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Articles 1 - 30 of 81
Full-Text Articles in Science and Technology Studies
The Drivers Of Academic Novelty In Digital Capitalism: Job Insecurity, Mental Illness And Time Poverty, Adalberto Fernandes
The Drivers Of Academic Novelty In Digital Capitalism: Job Insecurity, Mental Illness And Time Poverty, Adalberto Fernandes
Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis
The present-day digital capitalist academy increases novel academic results by leveraging factors such as precarious academic employment, time poverty, and mental illness. This paradigm reveals a confluence that turns seemingly negative aspects into productive elements. The consequence of this hypothesis is that by enhancing work, time and mental health conditions, there may be a reduction in the number of novelties, with an enhancement of academic's role as producers of truth.
Making-To-Be: Documents, Facta, And Material-Discursive Agency, Elliott Hauser
Making-To-Be: Documents, Facta, And Material-Discursive Agency, Elliott Hauser
Proceedings from the Document Academy
This paper presents the performative analysis of agency within and surrounding documents as a path towards uniting the otherwise incompatible insights of both meaningcentric and materialcentric approaches. I contrast the terms agentical, providing agency, and agentic, possessing agency, to help clarify the apparent incompatibilities of prior approaches. I argue that a relational conception of agency, wherein the agentical/agentic distinction is blurred, preserves important virtues of both meaning and materialcentric approaches to documents. This paves the way for a unified materialdiscursive account of documents and a cure for document studies’ inherited duality malady. Extending prior work on capta (Drucker, 2011) and …
Competing Visions Of Fundamental Global Change: Comparative Book Review Of Rethinking Humanity By Seba & Arbib, Cristian Ziliberberg
Competing Visions Of Fundamental Global Change: Comparative Book Review Of Rethinking Humanity By Seba & Arbib, Cristian Ziliberberg
Markets, Globalization & Development Review
No abstract provided.
Debris Of Progress: A Political Ethnography Of Critical Infrastructure, Ethan Tupelo
Debris Of Progress: A Political Ethnography Of Critical Infrastructure, Ethan Tupelo
Doctoral Dissertations
In this dissertation, I advance a political ethnography of critical infrastructure to better understand terminal capitalism, in which the waste products of commodification and resource depletion are destroying the ecological systems that support life. My object of study is the massive disjuncture between individual knowledge and intention, and these catastrophic collective planetary outcomes. Theoretically, I develop critical infrastructure theory to diagnose these destructive structures. By “infrastructure,” I mean systems of material and discursive flows fundamental to sedentary human organization, connecting local actions with global systems. Such infrastructure is “critical” in three senses: A) denoting the most important forms of infrastructure …
Weathering The Storm: Navigating Urban Ecologies Of Communication In Times Of Crisis, Austin Hestdalen
Weathering The Storm: Navigating Urban Ecologies Of Communication In Times Of Crisis, Austin Hestdalen
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This project explores cities as urban ecologies of communication in which crises emerge and are given significance within the dialogic relations cultivated among public actors attempting to make a living, together, within the shared historical-cultural contexts of everyday life. To describe cities as urban ecologies of communication is to describe them in terms of urban communication and its interdisciplinary foundations in the study of rhetoric, philosophy, planning, policy, architecture, sociology, geography, and media. The first chapter introduces the challenges of urban risk and crisis management within the complex ecologies of communication constituted by cities and reviews how ‘risk’ and ‘crisis’ …
Public Goods From Private Data: An Effectiveness And Justification Dilemma For Digital Contact Tracing, Andrew Buzzell
Public Goods From Private Data: An Effectiveness And Justification Dilemma For Digital Contact Tracing, Andrew Buzzell
The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique
Debate about the adoption of digital contact tracing (DCT) apps to control the spread of COVID-19 has focussed on risks to individual privacy. This emphasis reveals significant challenges to ethical deployment of DCT, but generates constraints which undermine justification to implement DCT. It would be a mistake to view this result solely as the successful operation of ethical foresight analysis, preventing deployment of potentially harmful technology. Privacy-centric analysis treats data as private property, frames the relationship between individuals and governments as adversarial, entrenches technology platforms as gatekeepers, and supports a conception of emergency public health authority as limited by individual …
