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Technoscientific Imaginaries

Conversations, Profiles, and Memoirs

What is it like to be a scientist at the end of the twentieth century? How have shifts in power and in assumptions about knowledge affected scientific practice? Who are the people behind the new technologies, and how do they address the difficult moral and professional issues during a time of global change? Techno-Scientific Imaginaries explores these and other important questions at the approach of the new millennium.

In these penetrating essays, twenty-four distinguished contributors from a broad range of fields present the voices of the scientists themselves—through interviews, conversations, and memoirs. We hear from Lithuanian physicists who discuss science after Communism and their own fantasies about what Western science is; a Japanese-American woman struggling with her ambivalence over designing nuclear weapons; political activists in India who examine relations among science, environmental politics, and government ideology in the aftermath of the Bhopal disaster; and many others, including biologists, physicians, corporate researchers, and scientists working with virtual reality and other cutting-edge technologies.

The contributors to this volume are Mario Biagioli, Maria E. Carson, Gary Lee Downey, Joseph Dumit, Michael M. J. Fischer, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Hugh Gusterson, Diana L. L. Hill, James Holston, Herbert C. Hoover, Jr., Gudrun Klein, Leszek Koczanowicz, Irene Kuter, Kim Laughlin, Rita Linggood, George E. Marcus, Kathryn Milun, Livia Polanyi, Christopher Pound, Simon Powell, Paul Rabinow, Kathleen Stewart, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, and Sharon Traweek.

Table of Contents

Introduction by George E. Marcus
1: Cornucopions of History: A Memoir of Science and the Politics of Private Lives
Livia Polanyi
2: Eye(I)ing the Sciences and Their Signifiers (Language, Tropes, Autobiographers): InterViewing for a Cultural Studies of Science and Technology
Michael M. J. Fischer
3: Twenty-first-Century PET: Looking for Mind and Morality through the Eye of Technology
Joseph Dumit
4: Medicine on the Edge: Conversations with Oncologists
Mary-Jo Del Vecchio Good, Irene Kuter, Simon Powell, Herbert C. Hoover, Jr., Maria E. Carson, Rita Linggood.
5: Reflections on Fieldwork in Alameda
Paul Rabinow
6: Innocence and Awakening: Cyberdammerung at the Ashibe Research Laboratory
Allucquere Rosanne Stone
7: The World of Industry-University-Government: Reimagining R&D as America 197
Gary Lee Downey
8: Trust but Verify: Science and Policy Negotiating Nuclear Testing Treaties - Interviews with Roger Eugene Hill
Diana L. L. Hill
9: Becoming a Weapons Scientist
Hugh Gusterson
10: Rehabilitating Science, Imagining "Bhopal"
Kim Laughlin
11: Of Beets and Radishes: Desovietizing Lithuanian Science
Kathryn Milun(aitis)
12: Andrzej Staruszkiewicz, Physicist
Leszek Koczanowicz
13: Bachigai (Out of Place) in Ibaraki: Tsukuba Science City, Japan
Sharon Traweek
14: Bitter Faiths
Kathleen Stewart
15: Confabulating Jurassic Science
Mario Biagioli
16: Insurgent Urbanism: Interactive Architecture and a Dialogue with Craig Hodgetts
James Holston
17: Kith and Kin in Borderlands
Gudrun Klein
18: Imagining In-formation: The Complex Disconnections of Computer Networks527
Christopher Pound
Contributors
Index

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