Thesis: S.B. in Science in Humanities and Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 52-53). / Introduction: The "deaf economy" is an emerging, new niche economic system taking shape within deaf communities globally. My research attempts to understand and describe the relationship of economic networks of deaf businesses, entrepreneurs, employees, and customers embedded in the "deaf economy." I came to discover that many social-cultural aspects of the deaf communities in my research, such as social ties and attitudes of solidarity, are one of the driving forces behind the "deaf economy." There were some studies done about the employment of the deaf in both United States and Europe in the past years. There are also few research studies done on the phenomenon of American deaf business-owners and entrepreneurs, but that was not the case for European deaf business-owners and entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship has become a popular concept and research topic today in the mainstream society. However, there is very little research into entrepreneurship within the deaf communities. Hence, there is not much understanding of how the government, institutions, and other people could advocate for entrepreneurism within the deaf communities, especially in the United States and Europe. Despite such little information, in the last few decades, there has been a substantial increase in employment and education of the deaf in both United States and Europe, which also incidentally shows an increase in phenomenon of deaf business-owners and entrepreneurs. However, I believe there is virtually no research into the concept of the "deaf economy", an economic network of deaf businesses, employees, and consumers. In 2012 and 2013, I was looking for a possible research topic on the deaf population for my summer projects. By chance, in 2012, I had happened to come across Professor W. Scot Atkins's dissertation on the lived experiences of fourteen American deaf entrepreneurs.1 Professor Atkins is currently a Rochester Institute of Technology business professor interested in deaf entrepreneurism. In our email correspondence, he had indicated the need for research into the concept of the "deaf economy," so I had decided to take on the initiative to answer this simple research question: "What is the deaf economy?" Secondary questions include: "What are the composition and attributes of the 'deaf economy' for Europe? How does it compare to American 'deaf economy'?" In order to answer those questions, I have selected certain sites of my case studies in different geographic locations using a qualitative or ethnographic approach: California and Las Vegas, Nevada (United States) and London, France, and Bulgaria (Europe). Also, I was hoping to discover the premises of the "deaf economy" similar to the concept of an "ethnic economic enclave" and conduct a short comparative analysis between the United States and Europe at the conclusion of the research. My research focuses only on the "deaf economy" of first-world, developed, capitalistic countries, such as the United States and England/France. I also had time constraints, since all of my research was done during summer vacations, so I was not able to go in-depth as much as I wanted to. Also, during my fieldwork, I came to realization that the "deaf economy" is a very broad topic and encompasses wide range of areas worthy of further examination in the future. My qualitative research is by no means rigorous as a dissertation research would be. Also, it is based on my own selected interviews and field observations, so my research may or may not be generalizable, especially if my research were to be replicated in the future. However, I would like to use this research opportunity to point out my interesting observations of the "deaf economy" and help to open up a potential new research topic for future research initiatives. / by Sheila Zhi Xu. / S.B. in Science in Humanities and Science

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, February 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [327]-349). / This dissertation examines how Americans have transformed the environment through the construction of new technologies and the roles of technical professionals in bringing about these changes. In the twentieth century, federal engineers, working with local Western boosters and their federal superiors, transformed the West's waterscape. Between 1900 and 1970, engineers of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation--only one of three federal agencies that built dams-constructed over 400. On the Columbia River alone, federal engineers constructed thirteen large dams that turned the nation's fourth largest river into a chain of lakes. Engineers wrought this transformation with multiple purpose dams-a new style of dam building in the twentieth century. This style combined a new way of understanding how dams should be used with new approaches to financing the construction of dams and to designing and siting dam structures. Engineers built dams that developed water resources for multiple uses: navigation, flood control, irrigation, and hydroelectricity production. They financed these dams by allocating the costs among uses and then obtaining funds either through federal grants (for navigation and flood control) or loans (for irrigation and hydroelectricity). Engineers frequently designed these dams as traditional concrete gravity structures and sited them at prime locations on major rivers. This work examines the rise of the multiple purpose style of dam building through the history of Grand Coulee Dam. Located on the Columbia River in Washington State, Grand Coulee Dam is one in a group of large dams planned in the 1920s and built in the 1930s during whose design and construction federal engineers worked out this new style of building. It shows that engineers came to prefer this style because it fulfilled conservationists' hopes for "comprehensive planning" of water resources and it eliminated financial problems with federal irrigation activities. Engineers alone did not launch this building program: local constituencies favored development and Franklin Roosevelt's new administration supported relief projects, conservation programs, and government involvement in the electrical industry. Working together, these three groups built a political coalition for multiple purpose dams that successfully underpinned expanded building. / by Karin Denice Ellison. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2006. / MIT Dewey Library copy issued in pages. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 190-200). / "The Soviet Farm Complex" is a history of food, farming and the environment in the postwar Soviet Union. It tells the story of how different technical and institutional authorities created an industrial Soviet countryside in the generation after World War II. Beyond the leadership of the Soviet state, international trade relationships, new technologies, unusual scientific cultures, stubborn environmental realities and human shortcomings played important roles in shaping the progress of agricultural change. Four historical fields inform this project: the history of technology, agricultural history, Soviet history and environmental history. Each of the five chapters addresses a different time, place and theme in the history of the Soviet countryside, providing a close-up view of the most important aspects of postwar rural change. Soviet agricultural reform has often been interpreted as a failure: a textbook case of poor central planning and destructive, high-modernist logic on the part of the Soviet state. In fact, this study shows that the collective farming system as a whole was not particularly dysfunctional, nor was it doomed to failure simply by virtue of being centrally planned. / (cont.) Much like the capitalist farms with which it competed, Soviet farms struggled to overcome enormous environmental, economic and social barriers to success. Similarly to capitalist systems, the Soviet Union's farming complexes succeeded in some places, while failing spectacularly in others. The history of Soviet agricultural change is not a history of faceless state agents imposing change from a great distance. Rather, it is made up of many different kinds of people working at many different jobs. Agricultural scientists and bureaucrats performed research, wrote reports, created policies and issued orders, sometimes against their better judgment and sometimes with the full force of their beliefs behind them. On the ground, agricultural laborers tried to follow the orders that originated from these higher echelons although workers and their work often experienced periods of great transition. In the universities, teachers endeavored to instruct their students in modern and efficient methods of producing food, and in every city and village the powerful tool of Soviet propaganda strived to persuade citizens of the value and logic of all aspects of agricultural modernization. / (cont.) By examining the connections between state authority, agricultural modernization and environmental change, this dissertation shows that the industrialization of the Soviet countryside was a dynamic and convoluted process, affected far more by the seemingly trivial histories of genetic variation, animal nutrition and weather than by the machinations of powerful politicians or the mismanagement of inept bureaucrats. / by Jenny Leigh Smith. / 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, 2009. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 293-320). / The manned spaceflight program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has suffered three fatal accidents: one in the Apollo program and two in the Space Transportation System (the Shuttle). These were the fatal fire in Apollo 204 (Apollo 1) in 1967, the explosion of the Solid Rocket Booster in STS-51L (Challenger) in 1986, and the destruction of the orbiter in STS-107 (Columbia). Three astronauts lost their lives in 1967, and in each Shuttle accident seven astronauts were killed. Following each of these fatal accidents, a significant investigation was conducted and a comprehensive investigation report produced. These investigation reports each served to create public narratives of the reasons for the accidents. The reports shaped the accidents' legacies for the space program and for large-scale complex engineering projects more generally. This thesis re-examines the evidence produced to investigate and explain each accident. By analyzing the investigation reports critically, as well as reviewing the accidents themselves, this work considers how engineering cultures and practices at NASA shifted to meet the changing demands of the space program. It argues that the public narratives of the accidents are not completely congruent with the engineering evidence, and that these very selective narratives are influential in shaping future strengths (and weaknesses) at NASA. By re-examining the accident evidence, the reports, and the role of each accident in shaping NASA engineering cultures, the thesis provides a view of engineering very different from what is apparent in previous historical work on the space program. / by Alexander F.G. Brown. / 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. 375-398). / This study examines the assemblage of scientific knowledge, engineering practices, measuring instruments, and civilian and military institutions in the U.S. and Japan that went into the construction of the machine operator as a historically situated category of person in the midtwentieth century. Over the three decades from 1930 to 1960, American psychologists, physiologists, anthropologists, and engineers produced a large body of knowledge, instruments, and techniques with which to understand, select, and train aircraft pilots. The figure of the pilot thus constructed was less of a "flier" engaged in speedy movements and adventures than of an "operator" with disciplined attention and posture. The conditions that constituted the aircraft operator were multifarious: spatial, virtual, psychological, anthropometrical, political, and cultural. I first examine the Link Trainer, a ground-based flight trainer, and explore how the meaning of "flying" shifted with the use of instrument flying technique and the experience of simulated training on the ground. Then I show how psychologists redefined flying from a problem of movement to a problem of attention in their research on pilot selection tests, especially by contrasting the validity of physiological tests and psychomotor tests. Concurrently, physical anthropologists were articulating two different ways of relating the pilot's body to flying; one was the correlation between physique and one's success as a pilot and the other was the dimensional configuration of the body in the space of the cockpit. In postwar Japan, this American notion of the pilot served as the model for Japanese pilots, who embraced American norms and conventions for flying after a long ban on aviation. Even the bodies of Japanese pilots were measured and compared with those of Americans. As the scientists and engineers in postwar America extended wartime knowledge and techniques to study various situations of machine operation, aircraft pilots also came to stand for human individuals more generally, forming the conceptual basis of human factors engineering or ergonomics. Through