Science and Technology Studies Commons^™

“Fly Buddha To Mars”: The Co-Production Between Religiosity And Science & Technology At Longquan Monastery, Beijing, Han Zhang, Junxi Qian, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article attempts at a re-theorization towards the symbiosis and co-production of religion, modern science and technology, inspired by theoretical thinking within geographies of religion and science and technology studies (STS). Recent scholarship on the geographies of religion has made substantive advancements in discerning the convergence of religion and secular modernity. However, science and technology (S&T), as an essential condition and driving force of secular modernity, remain peripheral to this ongoing theoretical agenda, yet to be fully incorporated into the analytical framework about the co-constitution of religion and secular modernity, arguably because of the entrench divide between the rationalism of …

Dataset: Combined Coded Assessments Of Sts Science Cafes (2017-2019), Karen A. Rader, Cynthia Gibbs

STS in Science Cafes

No abstract provided.

Research Tool: Sts Assessment Survey Instrument, Karen A. Rader, Cynthia Gibbs

STS in Science Cafes

No abstract provided.

Research Protocol: Focus Group/Needs Assessment (Afam Community), Karen A. Rader, Cynthia Gibbs

STS in Science Cafes

No abstract provided.

How Then Shall We Work: Should Christian Engineers Pursue Productivity?, Kayt Frisch, Michael Foster, Justin R. Vander Werff

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

Technology critics like Neal Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death) and Nicholas Carr (The Shallows) have long held forth that our technology shapes us. In recent years, philosophers (including some that have presented at past Christian Engineering Conferences) have explored the value-ladenness of engineering design and how the biases in our technology affect us on a daily basis. A “hidden in plain sight” technology that we interact with everyday is our approach to getting things done, or our “productivity system.” While everyone has a productivity system, that is, a way of organizing, prioritizing, and executing tasks, some have thought more explicitly …

Exploring Ai, Faith, And The Future Through A Faculty Research Group, Michael Paulus, Carlos Arias, Mike Langford, Phillip Baker

SPU Works

The impact of artificial intelligence on our world requires engagement from Christian scholars in every discipline. This presentation describes the organization of a faculty research group (FRG) to explore AI from various disciplinary perspectives and with Christian faith. This FRG increased knowledge of AI, stimulated interdisciplinary and theological reflection, and cultivated collaboration and scholarship. The FRG has an essay collection, AI, Faith, and the Future, forthcoming from Pickwick Publications. FRG members will discuss the impact of the FRG on members’ scholarship, as well as research opportunities related to AI.

Islamic Meditation: Mindfulness Apps For Muslims In The Digital Spiritual Marketplace, Megan Adamson Sijapati

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

This chapter describes and analyzes three digital sites that offer guided meditations curated by and for Muslims: Sakeenah, Sabr, and Halaqah. My analysis offers thick descriptions of these mobile apps, which first appeared in the online “meditation marketplace” in 2020 and 2021, and identifies resonant themes and questions that I believe are fruitful for the study of religion in digital landscapes and for mapping the shifting contours of lived Islam. Today’s industry of online meditation and mindfulness products is highly profitable, as meditation—and, more broadly, “mindfulness”—has in recent decades been embraced and normalized in contemporary, cosmopolitan life as a key …

La Musique Dans Les Cultures Tech. La Synthèse Modulaire En Temps De Covid-19, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Depuis 1996, la synthèse modulaire matérielle est passée d’une pratique artisanale de fabrication d’instruments de niche soutenue par un petit nombre de musiciens, à un phénomène transnational, une véritable culture tech. Malgré cet engouement, elle n’a pas donné naissance à de nouveaux genres musicaux populaires, et il n’est pas certain que la « musique », quelle que soit sa définition, soit ce qui rassemble les amateurs de synthèse modulaire. Ce texte a deux objectifs : tout d’abord, il présente les résultats d’une recherche en cours menée en ligne et dans plusieurs pays concernant le rôle des objets technologiques dans la …

Undersea Cables: The Ultimate Geopolitical Chokepoint, Bert Chapman

FORCES Initiative: Strategy, Security, and Social Systems

This work provides historical and contemporary overviews of this critical geopolitical problem, describes the policy actors addressing this in the U.S. and selected other countries, and provides maps and information on many undersea cable work routes. These cables are chokepoints with one dictionary defining chokepoints as “a strategic narrow route providing passage through or to another region."