Transdisciplinary Environmental Work: An Evaluation Of Transdisciplinarity In The Field Of Environmental Science And Its Relevance To South Carolina Conservation Efforts In Lake Wateree And The Catawba Indian Reservation, Olivia Mn Shugart
Senior Theses
Transdisciplinarity describes the integration of knowledge and exchange of ideas across diverse academic disciplines, public stakeholders, and decision-makers. In this paper, I discuss the relevance of transdisciplinarity to the environmental field and offer ways in which its principles could be employed to enhance current South Carolina conservation efforts. I advocate for transdisciplinary work through analyzing existing discourse on the value of transdisciplinary research to the environmental field, and I present some of the challenges associated with this mass integration of knowledge. Finally, I describe three models of transdisciplinary research that have been proposed by scholars to address some of these …
Pseudo-Science And ‘Fake’ News ‘Inventing’ Epidemics And The Police State, Babette Babich
Pseudo-Science And ‘Fake’ News ‘Inventing’ Epidemics And The Police State, Babette Babich
Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections
No abstract provided.
Afterlives Of Discovery: Speculative Geographies In The Colombian Political Landscape, Heidi A. Rhodes
Afterlives Of Discovery: Speculative Geographies In The Colombian Political Landscape, Heidi A. Rhodes
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation considers how the temporal remains of the Age of Discovery and its doctrine persist in a racial-geographical ranking of human and non-human, terrestrial and planetary life and worth. Across this work, I interpret a series of historical moments and their objects of speculative geographic cultural production: a state mapping program, a painting, a biomedical project, a de-monumenting protest action. As repositories of codified belief and repertoires of Discovery’s political and affective modes of racialized domination, I read these materials from the Colombian archives of coloniality and liberalism to illuminate their implications for Colombia’s national becoming as a liberal …
Pandemic, Human Precarity And Post-Pandemic Metaverses, Tracy Harwood
Pandemic, Human Precarity And Post-Pandemic Metaverses, Tracy Harwood
Markets, Globalization & Development Review
With the global COVID-19 pandemic and its continuing impacts, we have reached a nexus which places new emphasis on our understanding of ourselves and our relationship with others – other nations, other species, other worlds. A critical question is: Does this mean that our transition into the posthuman is complete? It is therefore with some interest that this Dialogue contribution approaches the review of Francesca Ferrando’s book (2019) titled Philosophical Posthumanism. Prior to and after the detailed review of the book, this Dialogue essay reflects on the precarity induced by the pandemic and possible socio-technological ways out of the current …
The Internet-Extended Mind: The Psychological Ramifications And Philosophical Implications Of Cognitive Offloading, Gloria Choi
The Internet-Extended Mind: The Psychological Ramifications And Philosophical Implications Of Cognitive Offloading, Gloria Choi
Scripps Senior Theses
In this thesis, I explore the internet-extended mind through both philosophical and psychological lenses in order to investigate the questions “To what extent is the mind extended onto the internet and, more generally, outside our bodies?” and “How will an increasingly internet-extended brain change the ways in which humans communicate, remember, and behave?”. First, I introduce the idea of a mind that extends out into the world, instead of lying solely in the brain. Then, I outline existing research that introduces the challenges and implications of an internet-extended mind in an ever-changing internet landscape. Next, I discuss how the internet …
Automating Autism: Disability, Discourse, And Artificial Intelligence, Os Keyes
Automating Autism: Disability, Discourse, And Artificial Intelligence, Os Keyes
The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems shift to interact with new domains and populations, so does AI ethics: a relatively nascent subdiscipline that frequently concerns itself with questions of “fairness” and “accountability.” This fairness-centred approach has been criticized for (amongst other things) lacking the ability to address discursive, rather than distributional, injustices. In this paper I simultaneously validate these concerns, and work to correct the relative silence of both conventional and critical AI ethicists around disability, by exploring the narratives deployed by AI researchers in discussing and designing systems around autism. Demonstrating that these narratives frequently perpetuate a dangerously dehumanizing model …
