Amy E. Slaton

Meritocracy, Technocracy, Democracy: Understandings of Racial and Gender Equity in American Engineering Education

The idea that technological labor produces both individual security and satisfaction and societal benefits has shaped engineering education in the United States since its inception. Educators and employers have historically cast engineering instruction as a route towards individual and collective uplift for the nation’s citizens. But ideologies of racial, gender, and other categories of difference predicated on identity underlie all such claims and explain the less-than-democratic character of STEM occupations, in which minority citizens, women, LGBT persons and persons with disabilities remain under-represented despite decades-old legal proscriptions against such discrimination. This chapter explores two linked logics that perpetuate this inequitable distribution of opportunities: the technocratic understanding of engineering as an enterprise in which power relations play no part; and the related construction of engineering education as a field based solely on meritocratic judgments about eligibility and skill. Through both of these formulations American engineering supports the ongoing exclusion of certain communities based on perceived heritage and ascriptions of potential in turn based on those identities. This chapter also frames a recent strengthening of these ideologies under emergent neoliberal understandings of market, state, and the agency of individual citizens-as-learners. Finally, given the origins of engineering knowledge and practice in discriminatory social relations, this chapter asks whether improved diversity in engineering would in fact represent a liberatory change.

George Washington carver slept here: Racial identity and laboratory practice at Iowa state college

Racialist social agendas have helped determine who will and will not be admitted to the engineering programs of American universities, and bench‐level activities within university laboratories have both followed from, and encouraged these structures of occupational opportunity. The engineering division of Iowa State College between 1900 and 1960 was one site of such exclusionary activity. African‐American students were under‐represented in its programs throughout this period, even as other areas of the university diversified and as women gradually increased their presence in the engineering division. This paper proposes a study of ISCs engineering curricula, instruments, and facilities as a means of identifying and understanding this inequity.

Statistics as Service to Democracy: Experimental Design and the Dutiful American Scientist

Through the middle decades of the twentieth century, prominent American statisticians established new channels to carry their experimental field around the nation and the globe. Two figures, Henry A. Wallace and Gertrude M. Cox, emerging from the land-grant Iowa State University, achieved particular influence. Their efforts, which included involvement with federal and international state affairs from the 1930s onward and on United Nations initiatives after the Second World War, embodied not only a rigorous empiricism directed at social problems but a service rationale associated with their white, (Mid)Western, Methodist identity; lines between private ethics and public conduct, between scientific study and intervention, dissolved. The statisticians paired generous impulses with an ambivalent approach towards equity, however, bringing robust ideas of innate human differences – gender, race, sexuality and ethnic distinctions in particular – to a wide range of post-colonial development efforts. In both their taxonomic understanding of individual identity (their own and others’) and their ideas of optimized statistical labor as clearly divided between routine data handling and advanced theoretical work, Wallace, Cox and their audiences embedded American particular ideas of human welfare in technical expertise. As US statistical methods shaped worldwide economic, agricultural, health and educational planning, a complex and constrained model of democracy sought and often found global footholds.

Concrete and Culture: A Material History. by Adrian Forty (review)

Reflecting dye image formation is almost the same as in the resonator of a gas laser. Hypothesis catalyst splits, so all of the signs of archetype and myth confirm that the action mechanisms myth akin download Concrete and Culture: A Material History by Adrian Forty pdf to the mechanisms of artistic and productive thinking. Hegelianism, as is commonly believed, recognize the natural polynomial. Absorption sequentially.