this expansion and generalization of the pilot, a particular type of human-the one who operates machines through displays and controls-came into being as an object of study and control. / by Chihyung Jeon. / 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 261-277). / This dissertation explores the relationship between types of livestock and place in the context of Great Britain's expanding agro-pastoral empire. Specifically, it examines how the distribution and circulation of breeds of livestock native to the British Isles influenced understandings of kind and location-of the dynamic interaction between heredity, human influence and environmental conditions, and their various fluid effects on ovine and bovine diversity. Drawing on extensive archival work in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia, I trace both the national origins and imperial expansion of British breeds. As Britain industrialized in the early nineteenth century, breeders faced the need to convert the specificity of their animals into fungibility while maintaining the distinctive character of their breeds, seemingly incompatible aims that nonetheless guaranteed the economic viability of their stock. Thus they reoriented local variability towards market standardization, transforming regional types of cattle and sheep into geographically transposable, bulky, and quick-fattening beasts suited for increasingly sophisticated economies and industrialized production. Tension between standardization and specialization shaped the dispersal of breeds throughout the empire as well. Here, stockbreeders served two masters: the unfamiliar climates and topographies of Australia, New Zealand, and North America, which demanded local adaptations, and the British consumer, whose dinner table was the end of the line for the bulk of colonial beef and mutton. As they tried to balance local adaptation and metropolitan taste, breeders experimented with heredity, testing the limits of contemporary understandings of heritability and breed plasticity, and developed of new strains of livestock genetically derived from British breeds, but culturally, economically and environmentally hybrid. In the process, imperialism itself was instantiated in these animals. Bodies of sheep and cattle were remade to suit new lands and later to fill the refrigerated holds of ocean liners. The empire itself was recast as a vast apparatus for feeding Britons. This system, divested of its imperial trappings and disseminated still further, brings meat to tables around the world today. / by Rebecca J. H. Woods. / 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. / Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 343-392). / This dissertation argues that Chile's history of computing is tightly interwoven with the history of the Chilean state. It begins by documenting the government use of mechanical tabulating machines during the 1920s and 1930s and concludes with the disbanding of the state computer enterprise known as ECOM in 1991. The dissertation pays particular attention to the period between 1964 and 1973, which was marked by the presidencies of Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei Montalva and Socialist Salvador Allende Gossens. The dissertation addresses three central questions. First, it asks how Chilean economic policies and political events shaped the country's technological history. Second, it asks what we can learn from computers if we treat them as texts for understanding historical processes in Chile, the Latin American region, and the developing world. Finally, it addresses how Chile's political leaders used computing machines in their attempts to control Chile's social, economic, and political development and to forward their plans to modernize the Chilean nation. It argues that computers proved valuable not only in producing the Chile of today but in articulating national goals that changed over time. / (cont.) Government, use of computers both reflected and made possible the ideological programs of developmentalism, socialism, and neoliberalism that dominated Chilean politics during the period under study. Based predominantly on archival research and oral history interviews, the dissertation follows a narrative format. It shows how computing technologies contributed to the practice of statecraft, influenced ideas of modernization, and reflected the tensions between Chile and the industrialized nations of the developed world. / by Jessica Eden Miller Medina. / 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. / Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 316-340). / This study of the changing practices and perceptions of prediction in the late nineteenth century reveals the process by which Americans came to rationalize economic and cultural uncertainty into modern life. Forecasts of all kinds were ubiquitous in the late nineteenth century; as the United States fashioned itself into an urban-industrial power with a national economy and an increasingly corporate and bureaucratic society, prediction became an increasingly significant scientific, economic, and cultural practice. As a postbellum crisis of certainty destabilized ways of thinking about the future-in science, social science, and religion-predictions, whether accurate or not, offered illusions of control over one's future to citizens of a rapidly modernizing America. I argue that the late-century search for predictability found as much uncertainty as it did certainty, that consumers of predictions were at once desirous and dismissive of forecasts that often took on greater cultural than economic value, and that producers and consumers of prediction together rationalized uncertainty and shaped a new cultural acceptance of the predictable unpredictability of modern life. In the first half of the dissertation I analyze the work of U.S. Department of Agriculture statisticians, private cotton estimators, Weather Bureau forecasters, and local "weather prophets," all of whom sought to systematically convert their observations into economically valuable predictions. In the second half of the dissertation I focus on the work of utopian novelist Edward Bellamy, fortune-tellers, and spirit mediums, whose prophecies circulated by the thousands through rural and urban America. / (cont.) "Propheteering" offers a new narrative of modernization by examining the tools and cultural practices used by both institutions and individuals to make sense of the late-century scientific and social reimagination of the future, however uncertain and fragmentary that future promised to be. / by Jamie L. Pietruska. / 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 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)