“How Could You Even Ask That?”: Moral Considerability, Uncertainty And Vulnerability In Social Robotics, Alexis Elder
“How Could You Even Ask That?”: Moral Considerability, Uncertainty And Vulnerability In Social Robotics, Alexis Elder
The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique
When it comes to social robotics (robots that engage human social responses via “eyes” and other facial features, voice-based natural-language interactions, and even evocative movements), ethicists, particularly in European and North American traditions, are divided over whether and why they might be morally considerable. Some argue that moral considerability is based on internal psychological states like consciousness and sentience, and debate about thresholds of such features sufficient for ethical consideration, a move sometimes criticized for being overly dualistic in its framing of mind versus body. Others, meanwhile, focus on the effects of these robots on human beings, arguing that psychological …
Autonomous Vehicles And The Ethical Tension Between Occupant And Non-Occupant Safety, Jason Borenstein, Joseph Herkert, Keith Miller
Autonomous Vehicles And The Ethical Tension Between Occupant And Non-Occupant Safety, Jason Borenstein, Joseph Herkert, Keith Miller
The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique
Given that the creation and deployment of autonomous vehicles is likely to continue, it is important to explore the ethical responsibilities of designers, manufacturers, operators, and regulators of the technology. We specifically focus on the ethical responsibilities surrounding autonomous vehicles that these stakeholders have to protect the safety of non-occupants, meaning individuals who are around the vehicles while they are operating. The term “non-occupants” includes, but is not limited to, pedestrians and cyclists. We are particularly interested in how to assign moral responsibility for the safety of non-occupants when autonomous vehicles are deployed in a complex, land-based transportation system.
The Law Of Black Mirror - Syllabus, Yafit Lev-Aretz, Nizan Packin
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.
Human Supremacy As Posthuman Risk, Daniel Estrada
Human Supremacy As Posthuman Risk, Daniel Estrada
The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique
Human supremacy is the widely held view that human interests ought to be privileged over other interests as a matter of ethics and public policy. Posthumanism is the historical situation characterized by a critical reevaluation of anthropocentrist theory and practice. This paper draws on animal studies, critical posthumanism, and the critique of ideal theory in Charles Mills and Serene Khader to address the appeal to human supremacist rhetoric in AI ethics and policy discussions, particularly in the work of Joanna Bryson. This analysis identifies a specific risk posed by human supremacist policy in a posthuman context, namely the classification of …
Kuasa Atas Ruang Pembebasan’: The Resilience Ofwomen In Sasak Culture, Lucky Wijayanti
Kuasa Atas Ruang Pembebasan’: The Resilience Ofwomen In Sasak Culture, Lucky Wijayanti
International Review of Humanities Studies
The Sasak tribe on Lombok island - West Nusa Tenggara, have traditional values and are applied through the social structure of their communities in daily life. Some existing customary values place women in irreplaceable positions. Even so, the existence of financial needs makes them work abroad as laborers, which indirectly results in the occurrence of divorce and early marriage. This is a problem for Sasak women in terms of survival in the Sasak culture. An ethnographic approach derived from Malinowski, the opinion of Svasek, and the value system framework from Kluckhohn are used in this study. This research concludes that …
Backing Up Into Advocacy: The Case Of Smartphone Driver Distraction, Robert Rosenberger
Backing Up Into Advocacy: The Case Of Smartphone Driver Distraction, Robert Rosenberger
The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique
For the last decade, I’ve been studying the topic of the driving impairment of smartphones. While this began as an exclusively academic project, it has increasingly compelled public engagement. One example of this came in an opinion piece I wrote in 2018 in response to a new traffic law. I take the opportunity here to fill out the academic backstory of this particular op-ed, reflect on how this larger project has evolved to include an unanticipated public-facing edge, and abstract some lessons about public writing.
