modelers with their models are part of an emerging discourse with the world, opening new possibilities for human interaction with the world's objects. As an example of the complex, global flow of people, objects and ideas I contrast two animation studios on opposite sides of the world, located in Connecticut and New Zealand. Though each of these is far from Hollywood-traditionally regarded as the heart of the film and animation industries-3D modeling practices, shared software and migrating workers link them to each other and to a global community of 3D thinkers and makers. Digital 3D modeling-sculpting characters, objects and environments, and even 3D printing the objects-emerges as a powerful way of connecting the self to the world. Finally, I examine the use of models as archives of real world objects and their attributes, with a case study a natural history museum's 3D modeling of a dinosaur. / by Rebecca Ann Perry. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, February 2003. / "December 2002." / Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves [263]-272). / In this thesis, I examine the current reorganization of office or information work in its technological, spatial, social and cultural aspects. Based on ethnographic and historical methods, I explore how information and communication technologies, and spatial designs combined with specific organizational visions shape the social organization and culture of work. Analyzing ideas as well as material configurations, design as well as use, and developments in offices as well as those beyond the office, I am particularly concerned with the new forms of life and cultural formations these developments produce. The 1990s saw a development towards more flexible, mobile and virtual ways of officing, such as non-territorial offices and remote work. Analyzing the alternative officing movement in the context of wider economic and cultural changes, I demonstrate the strategic role technology plays for the movement's vision of a less place-based definition of work. Suggesting an alternative intellectual origin for today's office concepts different from Taylorism, I opt for the concept of office landscaping, an influential German office concept developed after WW2 and inspired by cybernetics. Fieldwork in a present day innovative office design firm reveals a deep tension in its office designs between a more flexible and mobile organizational goal, and a more communicative and collaborative one - a tension that is exacerbated by technology. Further exploring the designers' own mobile and non-territorial office, I introduce the notion of placemaking to explain the observed friction in the mobile ways of the office. I also find a reconfigured power dynamic that is no longer based on space ownership, but rather on mobility and ownership of technology, or "techno-territory." / (cont.) Not only do I examine alternative office designs, I also investigate remote and technologically mediated work beyond the office among high-tech workers in the Silicon Valley region. My analysis suggests not only novel network-like social and professional structures but also hidden costs for individuals associated with these new formations. / Heinrich Joachim Schwarz. / 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. 456-493). / This dissertation traces a transformation in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's governance of food markets during the second half of the 20th century. In response to new correlations between diet and risk of disease, anxieties about (over)abundant food supplies, and changing notions of personal versus collective responsibility in an affluent society, the FDA changed how it regulated food labeling. Following WWII, the agency developed a set of standard recipes with fixed common name labels (such as "peanut butter" or "tomato soup"), or "standards of identity," for all mass-produced foods. However, the appearance of new diet foods and public health concerns undermined this system. Beginning in the 1970s, the FDA shifted its policies. Rather than rely on standardized identities, the agency required companies to provide informative labels such as the ingredients panel, nutrition labels, and various science-based health claims. Agency officials believed that such information would enable consumers to make responsible health decisions through market purchases. Food labeling is explored as a regulatory assemblage that draws together a variety of political, legal, corporate, and technoscientific interests and practices. The five chapters are organized chronologically. The first two describe how a shift in focus among nutrition scientists from concern for the undernourished to a concern with overeating led to the introduction onto the market of engineered foods capitalizing off popular interest in diet and health. A middle chapter describes a series of institutional scandals that generated the political animus to change the FDA's system, and registered a broader "shock of recognition" that Americans' views about food and food politics had changed. The final two chapters describe the introduction of "Nutrition Information" labeling in the 1970s and the mandatory "Nutrition Facts" panel in the 1990s. By looking at the regulation of labels as a kind of public-private infrastructure for information, the turn to compositional labeling can be understood not merely as a shift in representation-from whole foods to foods as nutrients-but more broadly as a retooling of food markets to embed notions about personal responsibility for health into the ways that food was designed, marketed, and consumed. / by Xaq Zachary Frohlich. / 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, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 409-429). / Guglielmo Marconi's trans-Atlantic wireless experiment in 1900 marked the beginning of a communication revolution that transformed the open space above the earth into channels of information flow. This dissertation grapples with the historical conditions that gave rise to such a transformation: the studies of radio-wave propagation and the treatments of radio interferences in early twentieth-century America and Western Europe. The part on propagation examines the debate between the surface diffraction theory and the atmospheric reflection theory for long waves, the development of the ionic refraction theory for short waves, the evidential quests for the existence of the ionosphere, and the studies of the geomagnetic effects on propagation. The part on interferences focuses on the engineering efforts toward the characterization of atmospheric noise and signal-intensity fluctuations, the policies of radio-channel allocation for fighting man-made interference, and the scientific research into electronic tube noise. By the mid-30s, the results from these endeavors had considerably improved the quality of radio communication. Characterizing Radio Channels builds a bridge between the history of science and the history of technology by inspecting an immaterial engineering entity--radio channels--whose control required significant scientific research. In the history of science, it contributes to an integrated study of electrical physics and geophysics. In the history of technology, it enriches radio history, epistemology of engineering knowledge, consumer studies, and the studies of technological policies. Combining both fields with the concept of radio channels enables a new understanding of the historical conditions that made the information society / (cont.) social factors that facilitated the modern research organizations in academia, industry, governments and the military. / by Chen-Pang Yeang. / 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, June 2007. / "May 2007." / Includes bibliographical references (p. 284-308). / My research is about the particular effects of Vietnam's economic liberalization program (known as "doi moi") on the local food and market system in Hanoi. Doi moi policies, which began in the late 1980s, have instituted major changes in both the national system of agricultural production and in Hanoi's local system of marketplaces. The doi moi reforms have created many new opportunities in Hanoi, but they have also re-configured social relationships and market spaces along the food chain to present new kinds of risk for consumers. These include harmful chemicals, goods of uncertain quality, and sellers who operate outside of the moral obligations of the dominant system of personal relationships. These things have not yet been resolved through regulation and have therefore been left to consumers and sellers to work out among themselves. The competition between various actors to manage foodborne risk in the absence of state regulation has taken place amidst the state's campaign to re-order Hanoi's market system according to neoiberal ideals. / (cont.) This has made the local market system a site for the enactment of a symbolic politics of modernity in which discourses that are really about risk and political economy have been obscured by their expression as a debate about "tradition" and modernity." Beneath the discourse of modernization lies a range of hybrid market worlds as well as systemic issues related to the transition from a centrally planned economy to a free market system. / by Margaret A. Hiesinger / 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 [255]-265). / This dissertation examines the distinctive and critical role that space exploration played in American foreign relations and national image making in the 1960s. Proposed by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, Project Apollo was established, in large part, as a means of demonstrating American power and promoting technocratic values in an international landscape defined by the Cold War, the collapse of colonialism, and the emergence of newly independent nations. While existing scholarship has gestured to this geopolitical context, it has tended to examine activity that takes place on American or lunar soil. This dissertation argues that the geopolitical context was not simply a backdrop but instead the main theater of Project Apollo. By embedding this familiar story back in its global context, this dissertation reinterprets the established narrative of Project Apollo in three significant ways. First, it places greater emphasis on the international stage and the relationship between the US and the world. Second, while the role of the Executive Branch remains essential to this story, this dissertation shifts the focus from engineers and managers, to key actors within the State Department and United States Information Agency, as well as foreign leaders and the world public. Finally, the role of Project Apollo in foreign relations, and public diplomacy in particular, becomes the defining feature of this investigation. By examining how US government elites promoted and disseminated information about space exploration to support American foreign relations interests, this dissertation offers a lens onto attempts to establish national power by fusing perceived values and strengths of science and technology- like rationality and progress- with the image of the nation's political system. These efforts, this dissertation demonstrates, were not only aimed at boosting American prestige, but were also strategic attempts to promote an idea of global unity and progress ushered in by American scientific and technological leadership. / by Teasel Muir-Harmony. / 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. 297-326). / This ethnography tracks a diverse set of practices I term "constructive biologies," by which I mean efforts in the post-genomic life sciences to understand how biology works by making new biological things. I examine five fields of constructive biology - synthetic biology, DIY (do-it-yourself) biology, hyperbolic crochet, sonocytology, and molecular gastronomy - investigating how they are enmeshed in sensory engagements that employ craftwork as a means of grasping biology. Synthetic biology is a community of bioengineers who aim to fabricate standardized biological systems using genetic components and manufacturing principles borrowed from engineering. DIY biology is a community of "biohackers" who appropriate synthetic biologists' terminologies, standards, and commitment to freely exchanging biomaterials in order to do hobbyist biological engineering in their homes. The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef is a distributed venture of thousands of women who are cooperatively fabricating a series of yarn and plastic coral reefs in order to build a material simulation of oceanic morphologies and evolutionary theories. Sonocytology, a technique in nanotechnology research, uses scanning probe microscopes to "listen to" cellular vibrations and "feel" the topologies of cells and cellular components. Molecular gastronomy is a movement in which practitioners - physical chemists and biochemists who study food, and chefs who apply their results - use biochemical principles and laboratory apparatuses to further cooking and the culinary arts. In analyzing these fields, I draw on histories of experimental biology, anthropological accounts of artisanship, science studies work on embodiment and tacit knowledge in scientific practice, and sensory ethnography. Based on data gathered from participant-observation and interviewing, I argue for thinking about making new biological things as a form of "crafting," an analytic that illuminates five aspects of contemporary biological manufacture: 1) sensory cultivation, 2) ongoing participation with biological media and forms, 3) the integration of making biological things and practitioners' selfmaking, 4) the embedding of social relations, interests, norms, and modes of exchange in built artifacts, and 5) the combination of making and knowing. In this study, I argue that both biology the substance and biology the discipline are currently being remade, and that increasingly, life scientists apprehend "life" through its manufacture. / by Hannah Sophia Roosth. / Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS