Dreamscapes of Modernity

Author: Sheila Jasanoff
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022627666X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 363

Book Description
Dreamscapes of Modernity offers the first book-length treatment of sociotechnical imaginaries, a concept originated by Sheila Jasanoff and developed in close collaboration with Sang-Hyun Kim to describe how visions of scientific and technological progress carry with them implicit ideas about public purposes, collective futures, and the common good. The book presents a mix of case studies—including nuclear power in Austria, Chinese rice biotechnology, Korean stem cell research, the Indonesian Internet, US bioethics, global health, and more—to illustrate how the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries can lead to more sophisticated understandings of the national and transnational politics of science and technology. A theoretical introduction sets the stage for the contributors’ wide-ranging analyses, and a conclusion gathers and synthesizes their collective findings. The book marks a major theoretical advance for a concept that has been rapidly taken up across the social sciences and promises to become central to scholarship in science and technology studies.

States of Knowledge

Author: Sheila Jasanoff
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134328338
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Book Description
Notes on contributors Acknowledgements 1. The Idiom of Co-production Sheila Jasanoff 2. Ordering Knowledge, Ordering Society Sheila Jasanoff 3. Climate Science and the Making of a Global Political Order Clark A. Miller 4. Co-producing CITES and the African Elephant Charis Thompson 5. Knowledge and Political Order in the European Environment Agency Claire Waterton and Brian Wynne 6. Plants, Power and Development: Founding the Imperial Department of Agriculture for the West Indies, 1880-1914 William K. Storey 7. Mapping Systems and Moral Order: Constituting property in genome laboratories Stephen Hilgartner 8. Patients and Scientists in French Muscular Dystrophy Research Vololona Rabeharisoa and Michel Callon 9. Circumscribing Expertise: Membership categories in courtroom testimony Michael Lynch 10. The Science of Merit and the Merit of Science: Mental order and social order in early twentieth-century France and America John Carson 11. Mysteries of State, Mysteries of Nature: Authority, knowledge and expertise in the seventeenth century Peter Dear 12. Reconstructing Sociotechnical Order: Vannevar Bush and US science policy Michael Aaron Dennis 13. Science and the Political Imagination in Contemporary Democracies Yaron Ezrah 14. Afterword Sheila Jasanoff References Index

Misconceiving Merit

Author: Mary Blair-Loy
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226820149
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Book Description
An incisive study showing how cultural ideas of merit in academic science produce unfair and unequal outcomes. In Misconceiving Merit, sociologists Mary Blair-Loy and Erin A. Cech uncover the cultural foundations of a paradox. On one hand, academic science, engineering, and math revere meritocracy, a system that recognizes and rewards those with the greatest talent and dedication. At the same time, women and some racial and sexual minorities remain underrepresented and often feel unwelcome and devalued in STEM. How can academic science, which so highly values meritocracy and objectivity, produce these unequal outcomes? Blair-Loy and Cech studied more than five hundred STEM professors at a top research university to reveal how unequal and unfair outcomes can emerge alongside commitments to objectivity and excellence. The authors find that academic STEM harbors dominant cultural beliefs that not only perpetuate the mistreatment of scientists from underrepresented groups but hinder innovation. Underrepresented groups are often seen as less fully embodying merit compared to equally productive white and Asian heterosexual men, and the negative consequences of this misjudgment persist regardless of professors’ actual academic productivity. Misconceiving Merit is filled with insights for higher education administrators working toward greater equity as well as for scientists and engineers striving to change entrenched patterns of inequality in STEM.

The Promise of Infrastructure

Author: Nikhil Anand
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478002034
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Book Description
From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions. While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment. A School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Contributors. Nikhil Anand, Hannah Appel, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Dominic Boyer, Akhil Gupta, Penny Harvey, Brian Larkin, Christina Schwenkel, Antina von Schnitzler

The Ethics of Invention: Technology and the Human Future

Author: Sheila Jasanoff
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393253856
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
We live in a world increasingly governed by technology—but to what end? Technology rules us as much as laws do. It shapes the legal, social, and ethical environments in which we act. Every time we cross a street, drive a car, or go to the doctor, we submit to the silent power of technology. Yet, much of the time, the influence of technology on our lives goes unchallenged by citizens and our elected representatives. In The Ethics of Invention, renowned scholar Sheila Jasanoff dissects the ways in which we delegate power to technological systems and asks how we might regain control. Our embrace of novel technological pathways, Jasanoff shows, leads to a complex interplay among technology, ethics, and human rights. Inventions like pesticides or GMOs can reduce hunger but can also cause unexpected harm to people and the environment. Often, as in the case of CFCs creating a hole in the ozone layer, it takes decades before we even realize that any damage has been done. Advances in biotechnology, from GMOs to gene editing, have given us tools to tinker with life itself, leading some to worry that human dignity and even human nature are under threat. But despite many reasons for caution, we continue to march heedlessly into ethically troubled waters. As Jasanoff ranges across these and other themes, she challenges the common assumption that technology is an apolitical and amoral force. Technology, she masterfully demonstrates, can warp the meaning of democracy and citizenship unless we carefully consider how to direct its power rather than let ourselves be shaped by it. The Ethics of Invention makes a bold argument for a future in which societies work together—in open, democratic dialogue—to debate not only the perils but even more the promises of technology.

Science of Science and Reflexivity

Author: Pierre Bourdieu
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 074563060X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 144

Book Description
Adressing a range of issues and debates in the natural and social sciences, this work provides a sociological analysis of science which enables readers to understand the social mechanisms which shape scientific practice.

The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China

Author: Ling Hon Lam
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547587
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 479

Book Description
Emotion takes place. Rather than an interior state of mind in response to the outside world, emotion per se is spatial, at turns embedding us from without, transporting us somewhere else, or putting us ahead of ourselves. In this book, Ling Hon Lam gives a deeply original account of the history of emotions in Chinese literature and culture centered on the idea of emotion as space, which the Chinese call “emotion-realm” (qingjing). Lam traces how the emotion-realm underwent significant transformations from the dreamscape to theatricality in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century China. Whereas medieval dreamscapes delivered the subject into one illusory mood after another, early modern theatricality turned the dreamer into a spectator who is no longer falling through endless oneiric layers but pausing in front of the dream. Through the lens of this genealogy of emotion-realms, Lam remaps the Chinese histories of morals, theater, and knowledge production, which converge at the emergence of sympathy, redefined as the dissonance among the dimensions of the emotion-realm pertaining to theatricality.The book challenges the conventional reading of Chinese literature as premised on interior subjectivity, examines historical changes in the spatial logic of performance through media and theater archaeologies, and ultimately uncovers the different trajectories that brought China and the West to the convergence point of theatricality marked by self-deception and mutual misreading. A major rethinking of key terms in Chinese culture from a comparative perspective, The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China develops a new critical vocabulary to conceptualize history and existence.

Cultural Boundaries of Science

Author: Thomas F. Gieryn
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226292618
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 422

Book Description
This text argues that an explanation for the cultural authority of science lies where scientific claims leave laboratories and enter boardrooms and living rooms. Here, one uses "maps" to decide who to believe - cultural maps demarcating "science" from pseudoscience, ideology, faith, or nonsense.

Groovy Science

Author: David Kaiser
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022637307X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Book Description
Did the Woodstock generation reject science—or re-create it? An “enthralling” study of a unique period in scientific history (New Scientist). Our general image of the youth of the late 1960s and early 1970s is one of hostility to things like missiles and mainframes and plastics—and an enthusiasm for alternative spirituality and getting “back to nature.” But this enlightening collection reveals that the stereotype is overly simplistic. In fact, there were diverse ways in which the era’s countercultures expressed enthusiasm for and involved themselves in science—of a certain type. Boomers and hippies sought a science that was both small-scale and big-picture, as exemplified by the annual workshops on quantum physics at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, or Timothy Leary’s championing of space exploration as the ultimate “high.” Groovy Science explores the experimentation and eclecticism that marked countercultural science and technology during one of the most colorful periods of American history. “Demonstrate[s] that people and groups strongly ensconced in the counterculture also embraced science, albeit in untraditional and creative ways.”—Science “Each essay is a case history on how the hippies repurposed science and made it cool. For the academic historian, Groovy Science establishes the ‘deep mark on American culture’ made by the countercultural innovators. For the non-historian, the book reads as if it were infected by the hippies’ democratic intent: no jargon, few convoluted sentences, clear arguments and a sense of delight.”—Nature “In the late 1960s and 1970s, the mind-expanding modus operandi of the counterculture spread into the realm of science, and sh-t got wonderfully weird. Neurophysiologist John Lilly tried to talk with dolphins. Physicist Peter Phillips launched a parapsychology lab at Washington University. Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill became an evangelist for space colonies. Groovy Science is a new book of essays about this heady time.”—Boing Boing

Dreamscapes of Modernity

Author: Sheila Jasanoff
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022627652X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 363

Book Description
"Dreamscapes of Modernity" introduces and develops the concept of "sociotechnical imaginaries," demonstrating how it helps explain the divergent ways in which states and societies conceptualize futures achievable through and supportive of advances in science and technology. The book s case studieswhich range over health security, Apartheid, rice biotechnology, Indonesian activism, and moreillustrate how different imaginations of social life and order are created in concert with imaginations of the goals, priorities, benefits, and risks of science and technologyat scales ranging from national to global. The concept of sociotechnical imaginaries adds to the theoretical repertoire of the social sciences, and in so doing extends work dealing with collective beliefs about social order that until now has not been adequately attentive to the central role of science and technology in shaping human possibilities. Through their varied disciplinary training and their willingness to join a common conversation, the contributors to this volume reveal the concept s reach from science and technology studies to neighboring fields such as anthropology, history, history of science and technology, law, sociology, and public policy. "