Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 298-323). / My dissertation examines the controversy over transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a noninvasive form of brain stimulation that is thought to provide a constant low level of electrical current to the brain. Although scientists have been experimenting with tDCS in both healthy and clinical populations for the last fifteen years, in late 2011 a movement arose wherein "lay" individuals began constructing their own tDCS devices, or purchasing consumer devices, to stimulate their brains outside of academic or medical settings for self-improvement purposes. Not surprisingly, the lay use of tDCS has not been well received by researchers, who have termed it "fringe" or "unorthodox." This work studies the conflict over tDCS: what is tDCS, who gets to use it, and who studies it? What are the multiple social worlds that tDCS inhabits, how is the technology interpreted and utilized in each, and how does each group authorize or discredit the other's use? My dissertation incorporates interviews, observations, an online survey, archival research, and legal analyses to probe aspects of the controversy from different angles. The first chapter introduces tDCS technology and chronicles the rise of the do-it-yourself movement and the subsequent emergence of direct-to-consumer devices. In the second chapter, I present an in-depth qualitative study of the practices of home users of tDCS; the third chapter offers a quantitative look at those who have purchased a consumer tDCS device, based on the results of an online survey. The fourth chapter addresses regulatory issues surrounding consumer tDCS devices, providing a comprehensive analysis of relevant legal doctrines and laws. The fifth chapter covers historical precedents for the home use of electrical stimulation, with a focus on uses of the medical battery between 1870 and 1920 in the United States. In the sixth chapter, I compare the medical battery to tDCS, arguing that the controversy over the home use of tDCS is not novel or even surprising, but rather the latest wave in a series of ongoing attempts by lay individuals to utilize electricity for therapeutic purposes. / by Anna Wexler. / 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, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 217-225). / This dissertation examines how Africa's place in the world is negotiated in different forms of material engagement with Dutch Wax cloth--designing, advertising, selling, buying, and tailoring-along the cloth's trajectory between the Netherlands and Togo. Derived from a manual Javanese textile printing technique, Dutch Wax cloth has been machine-printed in the Netherlands since the late 19th century, and was introduced to West Africa in the early 20th century. Lomé, Togo was a hub for its distribution throughout West and Central Africa for much of the 20th century. The cloth's visual and material attributes were historically developed through exchanges between West African consumers and European manufacturers and Dutch Wax has since been integrated into both dress practices and processes of social reproduction in Togo, as in much of West Africa. Further, in recent years, the cloth's producer has been rebranding itself from a textile manufacturer for Africa into a global luxury design and fashion brand. As such, Dutch Wax cloth has and continues to not only mediate but also embody West African participation in the global. By examining how Dutch Wax is "done" in various sites of practice along its path-how it is given form, and what is produced alongside these forms-this multi-sited ethnography brings to light how Africa's relationship to and place in the global is negotiated in the practices of designers, advertisers, sellers, buyers, and tailors across the Netherlands, Togo, and "the global." I argue that the view of Africa-in-the-world (Ferguson 2006) that emerges in each of these sites of practice and across all five is one that is characterized by a tenuous play between absence and presence, visibility and invisibility, inclusion and exclusion. Even as it offers a seductive alternative to past discourses about a "hopeless," "crisis-ridden," "old Africa," the "New Africa" remains decidedly layered and multiple. / by Amah Melissa Edoh. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. / The general post-Soviet decline of the states of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) mirrors specific declines in the robustness of these states' stocks of financial, physical, natural, human, organizational, and social capital assets. This loss of various kinds of capital assets over the past decade reduces the current potential and capacity of the region to implement reforms for sustainable development. While Central Asia entered the 20th century as a comparatively marginal and underdeveloped area of the world, during the Soviet period it amassed appreciable stocks of capital, especially human, physical, and social capital. The emergence of a vibrant scientific community in Central Asia during the middle of the century marked one of the most rapid expansions of scientific prestige, talent, and institutions in the developing world. With the disassembly of the Soviet Union, development and reform projects within Central Asia and funded by foreign donors have failed to achieve their development and reform goals. Within the environmental sphere, the post-Soviet period, despite a massive investment in environmental aid to the region from the West and Japan, has yielded few environmental benefits and seen the worsening of several environmental conditions, captured in the desiccation of the Aral Sea and the collapse of Caspian Sea fisheries. / (cont.) Paralleling this trend, democracy and rule of law have not taken strong root in Central Asia; rather authoritarianism and corruption are the norm in national governments. While processes of globalization (especially the free movement of human and financial capital) suggest that Central Asia could not have avoided decline in the 1990s, the severity of declines could have been mitigated by a more robust Western appreciation of the unique endowments of the Soviet era in human (the scientific community) and organizational (Perestroika public dialogues on rule of law, civil society, and democracy) capital. / by Eric Wilhelm Sievers. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, June 2003. / "May 2003." / Includes bibliographical references (p. 268-290). / Fighting Engineers examines social conflict as the cause of the formation of professional mechanical engineering in the nineteenth century U.S. Navy. In the middle of that century, the Navy began to utilize steam engines for motive power. Navy administrators recognized the need for engineering officers to design and operate ships' steam power plants, but the social and political status of staff engineering officers was unclear. Their rank was relative to line officers, the men who navigated the ship and commanded the crew. Engineers possessed no legal command authority. This created problems as engineers' responsibilities increased during the Civil War. In response to shortcomings evident in the training of the engineer corps during the Civil War, the U.S. Naval Academy in the postwar period designed an unprecedented technical curriculum. Through this program, the Navy trained the nation's first group of modern mechanical engineers. As Navy engineers built their profession after the war, they attempted to redefine what it meant to be a naval officer. The officer ideal moved from the aristocratic warrior of the antebellum period to a college educated, scientifically minded professional late in the century. To maximize the political utility of their technical expertise, Navy engineers had to spread their idea of mechanical engineering and engineering education to a broader audience. In the 1880s, they chose to do so in an unprecedented way. They promoted legislation that allowed them to serve as engineering professors at American universities. This foray into academia was a continuation of the long-standing government policy of internal improvements and federal technology sponsorship. / (cont.) The U.S. Navy developed a distinct form of professional mechanical engineering practice in the late nineteenth century. As Navy engineers became professors and industrialists, they transmitted Navy engineering throughout the nation. The human products of that engineering style were a new generation of professional engineers. They were the foundations upon which America erected the modern industrial economy. / Brendan Patrick Foley. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 88-108). / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Intellectual Property is an ideology of the late Twentieth Century which reserves property-like rights in information, so that creators may extract its economic value. Current American copyright law draws mainly from this concept; it has been constructed through history by negotiation between various established economic interests. Information Freedom is a competing ideology which has been successful in the software community. It emphasizes the dangers of over-propertization and the benefits of freely accessible resources, especially non-depletable information resources. Compromise must be reached in a practical (non-ideological) fashion in order to achieve the social goals of: production of creative content (encouraged by fair but not excessive compensation for creators); promotion of scientific, political, technical, artistic, cultural, and economic progress by removing obstacles to accessing content and taking advantage of innovations which change the status quo; protection of creative freedom; and ensuring quality and diversity in the content which is created. Civil disobedience as a means to achieve these goals may be counterproductive if it results in tighter technological restrictions on content availability or stricter legal mechanisms; legal reforms proposed by Lawrence Lessig and Jessica Litman are unlikely to be enacted. Internet-based technologies have strong potential to increase exposure to diversity, decrease costs, and improve the subjective experience for music consumers. Cheaper film-making equipment may have similar positive effects for motion pictures to a lesser degree. Internet bandwidth and other practical limitations suggest that immediate changes in video distribution and consumption patterns are more likely to be driven by the availability of Digital Video Recorders, or perhaps competing Video On Demand services. Different economic models which fund content creation may be appropriate for different applications, and may in some cases further social goals better than strong propertization. Alternative models include voluntary contributions (either from creators or consumers); indirect benefit by establishing reputation, selling related services, cross-promotion, or selling advertising; and public funding. The history of telecommunication, including the telegraph, radio, television, and the Internet, provides evidence that important uses for new technology may not be initially obvious, that the maturation of digital information technology and related economic models is just beginning. / by Christopher D. Beland. / S.B.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation follows British professors at Tokyo's late nineteenth century College of Technology (Kobudaigaku) and continues into the twentieth century with the Japanese students they trained. My first chapters map out an argument between British disciplines over Japanese 'adaptation' and/or 'resistance' to nature, a conflict driven by the development of the modem science of seismology in Tokyo. Seismology was a unique cross-cultural project - a 'Western' instrumental science invented and first institutionalized in a non-Western place. I discuss bow artifacts as diverse as seismographs, five-story wooden pagoda, and Mt. Fuji became 'boundary objects' in a fierce dispute between spokesmen for science and an over the character of the Japanese landscape and people. The latter chapters explain bow young Japanese architects and seismologists re-mapped the discursive and instrumental terrains of their British teachers, challenging foreign knowledge-production from inside colonizing disciplines. The text is framed around the story of the Great Nobi Earthquake of 1891. According to contemporary Japanese narratives, the great earthquake (the most powerful in modem Japanese history) was particularity damaging to the new 'foreign' infrastructure, and caused Japanese to seriously question, for the first time, the efficacy of foreign knowledge. 'Japan's earthquake problem' went from being one of bow to import European resistance into a fragile nation, to one of how to make a uniquely fragile imported infrastructure resist the power of Japanese nature. I critically re-tell this Japanese story as a corrective to European and American images of Meiji .Japan as a 'pupil country' and the West as a 'teacher culture'. "Foreign Knowledge" demonstrates in very concrete ways bow science and technology, art and architecture, gender, race, and class co-constructed Meiji Japan. Distinctions between 'artistic' and 'scientific' representations of culture/nature were particularly fluid in late nineteenth century Tokyo. Architects in my text often speak in the name of science and seismologists become an critics and even ethnographers. The narrative is also trans-national; centered in Tokyo, it follows Japanese architects, scientists, and carpenters to Britain, Italy, the United States, and Formosa. / by Gregory K. Clancey. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 1999. / Vita. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 254-273). / The dissertation is an historical study of the interactions between technologists and museums in the late nineteenth United States, the role of international expositions-such as Philadelphia in 1876 and Chicago in 1893-in these interactions, and the rise of technology collections in those museums. Through archival sources, as well as published primary and secondary source material, the dissertation examines the role of engineers and the public in creating technological collections in museums dominated by natural history specimens. It focuses on intersections between industry, engineers, international expositions, and museums in the nineteenth century by considering the cases of the Smithsonian's National Museum and the Field Columbian Museum. This research explores technology and its cultural roles, how technology related to or differed from other aspects of American culture, and how this may have precluded the establishment of a national museum dedicated to mechanical arts, technology and America's inventor citizens, even while some engineers brokered a place for technological collections to develop. Despite objections and a lack of support from the higher administration within the museums, mechanical and technological collections developed. In an era of enthusiasm for technology, invention, and mechanics, forces outside the museums pushed the development of the collections. In particular, a group of engineers, as curators and exhibit designers; played roles in the celebration of technological achievement and at the expositions, in the attempts to establish mechanical arts and technology collections at the two prominent museums, and in the connections between technologists and museums that proved essential to the development of the collections. In addition, pressure from a public audience enthused about technology and machines aided such collections by influencing museum administration. This dissertation argues that engineers became mediators between the museum world and the world of engineering by brokering the culture of technology and securing a subordinate, yet permanent place for technology within the museum world. Key issues in the negotiation and brokering include the nature of the culture of technology, the professionalization process of engineers and their need for social status and cultural recognition, and the place of technology in nineteenth century lives and hierarchies. / by Linda Eikmeier Endersby. / Ph.D.

Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 158-164). / Modern U.S. traffic safety policy is largely guided by three overarching principles that have influenced governments, industry, and community and citizen activists since the 1940s. The terms, education, engineering, and enforcement, detailed in the Action Program for Traffic Safety were developed by engineers and U.S. federal government traffic safety experts in response to growing concerns around rising traffic fatalities. In these guidelines, and the iterations that developed from them, responsibility for traffic safety shifted between drivers, policy makers, and the automotive industry. My dissertation examines the evolution of traffic safety policy, specifically looking at solutions to reach zero fatalities, over multiple decades. The traffic safety experts, including the auto industry, federal government, and community activists, striving for zero fatalities have reshaped traffic infrastructure, automotive regulation, and consumer perceptions of risky behaviors in an attempt to solve a major public health issue. Broadly following four themes, infrastructure, institutions, technology, and behavior, each chapter highlights how these actors mitigated risks and defined safety in order to find solutions to highway fatalities. To safety-concerned government officials