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 462-499). / This dissertation presents a history of the community of nuclear arms control experts in the United States during the middle and later years of the Cold War, the age of thermonuclear ballistic missiles. Arms control experts were, in many interesting ways, both insiders and outsiders to the American "nuclear state." The dissertation begins by exploring the formation of strategic arms control in the years leading up to 1960, showing how arms control emerged from the mixing of local communities of disarmament advocates and theorists of nuclear deterrence. Rather than inevitable doctrinal unity, early arms control was highly local and contingent. In particular, the crucial concept of "stability" was open to multiple interpretations. In the 1960s, arms control problems motivated groundbreaking scientific research. Elite contract consultants to the government contemplated the use of lasers as weapons against ballistic missiles. As consultants performed calculations and experiments in the context of classified discussions and studies, they founded a new field of physics called nonlinear optics. In the late 1960s, strategic arms control became a public issue during a complex political dispute over missile defense. Arms control experts mediated and fueled this controversy by participating in a surprising range of activity, rallying alongside local residents whose neighborhoods would be impacted by missile defense installations, and criticizing defense policy in Congressional testimony-even as they worked their connections to the White House. In the 1960s and 1970s arms controllers shaped a changing institutional landscape for the support of arms control expertise. They built arms control into a new government agency, and later drew on the resources of philanthropic foundations to create major university arms control centers. By the 1980s, arms control reached peak public visibility amid controversy over the Reagan administration's Strategic Defense Initiative. This dissertation uses the private papers and correspondence of numerous experts, a wide range of arms control publications, and government records to explore the diverse practices of arms control. It engages a wider discussion among historians about the status of Cold War elites, the relationship between experts and the American state, and the character of scientific knowledge during the Cold War. / by Benjamin Tyler Wilson. / 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 (p. 269-283). / This dissertation concerns the role of place in scientific practice. Ideas of place, I argue, shape and are shaped by science. I specifically look at the community of planetary scientists who, though they cannot step foot on the objects they study, transform planets into places. This is an ethnographic work that draws on 18 months of fieldwork during which time I encountered several different communities of planetary scientists. At MIT, I worked alongside astronomers looking for planets around other stars. These "exoplanet" astronomers transformed numerical counts of photons into complex worlds with atmospheres and weather. Data visualizations characterized the work of a community learning to see unseen planets in specific, place-based ways. I also traveled with an astronomer to a Chilean observatory where she studied the night sky hoping to find a "habitable planet." Many other astronomers share this goal and have designed various ways to detect a planet like Earth. The importance of these projects signifies that exoplanet astronomers are more interested in finding planetary kin - planets that are familiar places - than exotic aliens. To determine how the planetary places created by exoplanet astronomers differ from those in our own Solar System, I spent time at the NASA Ames Research Center with a group of computer scientists who create high resolution and three-dimensional maps of Mars. These maps reflect the kind of place Mars is today: it is available to everyone to explore, it is displayed such that you can imagine standing on the surface, and it is presented as geologically dynamic in ways similar to Earth. Even though these maps help give Mars a sense of place, Martian science is still stymied by the inability to send humans to its surface. Instead, planetary scientists travel to terrestrial sites deemed to be "Mars-like" to approximate performing geologic fieldwork on Mars. I went to one of these locations to see how, during these outings, Mars and Earth become entwined as scientists forge connections between two planetary places. These diverse scientific activities, I conclude, are transforming our view of the cosmos. Outer space is becoming outer place. / by Lisa Rebecca Messeri. / 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. 279-293). / "Negotiating Nature" explores resource management in action and the intertwined roles of law and science in environmental conflicts in the Upper Klamath River Basin in southern Oregon. I follow disputes over the management of water and endangered species. I develop several themes: first, how these disputes demonstrate the growing connections between scientific and legal authority in environmental matters. This occurs because environmental laws often limit participation in disputes to those who can offer "scientific data" in support of their claims. I call this situation "scientific legality" and suggest that increasingly, one's ability to make legal claims is closely tied to one's ability to muster scientific authority behind those claims. Second, how the growing importance of scientific expertise in environmental decision-making has affected the ways that groups frame environmental claims. Third, how negotiations over environmental rights, regulations, and policies shape not only management efforts, but also narratives of environmental relationships. In Part One, I discuss the Endangered Species Act of 1973, which legally mandates that only scientific considerations can be taken into account in certain aspects of endangered species management. As a result, the Act has impacted the ways people frame claims about endangered species. I then discuss how the Klamath Tribes of American Indians have responded this situation, and the implications of this for presumed divisions between the environmental knowledge of scientists and native peoples. In Part Two, I examine a 1975 water rights case, United States v. Adair et al. I explore how the court drew on and reproduced prominent narratives of American Indian history, and the ways these narratives bounded the agency of the Klamath in relation to the environment and the colonial process. In Part Three, I examine a dispute in 2001 over endangered species. In this conflict, a dispute over policy quickly became a dispute over the scientific claims that legitimated the policy. Expert disagreement ensued. Although political explanations for expert disagreement were common, I suggest that a more underlying cause was the unavoidable uncertainties of ecological claims. These uncertainties were politically useful to those who wanted to stall management action and maintain the status quo. / by Nicholas Seong Chul Buchanan. / Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-83). / by Russell Brian Olwell. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 186-208). / by Rebecca M. Herzig. / 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 309-328). / This dissertation examines the mutually reinforcing connections between science and law and their construction of pain in British regulation of animal experimentation. It investigates the Home Office's implementation of the Cruelty to Animals Act (1876), the first effort anywhere in the world to impose legal restrictions on vivisection, during the three decades following its enactment. The study ends in 1912 with the findings of a second Royal Commission that evaluated the workings of the Act. The Commission reaffirmed many of the Home Office polices regarding vivisection and their underlying premises. The Act mandated official supervision of scientific experiments that "calculated to give pain" to animal subjects. Implementing the Act therefore necessitated the identification and quantification of pain. This requirement created what I term the "bureaucracy of empathy," an attempt to systemize the understanding of animal suffering through administrative mechanisms. Practicing empathy was integral to some bureaucratic tasks, for example, attaching the right certificate to an inoculation experiment. Additionally, various factors including legal settings and scientific knowledge informed and situated this empathy with animals, when, for instance, an inspector drafted a report about mutilated monkeys while visiting a physiology laboratory. My analysis unravels that defining animal pain was often intertwined with the definition of an experiment. Law and science co-constitution of pain and experiments conditioned both the daily work of administering the law and the practices of experimenters. This dynamic led to the adoption of technologies such as anesthesia and pain scoring models, which provided legal-medical means to control pain in research and to ostensibly create a cruelty free experimental fact. A new pain-based ethical order was established, designed by law officers, civil servants, and court judges as much as by physiologists, remaking the relationships between experimenters, state representatives, and laboratory animals. / by Shira Dina Shmuely. / 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, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 216-226). / Pocket computers, called "smartphones," have become a part of everyday life over the past decade. Most people now routinely carry around with them millions of times more computing power than generated the Apollo mission to the Moon. They use it to access, process, and share information quickly and cheaply, in furtherance of the things people have long done: buying and selling, socializing, and so on, yet faster and across greater distances-characteristic of what we call "modernity." This has affected the ways in which people are working, and who is working, doing what, today. This thesis reports the results of a field study of one new kind of laborer who has been brought into work consequent to the smartphone: Uber drivers. The author conducted ethnographic fieldwork over one year in Boston, Massachusetts, and the surrounding area using ride-along sampling, participant observation, lengthy interviewing, and systematic coding in order to better understand a software-organized, person-to-person labor market in which the person who does the labor also brings the capital in the form of a vehicle used to provide transportation to other people. The first chapter of the thesis provides a typology of Uber drivers based on semi-random sampling through ride-alongs. The second chapter describes collective action that was undertaken by Uber drivers at Boston's Logan Airport in the form of a strike against the algorithm, which was an effort to induce the software to perceive an (artificial) driver shortage, leading to an increase in the price of fares. The third chapter offers a theory of the structure of Uber as an organization that mobilizes labor by using software to facilitate economic transactions that are triangulated between two users and the firm. The chapter also explains how this structure was particularly apt at mobilizing large numbers of people to carry out "regulatory breach," as they worked as Uber drivers doing the equivalent of taxi or livery work without complying with any of the applicable legal regulations. The final chapter explains how analysis of the field data, in combination with the new theoretical insights of the thesis, drives a conclusion suggested by the thesis title: that Uber has made a digital working class. / by H. C. Robinson. / 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 252-261). / This dissertation examines the history of shark-human interactions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It argues that the mid-twentieth century onward saw a series of conjunctures -technological, cultural, and scientific -that thrust sharks and humans into unprecedented levels of contact. This led to both a rise in preoccupation with sharks, and an emergence of new stakeholder groups that sought produce knowledge about them. The conflicting definitions, attitudes, and responses to sharks presented by these various groups are linked to greater