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Insiders and outsiders : nuclear arms control experts in Cold War America
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014)
This dissertation presents a history of the community of nuclear arms control experts in the United States during the middle and later years of the Cold War, the age of thermonuclear ballistic missiles. Arms control experts ...
Institutes for innovation : the emergence of academic-industrial cooperation and narratives of progress in the early 20th century
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014)
Early 20th century America is a critical context for understanding industrial innovation. Departing from a focus on innovation itself as manifested through the creation of new products and consumer opportunities, this ...
Highway madness! : politics and citizen participation in postwar U.S. traffic safety technology and policy
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017)
Modern U.S. traffic safety policy is largely guided by three overarching principles that have influenced governments, industry, and community and citizen activists since the 1940s. The terms, education, engineering, and ...
Bodies at war : National Security in American controversies over animal & human experimentation from WWI to the War on Terror
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018)
The rhetoric and apparatus of national security have played critical roles in American controversies over animal and human experimentation from the dawn of the Twentieth Century to today's "War on Terror." Drawing on ...
Doing Dutch Wax cloth : practice, politics, and 'the new Africa'
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016)
This dissertation examines how Africa's place in the world is negotiated in different forms of material engagement with Dutch Wax cloth--designing, advertising, selling, buying, and tailoring-along the cloth's trajectory ...
Afterlives of extinction : the politics of display in the modern United States
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2019)
Long extinct animals have a powerful hold on the American popular imagination. Dinosaurs, in particular, have been iconic and pervasive representatives of a planetary past for much of the twentieth century. While natural ...
Transnational biopolitics and family-making in secrecy : an ethnography of reproductive travel from Turkey to Northern Cyprus
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2019)
This dissertation is an ethnographic study of reproductive travel between Turkey and Northern Cyprus. Based on interviews and observations primarily carried out in a private In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) clinic in Northern ...
The subjects of modernism : mathematics, art, and the politics of value in twentieth-century United States
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2019)
My dissertation illuminates the status of mathematical knowledge in relation to other intellectual domains and racialized social forms-particularly American Orientalism-in the twentieth-century United States. Observers and ...
Project Apollo, Cold War diplomacy and the American framing of global interdependence
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014)
This dissertation examines the distinctive and critical role that space exploration played in American foreign relations and national image making in the 1960s. Proposed by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, Project Apollo ...
Rigging the world : 3D modeling and the seduction of the real
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014)
Evidence from history, archaeology, and the social sciences suggests that making models of the world has anchored our understanding of it since the earliest days. From models of deities, dwellings and weapons to molecules ...