Smallpox: the big picture

You probably didn’t have to wait in line for your flu shot this year, because the pressing worry that some new strain of influenza—such as the ‘bird flu’ and H1N1 that threatened in recent autumns to bring us downs—seems to have passed. Our fear of pandemics is notoriously variable and not entirely related to epidemiological projections or even to media coverage of emergent health risks. Rather, cultural forces, such as the social relations of urban life, local lore and perceptions of global geopolitical insecurity, converge to generate the popular response to the threat of disease. All help set the layperson’s gauge of a malady’s reach or virulence and, by extension, of the need to protect oneself and one’s family from infection. Such social complexity has characterized human responses to epidemics throughout history, but modern techniques of disease prevention, global-scale migrations and health bureaucracies have added many actors and tensions to the story. Emergent antivaccination movements in the US today distress all those concerned with public health, and it is only through acknowledging that complexity that we may see a way to address this worrisome social trend. In Pox, a historical account of America’s response to smallpox after 1900, Michael Willrich teases out the social, cultural, medical and political agendas that shaped the national reaction to that dreaded disease, finally eliminated in the US in 1949. In House on Fire, William H. Foege, an epidemiologist and former Smallpox: the big picture director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), follows the more recent international assault on smallpox, especially his own work in Africa and India in the 1960s and 1970s. Together, these books teach us not only about this one disease but also about the meanings of health, illness, privacy, responsibility and the state in modern societies. Both books describe the elaborate scientific and institutional processes by which public health interventions reached sufficiently large populations to eliminate smallpox in the twentieth century, including containment, surveillance and vaccination. Although the reduction of human suffering brought by the control of smallpox is central to both stories, neither author isolates the work of scientists and public health operatives from the cultural contexts in which these people labored. Both Willrich and Foege write of citizens who welcomed the work of medical experts and those who feared or resisted that intervention. The books thus draw lessons of far more value for present-day readers than would a simpler heroic narrative that presents primarily the positive outcomes of these interventions. Willrich’s account, based on primary sources that he meticulously researched, describes how local and federal health authorities in the US attempted to limit the impact of smallpox largely through vaccination, starting in the last decade of the nineteenth century. His narrative follows individuals stricken with the disease, antivaccine activists, and the campaigns of scientists, doctors, military men and bureaucrats, both obscure and prominent, to end the scourge. Willrich’s aim throughout is to trace smallpox as it played out in the “human community” of Progressive-era America and its remote military outposts. In this way, Willrich is showing that all diseases gain their entire meaning from the particular settings and belief systems in which they play out; in other words, there is not some purely biological version of smallpox that exists apart from such social circumstances. As Willrich describes the environments and social organizations of American communities, we see exactly why smallpox was greeted with various interventions and different degrees of urgency by diverse officials and populations. For example, because close proximity between the sick and the well became unavoidable in the nation’s increasingly crowded work camps, towns and cities, authorities had no choice but to turn away from older techniques of quarantine and emphasize vaccination to prevent the spread of smallpox. And yet, this book makes clear that ‘proximity’ is not how most citizens experience modern American life, structured as it is around private households, discrete family units and self-governing cities and towns. Thus, Willrich’s history helps us grasp why many Americans, who understandably experienced their own homes and neighborhoods as freestanding, safe and autonomous, were not easily swayed toward the essential collectivism of universal smallpox vaccination, despite watching people sicken and die from the disease. Willrich does not come close to endorsing that public resistance to vaccination, but he does probe its historical and cultural contingency with notable creativity. Willrich captures the emerging self-identity of public health officials and doctors after 1890 or so as messengers of science, as well as their oppositional role among ‘less informed’ communities (as more educated Americans commonly characterized their poor, immigrant or rural Amy E. Slaton is a Professor of History at Drexel University, Philadelphia,

The Uses of Context: Steen Hyldgaard Christensen, Bernard Delahousse, and Martin Meganck, eds., Engineering in Context

This lengthy collection (Engineering in Context. Aarhus, Denmark: Academica, 2009. Pp. 502. DKr 425), comprising twenty-seven essays by forty authors, brings a welcome focus on engineering in society, just as the work of engineers is gaining new significance as a source of worldwide social and political change. The world’s cities, communications networks, and transport systems expand by the day, as do the labors of the engineers involved. A rapidly globalizing though unstable system of industrial trade and production has lately given technological knowledge and its applications increasing importance in the rhetoric of nations seeking economic security and growth. In the United States, President Obama calls this “our own Sputnik moment,”while European Union members track the role of “innovation” in productivity as they seek to compete with Asian nations— which, in turn, boast rapidly expanding science and engineering institutions and industrial infrastructures. The editors’ aim to enhance readers’ awareness of engineering’s social origins and consequences is thus quite timely. The collection gathers historians of engineering, philosophers of technology, practicing engineers, and educators from institutions in the Americas and Europe. The project as a whole helps make the case, as author Andrew Jamison puts it, that contextual knowledge for engineers has too often been treated by engineering educators as “supplementary or add-on knowledge” (p. 52), when in reality social processes are integral to all that we call science and technology. The book frequently succeeds in making a constructive project of what could easily become an unwieldy one; what, after all, is not part of the contexts in which engineering attains its author-

The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750–1940 (review)

209 sis on the concurrence of science and more unorthodox “pseudoscientific” practices not only in the popular imagination but also in the work of Quiroga and Arlt. Blurring the traditional distinctions between high and low culture, these writers dwell quite comfortably among quacks, parapsychologists, and pseudoscientific periodicals. Readers who are perhaps better versed in scientific development and technical practices are sure to enjoy different aspects of the book. Although the focus can get blurred by the vast number of anecdotes, Sarlo manages to make an overwhelming amount of data come to life in witty accounts of Argentina’s technographical modernity. Erudite throughout and quite entertaining at times, this book also includes a generous critical apparatus. Sarlo moves beyond the common view in literary critical practice of science and technology as mere discourses— having little real existence outside the field of language—to an empirical demonstration of the writers and the populace’s very real link with what would become one of the dominant modes of the early-twentieth-century literary and cultural imagination.