Hope And Longing In Las Vegas, Michael Paulus

SPU Works

This paper brings together three interpreters of the earthly city and the apocalyptic city—Jacques Ellul, Hunter S. Thompson, and John of the Apocalypse—to reflect on the future of our technological society. Focusing on expectations about artificial intelligence, it explores the future imagined at the 2019 re:MARS conference, “Amazon’s global AI event for Machine Learning, Automation, Robotics, and Space,” and the global stress test of these expectations a year later during the COVID-19 pandemic. What can we learn from the negative prophecies of Ellul’s The Meaning of the City (1970) and Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey …

Fear And Loathing In The Technological City, Michael Paulus

SPU Works

This presentation brings together three interpreters of the city—Jacques Ellul, Hunter S. Thompson, and John of the Apocalypse—to reflect on the future of our technological society. It contrasts rejections of the city, found in Ellul’s The Meaning of the City (1970) and Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), with an affirmation of the technological city found in the Apocalypse of John.

Pseudo-Science And ‘Fake’ News ‘Inventing’ Epidemics And The Police State, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

A Method For Space Archaeology Research: The International Space Station Archaeological Project, Justin St. P. Walsh, Alice C. Gorman

Art Faculty Articles and Research

How does a ‘space culture’ emerge and evolve, and how can archaeologists study such a phenomenon? The International Space Station Archaeological Project seeks to analyse the social and cultural context of an assemblage relating to the human presence in space. Drawing on concepts from contemporary archaeology, the project pursues a unique perspective beyond sociological or ethnographical approaches. Semiotic analysis of material culture and proxemic analysis of embodied space can be achieved using NASA's archives of documentation, images, video and audio media. Here, the authors set out a method for the study of this evidence. Understanding how individuals and groups use …

Imagining The Posdigital Church, Michael Paulus

SPU Works

This essay focuses on the ongoing need and opportunity for church leaders to continue the process of digital transformation and imagine new forms of the post-pandemic church.

Mapping The Light Fantastic At Newgrange, Frank Prendergast, Clare Tuffy, John Lalor, Claire Breen, Sinéad Gargan

Articles

THE WORLD HERITAGE PROPERTY of Brú na Bóinne attracts thousands of visitors from Ireland and around the globe, many drawn by the remarkable winter solstice phenomenon, when the rising sun’s rays illuminate the burial chamber. During 2020 it became clear that public health measures to combat the global pandemic were going to preclude visitor access to the chamber of the Great Mound of Newgrange, including during the annual winter solstice celebrations. When the government agencies OPW and NMS discussed how to manage Newgrange and the solstice during the restrictions, Clare Tuffy, Manager of Visitor Services at Brú na Bóinne, suggested …

The Law Of Black Mirror - Syllabus, Yafit Lev-Aretz, Nizan Packin

Open Educational Resources

Using episodes from the show Black Mirror as a study tool - a show that features tales that explore techno-paranoia - the course analyzes legal and policy considerations of futuristic or hypothetical case studies. The case studies tap into the collective unease about the modern world and bring up a variety of fascinating key philosophical, legal, and economic-based questions.

Forging Our Future: A Review Of The Synthetic Age, Jeff Ploegstra

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"Part of Preston’s argument is for a profound improvement in scientific fluency in the population, but it should also be for a stronger behavioral response as well."

