TU Darmstadt, Philosophy

Website: Cheryce von Xylander

Her Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service

Pictures of hospital architecture meet pictures of mentally sick people gathered together within the walls of a particular asylum. The origins of the pictures are varied but they might be drawn from the same stock, the Bettmann Archive. The psychiatric hospital at issue is the Illenau asylum as portrayed in architectural drawings. Paintings of and by inmates of this influential clinic figure too. Cheryce von Xylander, science historian, presents her research on each topic, the history of psychiatry and the history of the Bettmann Archive. Her historical focus in both projects is on technical but also sociological issues. How does the component of aesthetics play a role in the healing process for mentally sick people? How do these architectural designs contribute to healing aesthetics? In 1995 Corbis, a mega picture stock library, purchased the Bettmann Archive. The pictures were digitalized and now they are sold online. The originals are stored in a salt mine, inaccessible to people who might wish to examine them. Once a popular place to meet in downtown New York, the Bettmann Archive is now dispanded. Yet, its aesthetic influence lingers on. The presented project has been treated under the following titles:
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•1998: A Fool's Paradise: The Psychiatry of „Gemüth“ in a Biedermeier Asylum. Diss. University of Chicago, Ann Arbor, UMI.
•2007: „© Bettmann/CORBIS“ – Techniken der Sichtbarmachung von historischem Bildmaterial. In: Konstruieren Kommunizieren Präsentieren. Bilder von Wissenschaft und Technik. Hrsg. Alexander Gall, Wallstein Verlag.

Her Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service

TU Darmstadt, Political Science

Website: Peter Niesen

His Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service (Starts at minute 23:00)

Can there be such a thing as cosmopolitanism in one country? This question is the key to Peter Niesen's current research project in a joint venture with David Owen from the University of Southampton (UK). One of their common aims is to establish a systematic alternative to what is now seen as cosmo- politanism. While David Owen is interested in border crossing participation and electoral rights across borders, Peter Niesen is working out border crossing communication rights. That is what they claim a universal membership within single states instead of a world state. The question of participating whether in one single world state or through a citizen membership within one single state is the borderline Peter Niesen wants to draw. Conversely, contemporary authors like David Held and Ottfried Höffe are thinking about a citizenship in one single world state. But Peter Niesen and his fellow instead believe in a systematic alternative. By drawing on 18th century authors like Kant and Bentham, they are stressing an idea of a virtually universal membership plus an activity within all single states. The empirical focus is on phenomena like political influences in single states or attempts to afford political participation across borders. Accordingly the project would be bound to a normative focus. That would be to build a normative notion of transnational freedom of expression simply to find in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19: Everyone got the right of free communication, regardless of frontiers.
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His Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service (Starts at minute 23:00)

Virginia Tech, STS

Website: Saul Halfon

His Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service

According to his opinion, “the ways that the technical, in sort of a domain, produces domination rationalities in ways of knowing and representations within particular institutional settings,” Saul Halfon presents a wide variety of different STS approaches. One of his global aims is to uncover voices and perspectives that would be hidden in science and technology controversies through technical practices and representations. Also, he aims to uncover logics that would produce particular types of representations, validations, and justifications for action. Within his book ‘The Cairo Consensus,’ he looks at policy institutions and the field of democracy. In particular, he examines how they are mutually repre- senting both, nature and people through technical practices in order to produce a moral, technically accurate, and overall legitimate approach to international population policy. Saul Halfon is also the codirector of the The- ater Workshops in Science and Technology Society, TWIST. The idea of this workshop is to use the theater to put voice into a conflict and to create dialogue with each other in a way that makes criticism more difficult to ignore. Within TWIST, STS takes placein a dramatic setting, fully narrated, giving full voice, and full stories. One current project he is working on, called Cultural Politics of Food Technoscience, is about nutrition promo- tion, and deals mainly with public knowledge, eating cultures, and food politics on nutrition. He is also looking at science based micro nutrition, which some have labeled “Nutritionism.” Saul Halfon has also worked out STS projects about politics of genetically modified foods, and about controversies over completitive uranium.
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•TWIST: www.twist.sts.vt.edu
•2006: The Cairo Consensus: Demographic Surveys, Women's Empowerment, and Regime Change. Lexington Books.

His Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service

Virginia Tech, STS

Website: Richard Hirsh

His Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service (Starts at minute 32:00)

Richard Hirsh’s main STS focus is on contemporary energy systems from the 1960s to present. He holds an M.A. in physics and is a member of the VT STS department, working in history. Also, Richard Hirsh published two books on electric power systems in the U.S. in which he examines ways technology is used in the power economy. He also discusses how environmental concerns were established, and how they became mainstream issues. He is interested in acceptance of technology within energy systems, similar cultural concerns, and the question, “What could be a beautiful technological system?” Not at least cross national studies are important for his projects.
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His Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service (Starts at minute 32:00)

Virginia Tech, STS

Website: Richard Burian

His Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service (Starts at minute 59:00)

Richard Burian presents three current topics which are in the STS context: 1) The conceptual change in science, esp. biology, 2) The interdisciplinary con- flicts, and 3) Technological changes of biology. He also deals with the work that is the base for these three topics, his history of biology, including the interaction among embryo biology and development biology, evolution, and theories that were later called genetics. To sum it up, Richard Burian’s major concerns are about discipline formation. His time bar is going from Darwin forward. His works on the history of genetics in France were collaborated by Jean Guillaume and Doris Allen, with whom he has written eight papers so far. Questions for the differences that are ceiling between disciplinary formation in different places are sort of in his arena. Also the epistemological evaluations of claims which are bounded rather to a national account and their institutional connection keep him busy.
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His Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service (Starts at minute 59:00)

TU Darmstadt, History

Website: Mikael Hård

His Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service

In the period between 1965 and 1974, one million apartments were built in Sweden, a country with about seven million inhabitants at that time. The project was dubbed the “Million Project.” Technique historian Mikael Hård is working on this in his current research: Standardizing the Nation: The Swedish People’s Home as a Consumption Junction. The main aspects of that research are standardization of technology and normalization of the environment. Furthermore, one of his lesser points is that IKEA has to be seen as a part of the Million Project. But his focus is rather coming out of political history, not business history. The level of standardization Hård calls so high, and you have to imagine a realization of the plan to build 1,000,000 apartments, that you yet nowadays would have absolutely no idea in which Swedish city you were if you would drive around through areas built in the sixties and seventies, without the knowledge about the city’s name. And this plan would have been realized among a triad of private, cooperative and public actors. Of course with the Swedish social democratic government on top, this collective level would be substantial, following Hård, for what came to be the Swedish folkhem model, the Swedish welfare, with its procurement, initiatives and contracts. With aims of creating a good life, Hård says, they would have instead created a system that allows no freedom for the people who live in it. Approaches about modification of the homes in use would have impacted the norms with effects such as the number of forks and knives a household needs and, of course, on all sizes of the interior. These changes would have been preceded with interviews and investigations of the users. But much earlier, in the late 40s, the Research Institute of the Home was created and started with what became the Million Project.
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His Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Servic

TU Darmstadt, German Linguistics

Website: Nina Janich

Her Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service

Nina Janich’s project is close to epistemology of science but very focused in linguistics. She is the head of the Scientific Communication Research, SciCoRe, which is kind of an interdisciplinary think tank at TU Darmstadt. With a linguistics background from culture of language (Sprachkultur) and scientific communication, but also language of advertisement (business communi- cation), her research focus here is on transdisciplinarity and non-knowledge and uncertainty in texts. Nina Janich is figuring out positions and affordances in interdisciplinary research frameworks. There, a main problem would be one of translations from the public to science or vice versa, especially in financing questions for research projects. She also discusses translations between scientists from different disciplines. In the non-knowledge and uncertainty in texts topic, Nina Janich is mainly separating actants in scientists, journalists and non-experts with the journalists as mediators bet- ween the two others. She says: “The known unknown is like a desiderate of research, where we know that we want to know something. And the unknown known is that we have a known that is not accepted or not established. And we have the unknown unknown, and there is the question if we can talk about it, because we don’t know what we don’t know and how important it is what we don’t know: When we don’t know something, how do we talk about it?”
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SciCoRe: www.linglit.tu-darmstadt.de/index.php?id=scicore (in German)

Her Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service

Virginia Tech, STS

Website: Barbara Allen

Her Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service (Starts at minute 32:30)

“I’m interested in finding out about how citizens behave with science,” Barbara Allen says about her project in this STSconnect series. Her compara- tive study of “Cancer Alley,” a chemical region in Louisiana, U.S., and the Porto Marghera Chemical Region in Italy, is a very interview based one. This qualitative research approach offers a complementing contrast to the heuris- tic empirics about the mentioned regions with measurements of toxins and statistics of diseases. Barbara Allen uses photos of the areas to complete this confrontation between witness’ stories and empirical facts: “I think that pictures tell great stories.” That is what she calls a “civic epistemology.” Accordingly, her questions concern a New Political Sociology of Science (NPSS), what Sheila Jasanoff, a professor for STS at Harvard, would describe with “ways in which the public is a participant in the constitution of knowledge.” Also, Barbara Allen is asking for the questions, “How can you connect those case studies to a policy making?” and according to the cross-national comparison, “How do the different arenas in a NPSS scope might look in different countries?” She also mentions that she is interested in integrating a German case study into her project and claims that these three different countries would have typical mentalities to constitute knowledge. The mindsets were contentious in the U.S., network-based in Italy and consensus seeking in Germany.
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Her Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service (Starts at minute 32:30)

Virginia Tech, STS

Website: Daniel Breslau

His Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service

Daniel Breslau brings together the most important components of “The political economy of market design: economics and the politics of electricity markets in the U.S.” These components are economic sociology, jurisprudence on elect- ricity markets and policy. He says: “The study places the constitutive role of economics within a political-economic understanding of market formation.” Like Barbara Allen he emphasizes the usage of interviews, but focuses on persons responsible and policy makers or economical actants rather than with citizens.
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• 2011: Social Knowledge in the Making. Edited by Charles Camic, Neil Gross, and Michele Lamon, University of Chicago Press. (In press.)

His Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service

TU Darmstadt, Sociology

Website: Rudi Schmiede

His Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service

“Castells speaks of a new period of development of society and the economy. The economy he calls an informational capitalism. The society he calls a net- work society. That’s the tradition in which we are working. And we operate with this model of informalization and together with globalization and what we call financialization,” Rudi Schmiede draws the line from Manuel Castells, the famous Spanish sociologist, about his work and one of his think tanks, KAIROS, Transfer and telos. KAIROS stands for Kritical Analysis of the InfoRmatization Of Society: “A more sociological, theoretical part. Looking at the society as a whole with research projects on knowledge and the deal with it (informalization).” Transfer deals with the question, “Is the industrialization in the IT industry a sort of new paradigm for modern developing countries?” In Transfer, a certain research in the industrial sphere is provided, also carrying with it a practical orientation. It is a very interdisciplinary STS topic, running “together with mechanical engineers and some other institutes in the role of trust in the context of virtual contextualization of engineers in the car industry.” telos, last but not least, stands for technology for electronic libraries and the organization of the semantic web. It is a group mainly active in the digital library field. “Digital libraries deal with the question how to make available, how to form and how to distribute scientific information. Scientific information is our work surrounding. So, digital libraries, research and shaping of technology is dealing with scientific working knowledge, with scientific working envi- ronment.” Rudi Schmiede and his team also developed a web research system on web sources of sociology (www.sozionet.org (offline)). Among these three missions Rudi Schmiede and his teams are following certain ideas of labor rights and real life situations of IT employees with the aim to “enhance conditions of personal autonomy, of subjective freedom.”
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His Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service

Virginia Tech, STS

Website: Ann Laberge

Her Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service (Starts at minute 38:30)

Ann Laberge criticizes the vast increase of industrial food in the U.S., and asks the question, “How Americans got so fat so fast?” Her lecture is partitioned in four parts: a) putting it on, b) taking it off, c) keeping it off, and d) settling. a: When presenting the topic of putting weight on. the significant citation above is related to an article from the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1999. Ann Laberge argues with this article against the opinion that Americans just eat too much. But: “What has happened about the 1980s is a vast increase in what I would call industrial food.“ b: When discussing taking weight off, she harshly criticizes the current dominant health discourse which she wants to rub because to her it isn’t appropriate: “The dominant health discourse basically maintains that through diet and exercise people can lose weight.” But, despite an appropriate maintenance of starving and exercise programs she believes, the industrial food would be too hard to resist and brings all lost pounds back. c: With regard to keeping weight off, Ann Laberge says: “The main reason why so many fail in the U.S. is what I call Big Food, rather than individual will power which is of course the last most generalized approach. […] Once you are on industrial junk, you are on.” A second variation of overweight processes she explains under the fourth topic, settling. d: It’s the scenario to settle with a partner in the young age and to develop a different vision of life when you are older. But to be fat over years and to reduce weight from one moment to the other because a person decided for that would bear serious side effects. This last point seems to be not just about the habits but rather, their combination with Big Food, just like Eddie Harris describes it in a satirical song, ‘That is Why You’re Overweight.’
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Her Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service (Starts at minute 38:30)

Virginia Tech, STS

Website: Matthew Wisnioski

His Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service (Starts at minute 1:08:30)

Issues of the relationship between art and technology are Matthew Wisnio- ski’s focus on the example of the Center Beam installation from MIT, an art object first exhibited on the documenta 6 in Kassel (Germany) in 1977. What Matthew Wisnioski describes here is a part of the history of MIT and particu- larly its pivot figure, Gyorgy Kepes. This fomer Bauhaus artist and co-deve- loper of the New Bauhaus in Chicago was after Wisnioski “the sort of guru for creating an institution aimed at the unity of all elements of ‘empire.’ According to the unity of sciences and art he was trying to recognize the power of weapons and to figure out a common ground.” Matthew Wisnioski is interested in both, the impact of art and design classes at MIT and the political structures within MIT authorities.
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His Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service (Starts at minute 1:08:30)

Virginia Tech, STS

Website: Jannet Abbate

Her Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service

During an evacuation of the building due to a snow storm alert in Falls Church, Janet Abbate gave her talk about “Reimagining Computing: Gender in the His- tory of Programming and Computer Science.” She has been a programmer by herself together with many women, and it was suspicious to her that there had never been any women mentioned in the history of computing. Janet Ab- bate is now developing studies on the structures of the IT field, and opportunities for women in computing, rather than to bring up those women who are probably inequitably slandered in the history of computing: “I want to show how gender was implicated in practices in computing that are not traditionally seen as gender- ed. In terms of labor I am mainly interested in two phenomena. One is the social construction of technical skills. […] The second labor issue I look at is gender implications – interacting in a career and having children.”
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•www.womenincomputing.net

•2000: Inventing the Internet. The MIT Press.

Her Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service

Virginia Tech, STS

Website: Gary Downey

His Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service (Starts at minute 28:45)

“I view on myself as a practitioner of Big STS,” is the kick off to Gary Dow- ney’s talk which deals with his project issue on, “What is engineering studies for? Dominant practices and scapable scholarships.” As Big STS he under- stands “a link and an inheritance of moments in critique, practices of critique and practices of critical participation.” STS research would have been boun- ded historically on critic and the refusion model. But to him this academic type of research would rely on theorized and normalized calibrations of normality. Thus he would emphasize STS works between practical critique and practical participation. But, according to him, “critical participation is not always accepted or desirable by academics.” In his talk he relates engineering to rather social projects. Engineering in these social projects would have to be a target for critique in any kind of way (historical, cultural, political, philosophical, organizational, ethical, rhetorical, etc.), but should be kept practical. Furthermore, he presents his own critical and analytical work, built on ethnography: “I am interested in how images in engineering become dominant. And, how dominant practices operate, for example the dominant image.” Another current project of his is a “Critique on normative holism in engineering.”
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•www.globalhub.org
•www.moranclaypool.com

His Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service (Starts at minute 28:45)

Virginia Tech, STS

Website: Sonja Schmid

Her Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service (Starts at minute 58:25)

Sonja Schmid has research interests in “history and sociology of Soviet and post-Soviet science and technology (especially energy technologies); Energy policy and international technology transfer (Cold War and current, especially in Europe/FSU); Popularization of, public engagement with science and tech- nology; Social studies of risk, risk communication.” She is an expert of the Chernobyl accident, and presents her book on ‘The Chernobyl Trial’. Her ap- proach is to analyze how the disaster was embedded in broader historical pro- cesses. She even interviewed veterans of Chernobyl and is drawing on any kind of documents, monographs, memoirs, etc. However, she is not going to define research in the much elaborated spectrum of What really happened. Additionally, Sonja Schmid is giving a short view on her second current project about The Energy policy in CEE. She looks on the culture (institutions and organizations) of energy from the bottom up in the CEE, and also how the Soviet technology impacts in the EU.
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Her Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service (Starts at minute 58:25)