Search Results

ENGLISH

Squares - Us Physical And Engineering Scientists In The Long 1970s

by Cyrus C. M. Mody

3,96€ + 10% CARD

 When ungroovy scientists did groovy science: how non-activist scientists and engineers adapted their work to a rapidly changing social and political landscape.In The Squares, Cyrus Mody shows how, between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, some scientists and engineers who did not consider themselves activists, New Leftists, or members of the counterculture accommodated their work to the rapidly changing social and political landscape of the time. These "square scientists," Mody shows, began to do many of the things that the counterculture urged: turn away from military-industrial funding, become more interdisciplinary, and focus their research on solving problems of civil society. During the period Mody calls "the long 1970s," ungroovy scientists were doing groovy science. Mody offers a series of case studies of some of these collective efforts by non-activist scientists to use their technical knowledge for the good of society. He considers the region around Santa Barbara and the interplay of public universities, think tanks, established firms, new companies, philanthropies, and social movement organizations. He looks at Stanford University''s transition from Cold War science to commercialized technoscience; NASA''s search for a post-Apollo mission; the unsuccessful foray into solar energy by Nobel laureate Jack Kilby; the "civilianization" of the US semiconductor industry; and systems engineer Arthur D. Hall''s ill-fated promotion of automated agriculture.
ENGLISH

European Objects - The Troubled Dreams Of Harmonization

by Brice Laurent

3,96€ + 10% CARD

 How interventions based on objects—including chemicals, financial products, and consumer goods—offer a path to rethink European integration.Interventions based on objects, Brice Laurent claims, have become a dominant path for European policy-making. In European Objects, Laurent analyzes the political consequences of these interventions and their democratization. He uses the term "European objects" to describe technical entities that are regulated—and thereby transformed—by European policies. To uncover the bureaucratic and regulatory intricacies of European governance, Laurent focuses on a series of these objects, including food products, chemicals, financial products, consumer goods, drinking water, and occupational environments. Laurent argues that taking European objects seriously offers a way to rephrase the dreams of harmonization and, eventually, rethink the constitutional strength of European integration.Laurent doesn''t just clarify how European regulation works, but also explores ways to realize long-term objectives for European integration, such as a harmonized market or an objective expertise. Regulation is best understood as "regulatory machinery" bringing together various types of legal constraints, material interventions on objects, and the imagining of desirable futures. Analyzing European objects enables Laurent to explore what regulation has become after years of evolution have made it a central component of the European policy world. He offers practical illustrations of how the regulatory machinery functions today. If Europe succeeds at reinventing the terms of its legitimacy with objects that matter for the European publics, it will provide a telling demonstration that the opposition of expertise and populism is not the unavoidable fate of liberal democracies.
ENGLISH

Making Time On Mars

by Zara Mirmalek

92,75€ + 10% CARD

 An examination of how the daily work of NASA''s Mars Exploration Rovers was organized across three sites on two planets using local Mars time.In 2004, mission scientists and engineers working with NASA''s Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) remotely operated two robots at different sites on Mars for ninety consecutive days. An unusual feature of this successful mission was that it operated on Mars time—the daily work was organized across three sites on two planets according to two Martian time zones. In Making Time on Mars, Zara Mirmalek shows that this involved more than a resetting of wristwatches; the team''s struggle to synchronize with Mars time involved technological and communication breakdowns, informal workarounds, and extra work to support the technology that was intended to support people. Her account of how NASA created an entirely new temporality for the MER mission offers insights about the assumptions behind the organizational relationship between clock time and work.Mirmalek, herself a member of the mission team, offers an insider''s view of the MER workplace and community. She describes the discord among MER''s multiple temporalities and examines issues of professional identity that helped shape the experience of working according to Mars time. Considering time and work relationships through a multidisciplinary lens, Mirmalek shows how contemporary and historical human-technology relationships inform assumptions about the unalterability of clock time. She argues that the organizational connection between clock time and work, although still operational, is outdated.
ENGLISH