Posting about ­­­­­­­­the book The Synthetic Age from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

https://inallthings.org/forging-our-future-a-review-of-the-synthetic-age/

Agency And Contemporary Recording Production, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Recording production is a complex, multistep, typically collaborative process that entails a shifting set of individuals inhabiting changing roles within spaces that house consider­ able amounts of specialized technology. As these roles and technologies feature promi­ nently in the aesthetics of Anglophone and Francophone popular music, they have been studied within such milieus for the longest period. This scholarship tends to understand the creative act as either the result of a prominent individual or something determined by the technologies used within studios. However, recent ethnomusicological scholarship has shown it is much more difficult to clearly situate agency within recording production, …

Recording Studios Since 1970, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Like many other specialty, purpose-built spaces, we tend to think of recording studios in instrumental terms, meaning that the space is defined in relation to the nominal type of work that the space is instrumental towards. While audio recordings have been made in spaces since 1877, not all of these spaces tend to be regarded as recording studios, partly since so many recordings were made in environments designed for other types of work; indeed, much of the first seventy years of US and UK recorded music history transpired at radio stations, concert halls and lightly treated mixed-use commercial spaces (e.g. …

Data And Identity: Notes Toward A Theology Of The Digitally Enhanced Self, Michael Paulus

SPU Works

In the HBO-BBC miniseries "Years and Years," a teenager named Bethany (!) comes out as transhuman and tells her parents she wants to “live forever as information ... [to] be data!” As information about us increasingly takes the form of digital data, we are all of us becoming data. Indeed, so much of our attention and agency is engaged with digital information in digital environments that the philosopher Luciano Floridi describes us as “inforgs” living “onlife” in an “infosphere.” Through nearly constant and ubiquitous patterns of digital interactions with human and artificial agents, we are creating digitally extended and enhanced …

Transhumanism (Dot) Mil: A Bibliometric Analysis Of Technoprogressive Terms In Military Publications, K. Durwood Evans

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Has transhumanism influenced military thinking? Previous work found that transhumanist terms did not appear widely in military publications. The present work analyzes and improves on previous content analysis of transhumanist terms in military literature using the tools of library and information studies.

Artificial Intelligence And The Apocalyptic Imagination: The Ends Of Divine, Natural, And Artificial Agency, Michael Paulus

SPU Works

New information and communication technologies (ICTs) are reshaping our lives and the environments in which we live to such an extent that philosopher Luciano Floridi claims we are living through an information revolution. ICTs are changing our self-understanding, how we relate to each other, and how we understand our role in the world. At the center of this revolution is the advent of auto­mated information processing and intelligent systems.These technologies of artificial intelligence (AI) raise questions about data collection, algorithmic agency, and the future of every dimension of life. They also inspire a range of hopes and fears. Some AI …

Wrack Lines Volume 19, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2019, Nancy Balcom, Syma Ebbin, David Gregorio, Richard Telford, Judy Benson

Wrack Lines

Issue theme is: "Making Connections: As the Climate Changes, People and Nature Intertwine in New Ways." Articles include: "As More Roads Become Rivers, Communities Search for Solutions;" "Solving an Engineering Conundrum: As Coastal Homes Get Elevated, New Research Looks at Whether Vulnerability to Wind Damage Is Increasing;" "Along the Coast, Residents Consider How to Heed Sandy's Warning of What's to Come;" "All Rivers, All Lives Run to the Sea," about the intersection of waterways and the world of nature writer Edwin Way Teale; and "Crosscurrents: Connecticut Sea Grant's Retrospective Exhibition Makes Waves," about reaching new audiences and building bridges with …

The Pedagogy Of Design And Technology At Xavier University Of Louisiana, New Orleans, Shayna Tova Blum

Faculty and Staff Publications

Abstract. Xavier University of Louisiana (XULA) is a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) university located in New Orleans, Louisiana. As a Historically Black University (HBCU), the university serves a diverse community of students in which many are first-generation, college graduates. Students enrolled in Design courses at XULA are studying in Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Art programs and majoring in subjects such as Computer Science, Physics, Mass Communication, Art, Business, and Science. The interdisciplinary student environment offers a unique opportunity for collaboration and peer learning, whereby students are able to share diverse perspectives on a topic by relating …

A Framework For Digital Wisdom In Higher Education, Michael Paulus

SPU Works

Institutions of higher education have a crucial role and responsibility at this moment of technological change to form people who will flourish in our so-called digital age. The speed with which digital information and communication technologies have permeated our lives has left little time for critical reflection on how we may intentionally integrate them into our lives. Regardless of when we were born or the depth of our technological expertise, we are all of us digitally naïve. Individually and collectively, we are still learning how to use new and emerging digital technologies well and wisely. This essay presents a framework …

From The City To The Cloud: Charles Williams’S Image Of The City As An Affirmation Of Artificial Intelligence, Michael Paulus

SPU Works

A number of Christian intellectuals who lived through the “catastrophic” twentieth century had a deep distrust of “technological innovation.” C. S. Lewis lamented the impact of technology on education, Dorothy L. Sayers lamented the impact of technology on community, and J. R. R. Tolkien lamented the impact of technology on the environment. Jacques Ellul saw technology as a human rejection of God’s work. For Ellul, this was the meaning of the city: from its primordial origins through its apocalyptic end, the city was a “counter-creation”—a technological negation of God’s Edenic creation.Charles Williams stands out from among his contemporaries in his …

Enhancing Your Intelligence Agency Information Resource Iq: Pt. 4: National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (Ngia), National Intelligence University (Niu), And National Reconnaissance Office (Nro), Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

Webinar presentation on publicly accessible information resources produced by the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGIA), National Intelligence University (NIU), and National Reconnaissance Office. Places significant emphasis on missions of these agencies, their historical accomplishments, coverage of their educational activity, and information on the technologies they have used and are currently using to fulfill their institutional objectives.

A Mixed Method Study Of Prospective Teachers' Epistemic Beliefs And Web Evaluation Strategies Concerning Hoax Websites, Jennifer Coccaro-Pons

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Teachers need to be equipped with the tools necessary to evaluate content on the Internet and determine if it is a credible source, or a hoax website since they are expected to instruct and prepare students on how to evaluate the sites which is now a relevant phenomenon. The purpose of the mixed‑method study was to obtain an understanding of the web evaluation strategies of prospective teachers regarding the evaluation of hoax websites and how their epistemic beliefs may influence their evaluation. Another aspect of this study was to find out what outcomes resulted from providing guidance, or not to …

Declining Versus Increasing Access To American Aviation Technology: Syria And Saudi Arabia In The 20th Century, Andrea L. Stanton

Religious Studies: Faculty Scholarship

This article uses Syria and Saudi Arabia as contrasting examples of how different Arab states interacted with United States aviation technology, involving aviation technology companies, airline cor-porations, and government officials as they worked to develop civil and military aviation capabilities after World War II. It consid-ers the role played by airline companies like TWA, the impact of the shift from military to commercial aviation technology among companies like Boeing, and the fallout from regional political developments like the Iranian Revolution. These factors all placed varying constraints on the two countries’ ability to draw upon American sources for airplanes and other …

What Drives Consumers In China To Buy Clothing Online? Application Of The Technology Acceptance Model, Zhenqian Wei, Min-Young Lee, Hong Shen

Retailing and Tourism Management Faculty Publications

An enormous number of Internet users have made China a profitable e-commerce marketplace, and clothing is one of the most frequently purchased items. This study explores the predictors of consumers’ motivation to buy clothing online in China by extending the technology acceptance model. Data were collected via an online questionnaire, resulting in 504 returned responses. The results indicate that perceived usefulness has a significant effect on consumers’ intention to buy clothing online; however, no direct relationship between perceived ease of use and buying intention was found. Furthermore, perceived convenience, perceived money saving, and perceived time-saving can explain why consumers perceive …