From Protecting To Performing Privacy, Garfield Benjamin
From Protecting To Performing Privacy, Garfield Benjamin
The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique
Privacy is increasingly important in an age of facial recognition technologies, mass data collection, and algorithmic decision-making. Yet it persists as a contested term, a behavioural paradox, and often fails users in practice. This article critiques current methods of thinking privacy in protectionist terms, building on Deleuze's conception of the society of control, through its problematic relation to freedom, property and power. Instead, a new mode of understanding privacy in terms of performativity is provided, drawing on Butler and Sedgwick as well as Cohen and Nissenbaum. This new form of privacy is based on identity, consent and collective action, a …
The General Artificial Intellect, Ramon S. Diab
The General Artificial Intellect, Ramon S. Diab
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
In passages of Marx’s Grundrisse known as the Fragment on Machines, Marx suggested that advanced capitalist development leads to the production of autonomous machines that replace labour-power in the direct production process. Autonomist Marxist interpretations of this text have emphasized that the proliferation of immaterial labour is the historical condition that is leading to a crisis in the measure of value based on labour-time and that will lead to a future communist mode of production. Further, Mario Tronti posited that as capitalist development unfolds, it subsumes both the state and society, a concept known as the ‘social factory thesis’. …
Ontological Boundaries Between Humans And Computers And The Implications For Human-Machine Communication, Andrea L. Guzman
Ontological Boundaries Between Humans And Computers And The Implications For Human-Machine Communication, Andrea L. Guzman
Human-Machine Communication
In human-machine communication, people interact with a communication partner that is of a different ontological nature from themselves. This study examines how people conceptualize ontological differences between humans and computers and the implications of these differences for human-machine communication. Findings based on data from qualitative interviews with 73 U.S. adults regarding disembodied artificial intelligence (AI) technologies (voice-based AI assistants, automated-writing software) show that people differentiate between humans and computers based on origin of being, degree of autonomy, status as tool/tool-user, level of intelligence, emotional capabilities, and inherent flaws. In addition, these ontological boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred as technologies emulate …
Toward An Agent-Agnostic Transmission Model: Synthesizing Anthropocentric And Technocentric Paradigms In Communication, Jaime Banks, Maartje M. A. De Graaf
Toward An Agent-Agnostic Transmission Model: Synthesizing Anthropocentric And Technocentric Paradigms In Communication, Jaime Banks, Maartje M. A. De Graaf
Human-Machine Communication
Technological and social evolutions have prompted operational, phenomenological, and ontological shifts in communication processes. These shifts, we argue, trigger the need to regard human and machine roles in communication processes in a more egalitarian fashion. Integrating anthropocentric and technocentric perspectives on communication, we propose an agent-agnostic framework for human-machine communication. This framework rejects exclusive assignment of communicative roles (sender, message, channel, receiver) to traditionally held agents and instead focuses on evaluating agents according to their functions as a means for considering what roles are held in communication processes. As a first step in advancing this agent-agnostic perspective, this theoretical paper …
Minds Without Spines: Evolutionarily Inclusive Animal Ethics, Irina Mikhalevich, Russell Powell
Minds Without Spines: Evolutionarily Inclusive Animal Ethics, Irina Mikhalevich, Russell Powell
Animal Sentience
Invertebrate animals are frequently lumped into a single category and denied welfare protections despite their considerable cognitive, behavioral, and evolutionary diversity. Some ethical and policy inroads have been made for cephalopod molluscs and crustaceans, but the vast majority of arthropods, including the insects, remain excluded from moral consideration. We argue that this exclusion is unwarranted given the existing evidence. Anachronistic readings of evolution, which view invertebrates as lower in the scala naturae, continue to influence public policy and common morality. The assumption that small brains are unlikely to support cognition or sentience likewise persists, despite growing evidence that arthropods …
In Search Of Psychiatric Kinds: Natural Kinds And Natural Classification In Psychiatry, Nicholas Slothouber
In Search Of Psychiatric Kinds: Natural Kinds And Natural Classification In Psychiatry, Nicholas Slothouber
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
In recent years both philosophers and scientists have asked whether or not our current kinds of mental disorder—e.g., schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder—are natural kinds; and, moreover, whether or not the search for natural kinds of mental disorder is a realistic desideratum for psychiatry. In this dissertation I clarify the sense in which a kind can be said to be “natural” or “real” and argue that, despite a few notable exceptions, kinds of mental disorder cannot be considered natural kinds. Furthermore, I contend that psychopathological phenomena do not cluster together into kinds in the way that paradigmatic natural kinds (e.g., chemical …
Animal Pain And The Social Role Of Science, Leslie Irvine
Animal Pain And The Social Role Of Science, Leslie Irvine
Leslie Irvine, PhD
Assuming that all animals are sentient would mean ending their use in most scientific research. This does not necessarily imply an unscientific or anti-scientific stance. Examining the social role of science reveals its considerable investment in preserving the status quo, including the continued use of animal subjects. From this perspective, the use of animal subjects is a custom that science could move beyond, rather than a methodological requirement that it must defend.
