http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/7912 Search the Channel search http://dspace.mit.edu/simple-search http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/39577 Title: Empire of energy : environment, geopolitics, and American technology before the age of oil <br/> <br/>Authors: Shulman, Peter Adam <br/> <br/>Abstract: This dissertation asks how the United States physically built its global empire. Between 1840 and 1930, empire building involved the establishment of a network of naval bases and coaling stations. By focusing on energy, I reconceptualize the American overseas empire as neither inevitable nor geographically predetermined. I trace how coal shaped U.S. expansion, how this expansion influenced ideas about national security, and how these security concerns affected the global environment. Coal reveals continuities in American foreign relations that link overseas expansion to responses to the introduction of steam power into ocean travel. As the Navy sought coal, it progressively assembled the familiar contours of America's global reach. The dissertation addresses both global and local history. It shows how policy makers before the Civil War demonstrated tremendous creativity in initiating geological investigations, diplomatic arrangements, and commercial agreements in foreign territories. Between the Civil War and 1898, these approaches gradually gave way to a more singular effort by the Navy to control strategic ports around the world. Soon, coal was so central to the Navy that coaling strategy and technology formed a foundation for the education of elite officers at the Naval War College, where its study shaped the planning for future wars. Attention to Americans in Borneo, Japan, the Isthmus of ... <br/> <br/>Description: Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, June 2007.; "May 2007."; Includes bibliographical references (p. 298-318). Sun, 29 Oct 2006 22:58:59 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/40394 Title: The Soviet Farm Complex : industrial agriculture in a Socialist context, 1945-1965 <br/> <br/>Authors: Smith, Jenny Leigh <br/> <br/>Abstract: "The Soviet Farm Complex" is a history of food, farming and the environment in the postwar Soviet Union. It tells the story of how different technical and institutional authorities created an industrial Soviet countryside in the generation after World War II. Beyond the leadership of the Soviet state, international trade relationships, new technologies, unusual scientific cultures, stubborn environmental realities and human shortcomings played important roles in shaping the progress of agricultural change. Four historical fields inform this project: the history of technology, agricultural history, Soviet history and environmental history. Each of the five chapters addresses a different time, place and theme in the history of the Soviet countryside, providing a close-up view of the most important aspects of postwar rural change. Soviet agricultural reform has often been interpreted as a failure: a textbook case of poor central planning and destructive, high-modernist logic on the part of the Soviet state. In fact, this study shows that the collective farming system as a whole was not particularly dysfunctional, nor was it doomed to failure simply by virtue of being centrally planned.; (cont.) Much like the capitalist farms with which it competed, Soviet farms struggled to overcome enormous environmental, economic and social barriers to success. Similarly to capitalist systems, the Soviet Union's farming complexes succeeded in some places, while failing spectacularly in others. The history of Soviet agricultural change is not a history of faceless state agents imposing change from a great distance. Rather, it is made up of many different kinds of people working at many different jobs. Agricultural scientists and bureaucrats performed research, wrote reports, created policies and issued orders, sometimes against their better judgment and sometimes with the full force of their beliefs behind them. On the ground, agricultural laborers tried to follow the orders that originated from these higher echelons although workers and their work often experienced periods of great transition. In the universities, teachers endeavored to instruct their students in modern and efficient methods of producing food, and in every city and village the powerful tool of Soviet propaganda strived to persuade citizens of the value and logic of all aspects of agricultural modernization.; (cont.) By examining the connections between state authority, agricultural modernization and environmental change, this dissertation shows that the industrialization of the Soviet countryside was a dynamic and convoluted process, affected far more by the seemingly trivial histories of genetic variation, animal nutrition and weather than by the machinations of powerful politicians or the mismanagement of inept bureaucrats. <br/> <br/>Description: Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2006.; MIT Dewey Library copy issued in pages.; Includes bibliographical references (leaves 190-200). Sat, 29 Oct 2005 22:58:59 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/40393 Title: In sync over distance : flexible coordination through communication in geographically distributed software development work <br/> <br/>Authors: Im, Hyun Gyung <br/> <br/>Abstract: In this dissertation, I examine how the members of a distributed software development team (LC) operating entirely virtually for four and half years developed useful social practices to collaborate across time and space. Based on various communication data from LC, I analyze the communicative structuring of distributed work in members' daily practices. I show that "temporal flexibility," often mentioned as key advantage of virtual organizing, is socially accomplished through "boundary management," as members negotiate different temporal boundaries and learn and adapt to others' temporal patterns. Second, I identify dynamic coordination practices in LC that interweave multiple modes of communication and coordination in evolving work contexts, and demonstrate how these coordination practices facilitate temporal flexibility in LC. Finally, I analyze how members used the asynchronous communication medium of email to coordinate their tasks, using the notion of genre and genre system.; (cont.) My analysis suggests that communicating, coordinating, and temporal structuring are not distinctive activities, but are closely bound up with each other in a local practice; time, communication, and coordination are dynamically reconfigured over time, reflecting evolving work, social relations, and local contexts. Key Words: distribute teams, virtual teams, virtual organizing, technology-mediated communication, temporal flexibility, coordinating, communicating, temporal structuring, social practices, communicative structuring, genre and genre system, reconfiguration of time, communication, and coordination. <br/> <br/>Description: Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2006.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 209-219). Sat, 29 Oct 2005 22:58:59 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/39579 Title: Medicating race : heart disease and durable preoccupations with difference <br/> <br/>Authors: Pollock, Anne, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology <br/> <br/>Abstract: This dissertation is an examination of intersections of race, pharmaceuticals, and heart disease over the course of the 20th century and today. Each of these parts has had a dynamic history, and when they are invoked together they provide a terrain for arguments about interventions in health and in justice in the present. An enduring aspect of discourses of heart disease over the past century has been articulating connections between characterizations of the modem American way of life and of heart disease. In that process, heart disease research and practice has participated in differentiating Americans, especially by race. This dissertation uses heart disease categories and the drugs prescribed for them as windows into racialized medicine. The chapters are organized in a way that is roughly chronological, beginning with the emergence of cardiology as a specialty just before World War II and the landmark longitudinal Framingham Heart Study that began shortly thereafter. A central chapter tracks the emergence and mobilization of African American hypertension as a disease category since the 1960s.; (cont.) Two final chapters attend to current racial invocations of two pharmaceuticals: thiazide and BiDil. Using methods from critical historiography of race, anthropology, and science studies, this thesis provides an account of race in medicine with interdisciplinary relevance. By attending to continuities and discontinuities over the period, this thesis illustrates that race in heart disease research and practice has been a durable preoccupation. Racialized medicine has used epistemologically eclectic notions of race, drawing variously on heterogeneous aspects that are both material and semiotic. This underlying ambiguity is central to the productivity of the recorded category of race. American practices of medicating race have also been mediating it, arbitrating and intervening on new and renewed articulations of inclusion and difference in democratic and racialized American ways of life. <br/> <br/>Description: Thesis (Ph. D. in History and Social Study of Science and Technology (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2007.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 320-350). Sun, 29 Oct 2006 22:58:59 GMT