Visions of STS
Visions of STS

Author: Stephen H. Cutcliffe

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 0791491129

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Visions of STS brings together the views of ten leading scholars to clarify the nature of Science, Technology, and Society Studies and point toward future developments. The interdisciplinary field of STS maps out the interconnected relationships among science, technology, and society in order to better understand both the innumerable benefits as well as problematic challenges. This book, rather than presenting science and technology as autonomous entities, analyzes each contextually as societal-mediated processes that reflect cultural, political, and economic values. It contains four basic programmatic essays that deal with technological determinism, the social constructivist view, STS and policy information, and the issue of interdisciplinarity. Visions of STS also stresses more specialized perspectives of work, education, and public policy analysis, and challenges the way STS itself is pursued. Taken together, these essays offer an exciting and unusually broad overview of STS.

Visions of Unity
Visions of Unity

Author: Yaroslav Komarovski

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2011-12-01

Total Pages: 467

ISBN-13: 1438439113

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This landmark book discusses the thought of Tibetan Buddhist thinker Shakya Chokden (1428–1507) on the two major systems of Mahāyāna Buddhism. Influential and controversial in his own day, Shakya Chokden's thought fell out of favor over time and his writings were eventually repressed, becoming available again only in the 1970s. Yet, his startling interpretations of the core areas of Buddhist thought remain valuable and well worth consideration today. Yaroslav Komarovski has used the twenty-four volumes of Shakya Chokden's collected work to provide a systematic presentation of a central aspect of his thought: a reconciliation of Yogācāra and Madhyamaka. Providing a detailed analysis of the two systems' mutual refutations of each other, Shakya Chokden argues for their fundamental compatibility and shared vision. In analyzing Shakya Chokden's ideas, Komarovski explores some of the most important issues of both traditional and modern Buddhist scholarship, including contested approaches to the nature of reality, the relationship between philosophy and contemplative practice, inter- and intrasectarian Buddhist polemics, and the nature of consciousness and mental processes.

Technology and Society
Technology and Society

Author: Deborah G. Johnson

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2008-10-17

Total Pages: 853

ISBN-13: 0262303388

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An anthology of writings by thinkers ranging from Freeman Dyson to Bruno Latour that focuses on the interconnections of technology, society, and values and how these may affect the future. Technological change does not happen in a vacuum; decisions about which technologies to develop, fund, market, and use engage ideas about values as well as calculations of costs and benefits. This anthology focuses on the interconnections of technology, society, and values. It offers writings by authorities as varied as Freeman Dyson, Laurence Lessig, Bruno Latour, and Judy Wajcman that will introduce readers to recent thinking about technology and provide them with conceptual tools, a theoretical framework, and knowledge to help understand how technology shapes society and how society shapes technology. It offers readers a new perspective on such current issues as globalization, the balance between security and privacy, environmental justice, and poverty in the developing world. The careful ordering of the selections and the editors' introductions give Technology and Society a coherence and flow that is unusual in anthologies. The book is suitable for use in undergraduate courses in STS and other disciplines. The selections begin with predictions of the future that range from forecasts of technological utopia to cautionary tales. These are followed by writings that explore the complexity of sociotechnical systems, presenting a picture of how technology and society work in step, shaping and being shaped by one another. Finally, the book goes back to considerations of the future, discussing twenty-first-century challenges that include nanotechnology, the role of citizens in technological decisions, and the technologies of human enhancement.

Visions of Tomorrow
Visions of Tomorrow

Author: Tom Easton

Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing Inc.

Published: 2010-07-08

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1602399980

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Gathers science fiction stories that accurately predicted future developments, including "The Land Iron Clads" by H.G. Wells, which foresaw tank warfare in 1903, and a tale that so closely depicted the atomic bomb in 1944 it worried the FBI.

The Nature of Cities
The Nature of Cities

Author: Jennifer S. Light

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Published: 2014-03-14

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 9781421413846

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The Nature of Cities brings together environmental and urban history to reveal how, over four decades, this ecological vision shaped the development of cities around the nation.

Beyond the Science Wars
Beyond the Science Wars

Author: Ullica Christina Olofsdotter Segerstrale

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2000-08-03

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9780791446171

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Contextualizes the "Science Wars" from interdisciplinary sociological, historical, scientific, political, and cultural perspectives.

Reframing Rights
Reframing Rights

Author: Sheila Jasanoff

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2011-07-22

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0262297787

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Investigations into the interplay of biological and legal conceptions of life, from government policies on cloning to DNA profiling by law enforcement. Legal texts have been with us since the dawn of human history. Beginning in 1953, life too became textual. The discovery of the structure of DNA made it possible to represent the basic matter of life with permutations and combinations of four letters of the alphabet, A, T, C, and G. Since then, the biological and legal conceptions of life have been in constant, mutually constitutive interplay—the former focusing on life's definition, the latter on life's entitlements. Reframing Rights argues that this period of transformative change in law and the life sciences should be considered “bioconstitutional.” Reframing Rights explores the evolving relationship of biology, biotechnology, and law through a series of national and cross-national case studies. Sheila Jasanoff maps out the conceptual territory in a substantive editorial introduction, after which the contributors offer “snapshots” of developments at the frontiers of biotechnology and the law. Chapters examine such topics as national cloning and xenotransplant policies; the politics of stem cell research in Britain, Germany, and Italy; DNA profiling and DNA databases in criminal law; clinical trials in India and the United States; the GM crop controversy in Britain; and precautionary policymaking in the European Union. These cases demonstrate changes of constitutional significance in the relations among human bodies, selves, science, and the state.

The Science of Empire
The Science of Empire

Author: Zaheer Baber

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1996-05-16

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9780791429204

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Investigates the complex social processes involved in the introduction and institutionalization of Western science in colonial India.

Dreamscapes of Modernity
Dreamscapes of Modernity

Author: Sheila Jasanoff

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-09-02

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 022627666X

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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.

digitalSTS
digitalSTS

Author: Janet Vertesi

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2019-05-07

Total Pages: 569

ISBN-13: 0691190607

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New perspectives on digital scholarship that speak to today's computational realities Scholars across the humanities, social sciences, and information sciences are grappling with how best to study virtual environments, use computational tools in their research, and engage audiences with their results. Classic work in science and technology studies (STS) has played a central role in how these fields analyze digital technologies, but many of its key examples do not speak to today’s computational realities. This groundbreaking collection brings together a world-class group of contributors to refresh the canon for contemporary digital scholarship. In twenty-five pioneering and incisive essays, this unique digital field guide offers innovative new approaches to digital scholarship, the design of digital tools and objects, and the deployment of critically grounded technologies for analysis and discovery. Contributors cover a broad range of topics, including software development, hackathons, digitized objects, diversity in the tech sector, and distributed scientific collaborations. They discuss methodological considerations of social networks and data analysis, design projects that can translate STS concepts into durable scientific work, and much more. Featuring a concise introduction by Janet Vertesi and David Ribes and accompanied by an interactive microsite, this book provides new perspectives on digital scholarship that will shape the agenda for tomorrow’s generation of STS researchers and practitioners.