Transhumanism (Dot) Mil: A Bibliometric Analysis Of Technoprogressive Terms In Military Publications, K. Durwood Evans
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.
Signals In The Black Stack / Geometyr Design Manual, Jason T. Scaglione
Signals In The Black Stack / Geometyr Design Manual, Jason T. Scaglione
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The following white paper provides a critical accompaniment to my capstone project: the GEOMEtyr Design Manual. GEOMEtyr is a virtual reality to be made accessible as a mobile and web platform for the visualization of certain systemic elements of a utopic world that parallels our own planet’s geographies, polities, and climates. As such, the GEOMEtyr virtualization is designed to derive utopian space from the informational structures of our own world. The operations by which this may be accomplished are broadly described within the accompanying GEOMEtyr manual. The white paper, Signals in the Black Stack, elaborates vital world-building characteristics of informational …
The Affective Politics Of Twitter, Johnathan C. Flowers
The Affective Politics Of Twitter, Johnathan C. Flowers
Computer Ethics - Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE) Proceedings
Given the increasing encroachment of Twitter into offline experience, it has become necessary to look beyond the formation of identity in online spaces to the ways in which identities surface through the formation of affective communities organized through the use of technocultural assemblages, or the platforms, algorithms, and digital networks through which affect circulates in an online space. This essay focuses on the microblogging website Twitter as one such technocultural assemblage whose hashtag functionality allows for the circulation of affect among bodies which “surface” within the affective communities organized on Twitter through their alignment with and orientation by hashtags which …
Difference Between Algorithmic Processing And The Process Of Lifeworld (Lebenswelt), Domenico Schneider
Difference Between Algorithmic Processing And The Process Of Lifeworld (Lebenswelt), Domenico Schneider
Computer Ethics - Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE) Proceedings
The following article compares the temporality of the life-world with the digital processing. The temporality of the life-world is determined to be stretched and spontaneous. The temporality of the digital is given by discrete step-by-step points of time. Most ethical issues can be traced back to a mismatch of these two ways of processing. This creates a foundation for the ethics of the digital processing. Methodologically, phenomenological considerations are merged with media-philosophical considerations in the article.
Rethinking Algorithmic Bias Through Phenomenology And Pragmatism, Johnathan C. Flowers
Rethinking Algorithmic Bias Through Phenomenology And Pragmatism, Johnathan C. Flowers
Computer Ethics - Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE) Proceedings
In 2017, Amazon discontinued an attempt at developing a hiring algorithm which would enable the company to streamline its hiring processes due to apparent gender discrimination. Specifically, the algorithm, trained on over a decade’s worth of resumes submitted to Amazon, learned to penalize applications that contained references to women, that indicated graduation from all women’s colleges, or otherwise indicated that an applicant was not male. Amazon’s algorithm took up the history of Amazon’s applicant pool and integrated it into its present “problematic situation,” for the purposes of future action. Consequently, Amazon declared the project a failure: even after attempting to …