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 inside the walls of a singular edifice. Architectural project drafts describe the psychiatric hospital Illenau; paintings depicting the inmates speak tomes. The origins of said pictures are variegated. Similar images culminate as stock photography in a collection that has come to be known as the Bettmann Archive. Cheryce von Xylander, a science historian, has presented two projects, one from the annals of psychiatry, another on the historicity of pictorial search. Both projects dwell on technical as well as sociological details relating them, insistently, to the situated emergent history. What is the role of aesthetics in healing mentally sick people? How do curative aesthetics bear upon architectural design? Corbis, a multinational purveyor of stock images, purchased the Bettmann Archive in 1995. In theory, the entire collection was to be digitalized for online commercial distribution. In practice, the originals wound up in a salt mine, beyond the reach of casual readers. Once a popular location in downtown New York, now a fraction of the Bettmann Archive traces to a url. The disappearance of historical practice – be it psychiatric therapy or pictorial navigation – leaves manifest traces in the manifold of cognition.
(DS)

•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 within one country? This is the key question guiding Peter Niesen's current research project, a joint venture with David Owen from the University of Southampton (UK). One of their aims is to establish a systematic alternative to the common conception of cosmopolitanism. While David Owen is interested in border-crossing participation and electoral rights across borders, Peter Niesen concentrates on border-crossing communication rights. They advocate universal membership within single states instead of privileging the world state. Participation tends to break down a world state versus single state dichotomy. Contemporary authors like David Held and Ottfried Höffe conceive of citizenship in single world state terms. But Niesen and Owen believe that a systematic alternative is viable. By drawing on 18th century authors like Kant and Bentham, they urge universal membership and political participation across states. The empirical focus is on phenomena like political influence within single states as opposed to political participation across state borders. The project’s declared aim is to add the notion of transnational freedom as an amendment to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19: Everyone got the right of free communication, regardless of frontiers.
(DS)

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

Virginia Tech, STS

Website: Saul Halfon

His Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service

Saul Halfon presents a wide variety of STS approaches concerned with “the ways that the technical domain produces domination rationalities in ways of knowing and representations within particular institutional settings”. His central aim is to uncover voices and perspectives otherwise hidden in the routine practice of science and technology. Specifically, he seeks to uncover logics that would produce particular types of representations, validations, and justifications for action. His book The Cairo Consensus looks at policy institutions in relation to the practice of democracy. The study traces how notions of “nature” and “human agency” are given a technical translation that serves to legitimate international population policy. Saul Halfon is also the co-director of the Theater Workshops in Science and Technology Society, TWIST. The idea of this workshop is to use theater to articulate conflict and to show the role of dialogue in conflict resolution. TWIST explores STS-issues in a dramatic setting that involves narration, incorporates minority viewpoints and illustrates the politics of story-telling. A current project entitled Cultural Politics of Food Technoscience, is about nutrition promotion and deals mainly with public knowledge, eating cultures, and food politics on nutrition. Halfon is also investigating science based micro nutrition, so-called “Nutritionism.” He has completed studies on the politics of public education over genetically modified foods as well as the controversy over enriched uranium.
(DS)

•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 is a historian with an M.A. in physics and a member of the STS department at Virginia Tech. He has published two books on electric power systems in the U.S. that examine the role of technology in the market of power supply. He traces the rise of the environmental debate and how it became a mainstream issue. The focus of his studies lies on technology acceptance with respect to energy systems and related cultural concerns. Hirsh draws on comparative national studies to explore the question of “what could be a beautiful technological system” might look like.
(DS)

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 focuses on three current topics in STS studies: 1) conceptual change in science, esp. biology; 2) interdisciplinary conflicts; and 3) the changing role of technology in biology. He historicizes these three topics by tracing the disciplinary formation of biology through the interaction of embryo biology and developmental biology, evolutionary theory, and early work in genetics. In sum, Richard Burian’s major concerns are about discipline formation. His time bar begins with Darwin. In an on-going collaboration with Jean Guillaume and Doris Allen, he has written eight papers on the history of genetics in France. He asks why disciplinary formations vary in different places and how national and institutional interests play out in the formation of epistemological constraints.
(DS)

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.” Mikael Hård, a historian of technology, is working on this in his current research Standardizing the Nation: The Swedish People’s Home as a Consumption Junction. Of central concern to his project are standardization of technology and normalization of the environment; he also argues that IKEA has to be seen as a part of the Million Project. His approach draws on the methods of political history, not business history. The planned apartments were so highly standardized that, without knowing the city’s name, it was impossible to distinguish one Swedish city built in the sixties and seventies from the next. The plan was to be realized in a triad of private, corporate and public sponsorship. It also informed what would become the Swedish “folkhem” model, the Swedish welfare system, with its modes of procurement, social initiatives and contracting methods. Though the program’s aim was to promote social equality, it actually proved a hindrance to personal freedom. Modifications to the size and arrangement of homes, which were planned down to the number of forks and knives needed in a household, were not viable. Interviews and demographic statistics defined the users. Already in the late 40s, the Research Institute of the Home had been created to inaugurate a scheme that would become the Million Project.
(DS)

His Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Servic

TU Darmstadt, German Linguistics

Website: Nina Janich

Her Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service

Nina Janich’s project concerns the epistemology of science with a focus on linguistics. She is the head of the Scientific Communication Research, SciCoRe, an interdisciplinary research team at TU Darmstadt. With her background in linguistic cultures (“Sprachkultur”) and science communication, but also in marketing and business communication, she maps out transdisciplinarity and non-knowledge and uncertainty in texts. She seeks to identify new positions and affordances in interdisciplinary research frameworks. A major issue is the problem of translation from the public sphere to the realms of science and vice versa, which has significant implications for research funding. She also studies translation amongst scientists from different disciplines. Her project non-knowledge and uncertainty in texts examines communication patterns between scientists, journalists and non-experts and argues that journalists serve as mediators between the other two parties. But nobody, it seems, can cover all of the bases. In her words, “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?”
(DS)

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 comparative study of “Cancer Alley,” a chemical region in Louisiana, U.S., and the Porto Marghera Chemical Region in Italy, is based on interviews. Qualitative research methods complement the empirical heuristics available on toxins and disease statistics in the region under investigation. Allen also uses photos of the affected areas to supplement her fusion of witness’ testimonials with empirical facts: “I think that pictures tell great stories.” This procedure allows her to unearth what she calls “civic epistemology.” The questions she asks frame a New Political Sociology of Science (NPSS), what Sheila Jasanoff, professor for STS at Harvard, would describe as “ways in which the public is a participant in the constitution of knowledge.” In keeping with her commitment to engaged scholarship, Allen has extended her inquiry to include the process of political representation in a cross-national perspective. “How to connect these case studies to policy making?” and “How does this connection play out in different countries?” She is interested in integrating a German case study into her project and argues that these three countries exemplify three modes of knowledge constitution: contrarian in the U.S., network-based in Italy and consensus-seeking in Germany.
(DS)

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 examines “the political economy of market design: economics and the politics of electricity markets in the U.S.” His study focuses on three major areas of activity: economic sociology, jurisdiction on electricity markets and the process of policy-making. In drawing out dynamic interactions between these spheres of engagement, Breslau brings transparency and accountability to market-driven phenomena. In his words: “The study places the constitutive role of economics within a political-economic understanding of market formation.” Like Barbara Allen, he emphasizes the use of interviews, but focuses on leadership structures and policy makers, that is to say influential economic players rather than average citizens.
(DS)

• 2011: Social Knowledge in the Making. Edited by Charles Camic, Neil Gross, and Michele Lamon, University of Chicago 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 network 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 a parallel between the work of Manuel Castells, the famous Spanish sociologist, and his research teams: KAIROS, Transfer and Telos. KAIROS stands for Kritical Analysis of the InfoRmatization Of Society: it studies “society as a whole” and processes of knowledge transmission, “informalization.” ‘Transfer’ asks to what extent “industrialization in the IT industry” can serve as “a new paradigm in modern developing countries”? Transfer cooperates with the industrial sector and has a decidedly practical orientation. This interdisciplinary STS venture cooperates “with mechanical engineers at various institutes to address the role of trust in the virtual contextualization of engineering in the car industry.” The third research team, ‘Telos’ stands for technology for electronic libraries and the organization of the semantic web. This group is 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 environment.” Rudi Schmiede and his team also developed a web research system on web sources of sociology (www.sozionet.org (offline)). By means of these three projects, Rudi Schmiede and his teams seek to promote labor rights and the working conditions of IT employees, the aim being to “enhance conditions of personal autonomy, of subjective freedom.”
(DS)

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. Her question is “How Americans grew so fat so fast?” Her lecture proceeds in four steps: a) putting it on, b) taking it off, c) keeping it off, and d) settling. The above question is borrowed from an 1999 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The point is not that Americans just eat too much. Rather, “What happened in the 1980s is a vast increase in what I would call industrial food.“ Laberge criticizes the dominant health discourse for mainting “that through diet and exercise people can lose weight.” This inappropriate advice fails to take into account that industrial foods, which are too readily available and too hard to resist, will bring all of the lost pounds back. “The main reason why so many fail to lose weight in the U.S. is what I call Big Food, rather than individual will power” and, she adds, “once you are on industrial junk, you are on.” The only real alternative, she says, is “to settle with a partner at a young age and to develop a different way of life, a plan for growing old together”. People can manage their eating habits in couples and families.
(DS)

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)

The relationship between art and technology is the focus of Matthew Wisnioski’s study. The example he presents is the Center Beam installation from MIT, an art object first exhibited at the documenta 6 in Kassel (Germany) in 1977. What Matthew Wisnioski describes here concerns the history of MIT and particularly its pivot figure, Gyorgy Kepes. This fomer Bauhaus artist and co-developer of the New Bauhaus in Chicago was, according to 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 traces this ambitious project in its impact on art and design classes and at the level of university politics at MIT.
(DS)

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

Virginia Tech, STS

Website: Jannet Abbate

Her Talk: VT Video/Broadcast Service

Janet Abbate gave her talk on “Reimagining Computing: Gender in the History of Programming and Computer Science” during a snow storm alert in Falls Church. Since she has been a programmer herself and knows many women who write code, she finds it suspicious that there is no mention of women in the history of computing. Janet Abbate now works on creating opportunities for women in computing. Rather than remembering forgotten in the history of computing, she wants “to show how gender was implicated in computational practices not traditionally seen as gendered”. In terms of labor, she is mainly interested in two phenomena, namely “the social construction of technical skills” and the gender implications of “interacting in a career and having children”.
(DS)

•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 Downey’s talk “What is engineering studies for? Dominant practices and scalable scholarship.” As Big STS he understands “a link and an inheritance of moments in critique, practices of critique and practices of critical participation.” Historically, STS research has relied on criticism and the rejection model. But to him this methodological bias relies too much on theorized and naturalized calibrations of normality. His approach to STS operates between practical critique and practical participation. This is not uncontroversial since, as he concedes, “critical participation is not always accepted or desirable in academia.” Engineering is a practice and, though subject to every kind of critique (historical, cultural, political, philosophical, organizational, ethical, rhetorical, etc.), should be kept practical. His own critical and analytical work draws on ethnographical methods: “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.”
(DS)

•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 wide-ranging 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 technology; Social studies of risk, risk communication.” She has studied the Chernobyl accident and published a book entitled The Chernobyl Trial. Her approach situates the disaster in broader historical process. Although she interviewed veterans of Chernobyl and draws on a vast array of documents, monographs, memoirs, etc., she does not claim to have produced a definitive account of What really happened. Her second project on The Energy policy in CEE examines energy cultures (institutions and organizations) from the bottom up and investigates how Soviet technology impacts the EU.
(DS)

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