trends in science, culture, and society. In particular, the way humans write and think about sharks and other man-eating predators has deep links to the position we see ourselves occupying in the environment. Further, anxieties about sharks are strongly tied to the complicated cultural relationships that people have with the marine environment, both as a place of wonder and terror. Lastly, sharks also allow us to examine the technologies we use to tame and navigate the ocean, as the shifts that brought humans and sharks into closer proximity were intertwined with new technologies that changed the ways humans interacted with marine spaces. Each chapter presents case studies from the United States and South Africa, juxtaposing the responses by each region. The opening chapter charts the rise of shark attack numbers in the mid-century. It traces the impact of highly publicized shark attacks in the U.S. and South Africa in the 1950s, which resulted in differing approaches to combat the threat of shark attack. Chapter Two explores the intersections between popular depictions of sharks and changing perceptions of shark behavior, centering on the ur-text of shark literature: Jaws. Chapter Three traces the advent of shark tourism, and examines the controversy surrounding white shark cage diving in South Africa. Chapter Four explores the response of Cape Cod communities to an influx of white sharks into the region, drawing parallels with earlier historical examples of predator eradication and conservation. The dissertation thus argues that studying shark-human interactions allows for the interrogation of divisions between myth and science, experts and laypersons, popular culture and scientific knowledge, humans and the environment. / by Michaela Jane Thompson. / 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, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 263-285). / This dissertation is a study of emergent economic forms of life. It investigates recent remakings of economic existence and modes of disseminating these forms of life, and does so with particular reference to the crafting of electricity markets in the United States. It draws on more than a year of fieldwork among experts and users involved in electricity exchange. The experts and users among whom I conducted participant observation include computer programmers who assist companies that trade in electricity markets by collecting information and making trading suggestions, electrical engineers who design new infrastructures such as electricity markets for buying and selling electricity in bulk, psychologists and social scientists who study people's electricity consumption behavior to generate economic technologies to save money to users and providers of electricity, and citizen groups based in West Virginia and rural Illinois that organize against electricity markets' exclusion of consumers from decision-making mechanisms. Bringing questions of economic anthropology to bear upon the emergent literature of the anthropology of infrastructures, I propose that new economic forms of existence often come to being though infrastructure building and maintenance. For the last 20 years, experts of diverse technical backgrounds have been reprogramming the electric grid to allow for enhanced calculative choice and competition - principles at the core of the neoliberal agenda. I demonstrate that people who do not necessarily concern themselves with the formal study of economics often take the lead in creating and propagating wide-ranging economic emergent forms of life, such as neoliberalism, across the social field. To zero in on their work, I develop the concept of "techno-economics": an approach that understands commodities, whether they are living nonhumans such as livestock or inorganic processes like electricity, as more than passive receptacles of human design, and locates humans within their efforts to commoditize and marketize unruly objects, like electricity - a commodity that cannot be stored in warehouses or shipped on highways. Anthropological studies of the techno-economic, I suggest, are best equipped to make connections in ethnographic representation between otherwise disparate nodes of social life, like expertise and wires, law and steel, and finally, economics and electricity. / by Canay Özden-Schilling. / 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, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 252-257). / With the emergence of biomedical technologies, human body parts from living or dead donors have become commodities in the international networks of trade. This dissertation tries to understand religious, political and ethical discourses on this emerging economy and how it creates its subjects in Turkey. By drawing analogies from the early days of anatomy and mental health practices and by using a three-fold-corpus (state, body and law) as a framework, it illustrates how the state, the religious law on the body, and social inequalities turn some subjects to objects of this biomedical practice while extending life for others. Life histories, oral histories, doctors' and patients' accounts, media reporting, urban legends, cinematography, theater, poetry and literature speak of this new biomedical life. The meaning of the cadaver, the brain-dead body, and the living donor are reevaluated. The personhood of suicides, the homeless, the poor, the mentally ill, the immigrant, and women are all questioned with the redefinition of boundaries of life and death. Biomedicine effects this kind of social change. / (cont.) A cultural history of this production sheds a light onto how Turkey has become one of the centers of organ trafficking in the Middle East in the 1990s, how doctors generate biomedical politics inspired by their American or European counterparts, and how patients, who have acquired kidneys, rationalize and legitimize the world they live in while they seek for "a second life," "a humane treatment," and social equality. Simultaneously new definitions of the human, the person and the self emerge as a new body is reconstructed with parts originating from another human being. It is the history of the biomedicalization of the self. / by Aslihan Sanal. / Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS