Dreamscapes Of Modernity

Download or read book Dreamscapes of Modernity written by Sheila Jasanoff and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-09-02 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book States of Knowledge written by Sheila Jasanoff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-07-31 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book Misconceiving Merit written by Mary Blair-Loy and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-06-16 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Promise of Infrastructure written by Nikhil Anand and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-16 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book Dreamscapes of Modernity written by Sheila Jasanoff and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-09-02 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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. "

Download or read book Science of Science and Reflexivity written by Pierre Bourdieu and published by Polity. This book was released on 2004 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Ethics of Invention: Technology and the Human Future written by Sheila Jasanoff and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.