and industry leaders, central actors in the development of federal traffic safety policy, traffic safety encompassed engineering, education, enforcement, citizenship, humanitarian, and moral issues. On the other hand, to women's community and activist groups, like MADD, traffic safety's focus was the education of drivers and pedestrians, and the prevention of crashes through educational and public health approaches. However, to working class white males, government mandated safety was viewed as an infringement upon their freedom as individuals to choose how to be safe and how to define their level of safety, regardless of its effects on others. Through analysis of these narratives emerges a more complete picture of the public health, education, and social policy implications of twentieth century traffic safety, the role of citizen activism in traffic safety policy development at the local, state, and federal levels, and the ways in which the traffic safety solutions have shifted over time. / by Renée Marie Blackburn. / 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, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 320-350). / This dissertation is an examination of intersections of race, pharmaceuticals, and heart disease over the course of the 20th century and today. Each of these parts has had a dynamic history, and when they are invoked together they provide a terrain for arguments about interventions in health and in justice in the present. An enduring aspect of discourses of heart disease over the past century has been articulating connections between characterizations of the modem American way of life and of heart disease. In that process, heart disease research and practice has participated in differentiating Americans, especially by race. This dissertation uses heart disease categories and the drugs prescribed for them as windows into racialized medicine. The chapters are organized in a way that is roughly chronological, beginning with the emergence of cardiology as a specialty just before World War II and the landmark longitudinal Framingham Heart Study that began shortly thereafter. A central chapter tracks the emergence and mobilization of African American hypertension as a disease category since the 1960s. / (cont.) Two final chapters attend to current racial invocations of two pharmaceuticals: thiazide and BiDil. Using methods from critical historiography of race, anthropology, and science studies, this thesis provides an account of race in medicine with interdisciplinary relevance. By attending to continuities and discontinuities over the period, this thesis illustrates that race in heart disease research and practice has been a durable preoccupation. Racialized medicine has used epistemologically eclectic notions of race, drawing variously on heterogeneous aspects that are both material and semiotic. This underlying ambiguity is central to the productivity of the recorded category of race. American practices of medicating race have also been mediating it, arbitrating and intervening on new and renewed articulations of inclusion and difference in democratic and racialized American ways of life. / by Anne Pollock. / 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, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 147-159). / My dissertation, "Changed Climate: Networking, Professionalization, and Grassroots Organizing in U.S Environmental Organizations," explores the efforts of four established U.S. environmental NGOs to change their organizational cultures and routine practices to develop grassroots activism for climate change advocacy. I find that although actors within and outside the environmental movement recognize a collective failure to influence the U.S. policy process on climate change issues, their organizations have been unable to adapt to the current political environment. My data derives from extensive participant observation, semi-structured interviews with organizational staff and experts, and statistical analysis of organizational efforts to recruit volunteer participants and develop their leadership over a two-year period. I follow four environmental organizations as they sought to create of a national climate-focused social movement. Working in collaborative partnership with other state- and national-level NGOs under the moniker of the "Climate Coalition," they initiated pilot organizing campaigns in June 2011 in three U.S. cities toward three intertwined goals of 1) building social movement power via local coalitions, 2) developing volunteer leadership capable of forging a social movement community, and 3) mobilizing the resources of that constituency in collective action to effect change. In Chapter 1, looking first at the network of organizations that comprised the Climate Coalition, I show that the network's novel configuration - a third party network administrator both coordinated the activities of the participating organizations and worked with them to set the network's strategy - produced rather than diminished the tensions inherent in inter-organizational collaboration. Turning next to the organizations themselves in Chapter 2, I explore the challenges of integrating new types of experts and expertise into existing organizational structures. In particular, I suggest that the focus on involving volunteer expertise through community organizing disrupted existing organizational notions of expertise and prevented large-scale organizational embrace of the movement building work. Finally, in Chapter 3 1 examine the experiences of the volunteers on one of the movement building campaigns, and argue that the role of the community organizer in cultivating and developing volunteer leadership is essential for understanding the long-term success of movement building work. / by Nathaniel S. Deshmukh Towery. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS)