Browsing by Subject "Science studies"
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Item Science and the culture of American childhood, 1900-1980(2012-12) Onion, Rebecca Stiles; Davis, Janet M.; Mickenberg, Julia L.; Meikle, Jeffrey; Hunt, Bruce; Hartigan, JohnIn American culture of the twentieth century, there has evolved a persistent popular association between the personal qualities of children and of scientists. Efforts to encourage children to get “hooked on science” have consistently noted this affinity, as Americans have ascribed curiosity, wonder, and delight in discovery to their children. Responding to debates within cultural history, childhood studies, and the history of science, this dissertation argues that tracking the ways that this cultural commonplace has been created, and showing how it has depended upon inequalities of gender, race, and class, can help us understand intermingled attitudes of awe and distrust toward science in public culture. In five chapters, the dissertation traces efforts to bring science into children’s popular culture across the twentieth century, showing how these efforts constitute a very visible form of public science. In Chapter One, located in the Progressive Era, the American Museum of Natural History and the Brooklyn Children’s Museum offer comparative case studies that show how “science” was perceived as a civilizing or empowering force in children’s lives, depending on their social class. In the interwar period, children’s culture taught that posing questions about the natural and technological worlds was a practice that cemented a white male child’s position as the vanguard of evolution. Chapter Two examines the proliferation of children’s non-fiction and encyclopedias, and Chapter Three shows how chemistry sets created images of modern boyhood. In the postwar era, young scientists began to appear as an endangered species, as science promoters saw popular culture as a threat to the kind of individuality and focus necessary for serious inquiry. Chapters Four and Five show how promoters of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search and Robert Heinlein, author of a series of young-adult science fiction novels, sought to create alternative youth cultures hospitable to science. By examining the images of young inquirers that result from these popularization efforts, I argue that these images helped adults come to terms with their own relationships to innovation, while naturalizing the perception of science as an intellectual project of privilege.Item Unruly energies : provocations of renewable energy development in a northern German village(2014-08) Carlson, Jennifer D.; Stewart, Kathleen, 1953-This dissertation asks how inhabitants of a sustainable village are living out Germany’s transition from nuclear to renewable energy. The sustainable village remains a locus of optimistic attachments for renewable energy advocates, who argue that a decentralized power grid will enable people to more directly participate in power production and politics as “energy citizens.” Yet while rural areas have become sites of speculation, innovation and growth, few rural-dwellers are enfranchised in (or profiting from) the technoscientific projects in their midst. I draw upon 13 months of fieldwork in a northern German village transformed by wind turbines, photovoltaics and biofuels to consider why, asking what kinds of public life flourish in the absence of democratic engagement with renewable technologies. This ethnography engages the village as multiply constituted across domains of everyday life, including transit, farming, waste management, domestic life, and social gatherings. I found that environmental policy, everyday practices, and the area’s material histories combined to produce ontologies—senses of what exists—that circumscribe citizen participation in the energy sector, affording more formal opportunities to men than to women, and privileging farmers’ interests in plans that impacted the larger community. These findings illuminate how many villagers become ambivalent toward the project of the energy transition and disenfranchised from its implementation. Yet many who were excluded from formal participation also engaged with renewable technologies as they sensed out their worlds, using tropes of sustainable energy and technoscientific materials to place themselves in this emerging energy polity. Their everyday worldmaking brimmed with what I call unruly energies, structures of feeling that registered more as affects than as discourse. In the village, these took form as sensory disturbances, disquiet among neighbors, technoscientific optimism and skepticism toward environmental policy. These affective modes of attention, investment and participation were vital aspects of public life that shaped the transition’s unfolding. They exceeded liberal models of renewable energy citizenship, which presume that socioeconomic interest and environmental commitment are universal among citizens. In this way, unruly energies compel more nuanced attention to the multiple, contingent, site-specific ways in which citizenship takes form in the making of eco-capitalist energy infrastructure.