Sulphuric Utopias - A History Of Maritime Fumigation

by Christos Lynteris e Lukas Engelmann

3,96€ + 10% CARD

 How early twentieth century fumigation technologies transformed maritime quarantine practices and inspired utopian visions of disease-free global trade.In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fumigation technologies transformed global practices of maritime quarantine through chemical and engineering innovation. One of these technologies, the widely used Clayton machine, blasted sulphuric acid gas through a docked ship in an effort to eliminate pathogens, insects, and rats while leaving the cargo and the structure of the vessel unharmed, shortening its time in quarantine and minimizing the risk of importing infectious diseases. In Sulphuric Utopias, Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris examine this overlooked but historically crucial practice at the intersection of epidemiology, hygiene, applied chemistry, and engineering. They show how maritime fumigation inspired utopian visions of disease-free trade to improve global shipping and to encourage universally applicable standards of sanitation and hygiene.Engelmann and Lynteris chart the history of ideas about fumigation, disinfection, and quarantine, and chronicle the development of the Clayton machine in 1880s New Orleans. Built by the Louisiana Board of Health and adapted and patented by Thomas Clayton, the machine offered a barrier against bacteria and pests and enabled a highway to global trade. Engelmann and Lynteris chronicle the Clayton machine''s success and examine its competitors, including carbon-based fumigation methods in Germany and the Ottoman Empire as well as the "Sulfurozador" in Argentina. They follow the international standardization of maritime fumigation and explore the Clayton machine''s decline after World War I, when visions of "sulphuric utopia" were replaced by a pragmatic acknowledgment of epidemiological complexity.
ENGLISH

Listening In The Field - Recording And The Science Of Birdsong

by Joeri Bruyninckx

92,75€ + 10% CARD

 The transformation of sound recording into a scientific technique in the study of birdsong, as biologists turned wildlife sounds into scientific objects.Scientific observation and representation tend to be seen as exclusively visual affairs. But scientists have often drawn on sensory experiences other than the visual. Since the end of the nineteenth century, biologists have used a variety of techniques to register wildlife sounds. In this book, Joeri Bruyninckx describes the evolution of sound recording into a scientific technique for studying the songs and calls of wild birds and asks, what it means to listen to animal voices as a scientist. The practice of recording birdsong took shape at the intersection of popular entertainment and field ornithology, turning recordings into objects of investigation and popular fascination. Shaped by the technologies and interests of amateur naturalism and music teaching, radio broadcasting and gramophone production, hobby electronics and communication engineering, birdsong recordings traveled back and forth between scientific and popular domains, to appear on gramophone recordings, radio broadcasts, and movie soundtracks.Bruyninckx follows four technologies—the musical score, the electric microphone, the portable magnetic tape recorder, and the sound spectrograph—through a cultural history of field recording and scientific listening. He chronicles a period when verbal descriptions, musical notations, and onomatopoeic syllables represented birdsong and shaped a community of listeners; later electric recordings struggled with notions of fidelity, realism, objectivity, and authenticity; scientists, early citizen scientists, and the recording industry negotiated recording exchange; and trained listeners complemented the visual authority of spectrographic laboratory analyses. This book reveals a scientific process fraught with conversions, between field and laboratory, sound and image, science and its various audiences.
ENGLISH

Unreliable Nation - Hostile Nature And Technological Failure In The Cold War

by Edward Jones-Imhotep

92,75€ + 10% CARD

 An examination of how technological failures defined nature and national identity in Cold War Canada.Throughout the modern period, nations defined themselves through the relationship between nature and machines. Many cast themselves as a triumph of technology over the forces of climate, geography, and environment. Some, however, crafted a powerful alternative identity: they defined themselves not through the triumph of machines over nature, but through technological failures and the distinctive natural orders that caused them. In The Unreliable Nation, Edward Jones-Imhotep examines one instance in this larger history: the Cold War-era project to extend reliable radio communications to the remote and strategically sensitive Canadian North. He argues that, particularly at moments when countries viewed themselves as marginal or threatened, the identity of the modern nation emerged as a scientifically articulated relationship between distinctive natural phenomena and the problematic behaviors of complex groups of machines.Drawing on previously unpublished archival documents and recently declassified materials, Jones-Imhotep shows how Canadian defense scientists elaborated a distinctive "Northern" natural order of violent ionospheric storms and auroral displays, and linked it to a "machinic order" of severe and widespread radio disruptions throughout the country. Tracking their efforts through scientific images, experimental satellites, clandestine maps, and machine architectures, he argues that these scientists naturalized Canada''s technological vulnerabilities as part of a program to reimagine the postwar nation. The real and potential failures of machines came to define Canada, its hostile Northern nature, its cultural anxieties, and its geo-political vulnerabilities during the early Cold War. Jones-Imhotep''s study illustrates the surprising role of technological failures in shaping contemporary understandings of both nature and nation.
ENGLISH

Reordering Life - Knowledge And Control In The Genomics Revolution

by Stephen Hilgartner

92,75€ + 10% CARD

 How the regimes governing biological research changed during the genomics revolution, focusing on the Human Genome Project.The rise of genomics engendered intense struggle over the control of knowledge. In Reordering Life, Stephen Hilgartner examines the "genomics revolution" and develops a novel approach to studying the dynamics of change in knowledge and control. Hilgartner focuses on the Human Genome Project (HGP)—the symbolic and scientific centerpiece of the emerging field—showing how problems of governance arose in concert with new knowledge and technology. Using a theoretical framework that analyzes "knowledge control regimes," Hilgartner investigates change in how control was secured, contested, allocated, resisted, justified, and reshaped as biological knowledge was transformed. Beyond illuminating genomics, Reordering Life sheds new light on broader issues about secrecy and openness in science, data access and ownership, and the politics of research communities. Drawing on real-time interviews and observations made during the HGP, Reordering Life describes the sociotechnical challenges and contentious issues that the genomics community faced throughout the project. Hilgartner analyzes how laboratories control access to data, biomaterials, plans, preliminary results, and rumors; compares conflicting visions of how to impose coordinating mechanisms; examines the repeated destabilization and restabilization of the regimes governing genome databases; and examines the fierce competition between the publicly funded HGP and the private company Celera Genomics. The result is at once a path-breaking study of a self-consciously revolutionary science, and a provocative analysis of how knowledge and control are reconfigured during transformative scientific change.
ENGLISH

Vulnerability In Technological Cultures - New Directions In Research And Governance

180,20€ + 10% CARD

 Analysis and case studies explore the concept of vulnerability, offering a novel and broader approach to understanding the risks and benefits of science and technology.
ENGLISH

Making Silicon Valley - Innovation And The Growth Of High Tech, 1930-1970

by Christophe Lecuyer

106,00€ + 10% CARD

 A history of the innovative practices in the San Francisco-area electronics industry that paved the way for the rise of the computer industry in Silicon Valley.
ENGLISH

Imperial Technoscience - Transnational Histories Of Mri In The United States, Britain, And India

by Amit Prasad

108,65€ + 10% CARD

 A study of science and technology practices that shows how even emergent aspects of research and development remain entangled with established hierarchies.
ENGLISH

Low Power To The People - Pirates, Protest, And Politics In Fm Radio Activism

by Christina Dunbar-Hester

106,00€ + 10% CARD

 An examination of how activists combine political advocacy and technical practice in their promotion of the emancipatory potential of local low-power FM radio.
ENGLISH

Good Science - The Ethical Choreography Of Stem Cell Research

by Charis Thompson

106,00€ + 10% CARD

 An examination of a decade and a half of political controversy, ethical debate, and scientific progress in stem cell research.
ENGLISH

Arguments That Count - Physics, Computing, And Missile Defense, 1949-2012

by Rebecca Slayton

106,00€ + 10% CARD

 How differing assessments of risk by physicists and computer scientists have influenced public debate over nuclear defense.
ENGLISH

Entangled Geographies - Empire And Technopolitics In The Global Cold War

92,75€ + 10% CARD

 Investigations into how technologies became peculiar forms of politics in an expanded geography of the Cold War.
ENGLISH

Handling Digital Brains - A Laboratory Study Of Multimodal Semiotic Interaction In The Age Of Computers

by Morana Alac

98,05€ + 10% CARD

 An analysis of how fMRI researchers actively involve their bodies--with hand movements in particular--in laboratory practice.
ENGLISH

Trading Zones And Interactional Expertise - Creating New Kinds Of Collaboration

84,80€ + 10% CARD

 A proposal for a new framework for fostering collaborations across disciplines, addressing both theory and practical applications.
ENGLISH

Everyday Engineering - An Ethnography Of Design And Innovation

66,25€ + 10% CARD

 A guide to the everyday working world of engineers, written by researchers trained in both engineering and sociology.Everyday Engineering was written to help future engineers understand what they are going to be doing in their everyday working lives, so that they can do their work more effectively and with a broader social vision. It will also give sociologists deeper insights into the sociotechnical world of engineering. The book consists of ethnographic studies in which the authors, all trained in both engineering and sociology, go into the field as participant-observers. The sites and types of engineering explored include mechanical design in manufacturing industries, instrument design, software debugging, environmental management within companies, and the implementation of a system for separating household waste.The book is organized in three parts. The first part introduces the complexity of technical practices. The second part enters the social and cultural worlds of designers to grasp their practices and motivations. The third part examines the role of writing practices and graphical representation. The epilogue uses the case studies to raise a series of questions about how objects can be taken into account in sociological analyses of human organizations.
ENGLISH

Making Parents - The Ontological Choreography Of Reproductive Technologies

by Charis Thompson

106,00€ + 10% CARD

 Assisted reproductive technology (ART) makes babies and parents at once. Drawing on science and technology studies, feminist theory, and historical and ethnographic analyses of ART clinics, Charis Thompson explores the intertwining of biological reproduction with the personal, political, and technological meanings of reproduction. She analyzes the "ontological choreography" at ART clinics—the dynamics by which technical, scientific, kinship, gender, emotional, legal, political, financial, and other matters are coordinated—using ethnographic data to address questions usually treated in the abstract. Reproductive technologies, says Thompson, are part of the increasing tendency to turn social problems into biomedical questions and can be used as a lens through which to see the resulting changes in the relations between science and society.After giving an account of the book''s disciplinary roots in science and technology studies and in feminist scholarship on reproduction, Thompson comes to the ethnographic heart of her study. She develops her concept of ontological choreography by examining ART''s normalization of "miraculous" technology (including the etiquette of technological sex); gender identity in the assigned roles of mother and father and the conservative nature of gender relations in the clinic; the naturalization of technologically assisted kinship and procreative intent; and patients'' pursuit of agency through objectification and technology. Finally, Thompson explores the economies of reproductive technologies, concluding with a speculative and polemical look at the "biomedical mode of reproduction" as a predictor of future relations between science and society.
ENGLISH

Framing Production - Technology, Culture, And Change In The British Bicycle Industry

by Paul Rosen

50,35€ + 10% CARD

 The production of bicycles in Britain and the United States recently suffered severe setbacks. The renowned American Schwinn brand was downgraded to the mass market by its new owners following bankruptcy, and Britain''s Raleigh came close to closure because of high debts and poor returns, saved only by a last-minute management buyout. In both cases, market share and credibility were lost to newer, more innovative firms, as well as to a recentering of the global bicycle industry in the Far East.This book reflects on such changes by setting them within a sociological and historical context. It focuses on the British bicycle industry in the interwar years and in the 1980s and the 1990s—periods characterized by modernization of production and of industrial organization, by changing relations among players in the industry, by new developments in labor relations, and by changes in interactions between markets and product design. In particular, it traces the fortunes of the Raleigh Cycle Company from its beginnings as an innovative young firm, through massive expansion of its products and markets and the assimilation of many of its competitors, into further innovation amid market contraction and management inertia, and finally into a phase of global restructuring that has transformed and reduced its role within the industry.The book explores the complex ways in which product design, production methods, industrial organization, and the cultures of cycling have interacted to create a succession of sociotechnical frames for the bicycle. At the same time, on an activist level, the book promotes a participatory politics of bicycle technology and a less car-centered view of personal transportation.
ENGLISH

Living In A Material World - Economic Sociology Meets Science And Technology Studies

92,75€ + 10% CARD

 Understanding the intersection of economic sociology and science and technology studies through the idea of materiality.
ENGLISH

How Users Matter - The Co-Construction Of Users And Technology

106,00€ + 10% CARD

 Users have become an integral part of technology studies. The essays in this volume look at the creative capacity of users to shape technology in all phases, from design to implementation. Using a variety of theoretical approaches, including a feminist focus on users and use (in place of the traditional emphasis on men and machines), concepts from semiotics, and the cultural studies view of consumption as a cultural activity, these essays examine what users do with technology and, in turn, what technology does to users. The contributors consider how users consume, modify, domesticate, design, reconfigure, and resist technological development—and how users are defined and transformed by technology.The essays in part I show that resistance to and non-use of a technology can be a crucial factor in the eventual modification and improvement of that technology; examples considered include the introduction of the telephone into rural America and the influence of non-users of the Internet. The essays in part II look at advocacy groups and the many kinds of users they represent, particularly in the context of health care and clinical testing. The essays in part III examine the role of users in different phases of the design, testing, and selling of technology. Included here is an enlightening account of one company''s design process for men''s and women''s shavers, which resulted in a "Ladyshave" for users assumed to be technophobes. Taken together, the essays in How Users Matter show that any understanding of users must take into consideration the multiplicity of roles they play—and that the conventional distinction between users and producers is largely artificial.
ENGLISH

Insatiable Curiosity - Innovation In A Fragile Future

by Helga Nowotny

66,25€ + 10% CARD

 Explores the strands of the often unexpected intertwining of science and technology and society.
ENGLISH

Building The Trident Network - A Study Of The Enrollment Of People, Knowledge, And Machines

by Maggie Mort

100,70€ + 10% CARD

 A sociotechnical study of production contingencies in the United Kingdom's Trident submarine and missile system.
ENGLISH

Mechanizing Proof - Computing, Risk, And Trust

by Donald Mackenzie

106,00€ + 10% CARD

 Most aspects of our private and social lives—our safety, the integrity of the financial system, the functioning of utilities and other services, and national security—now depend on computing. But how can we know that this computing is trustworthy? In Mechanizing Proof, Donald MacKenzie addresses this key issue by investigating the interrelations of computing, risk, and mathematical proof over the last half century from the perspectives of history and sociology. His discussion draws on the technical literature of computer science and artificial intelligence and on extensive interviews with participants.MacKenzie argues that our culture now contains two ideals of proof: proof as traditionally conducted by human mathematicians, and formal, mechanized proof. He describes the systems constructed by those committed to the latter ideal and the many questions those systems raise about the nature of proof. He looks at the primary social influence on the development of automated proof—the need to predict the behavior of the computer systems upon which human life and security depend—and explores the involvement of powerful organizations such as the National Security Agency. He concludes that in mechanizing proof, and in pursuing dependable computer systems, we do not obviate the need for trust in our collective human judgment.
Loading results...

View more results