Sal Restivo - US grants

The creation of university research centers to encourage collaboration among academe, industry and government in the conduct of science and technology is a relatively new phenomenon in this country. The aim of this project is to explore what happens to the values of these three sectors when they come together in these settings. This effort itself is a collaboration between four scholars from the disciplines of philosophy, political science and sociology. They will use their disciplinary perspectives and methods, including normative, organizational, structural and ethnographic analysis, in an intensive, on-site examination of the negotiation of values, including concerns for professional success, control, and management, in two research centers located at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Center for Manufacturing Productivity and Technology Transfer and the Center for Composite Materials and Structures. A four-member board incorporating business, government, and public interest perspectives, will advise the project; and the study will be augmented by an exchange of ideas and data with an investigation of other university-industry interactions currently underway in RPI's Center for Science and Technology Policy. Results will be disseminated in articles for disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals. Special mailings of "Working Papers" will be made to administrators and policymakers, and the findings should also be appropriate for sessions at meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Society for Social Studies of Science. Involvement at the centers should also lead to channels of publication to audiences interested in the centers' activities. This project can make a unique contribution to the development, application, and evaluation of collaborative research agendas and methods in science and technology studies. It will also provide the first intensive, longitudinal examination of the processes and products of negotiating values in these new institutional settings. The investigators are exceptionally well qualified; graduate students are involved; institutional support and cooperation is excellent. The use of an advisory board and interaction with another related investigation will help to assure broader relevance and balance. This is a good example of the kind of cross-disciplinary research EVS should encourage. Results are likely to be useful and widely disseminated. Costs are reasonable. Total support in the amount of $164,374 is recommended, of which $96,000 is awarded now, from the Directorate for Engineering and the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

This dissertation research project will enable the student researcher to complete a dissertation which examines the intersections of feminist theory and social studies of science as applied to research in biomechanics and related fields. The proposed research is a study of the scientific and technical practice of researchers in biomechanics and related fields. The study will focus on practices in setting research priorities, modelling, and representation, and how patterns of authority and the relations between gender and power affect these practices. The project will bridge two gaps in contemporary science and technology studies: (1) between formally sociological studies of laboratories and institutions and culturally oriented studies of representations in science; and (2) between feminist criticisms of science and theories of science, technology and society. Particularly, the study will focus on (1) the intersection of representations in scientific practice and larger cultural metaphors of body as machine; (2) the practices, such as filtering, selection, and ordering, that go into the measurement and mathematization of natural objects; (3) the general organization of knowledge work in science and engineering. This modest grant will allow the student to travel to several initial and three new research sites in order to conduct the necessary interviews and observations. The dissertation should be completed by December, 1993.

This dissertation project begins with the premise that science is a specific way of knowing created by the dominant culture, that education is a social process, that schools are sites of cultural production and that teachers are public intellectuals. This study focuses on women in the West African country of Togo who are teaching Western science. It is interested in the roles of Togolese science educators as instruments of domination, liberation and servitude. The educational infrastructure has a history and a present that needs to be considered in relation to the social distribution of power. The project draws upon the concepts of power, knowledge, gender, and culture to look at the history and present moment surrounding the teaching of science in Togo. The last stage of the research involves archival research in France to study the influence of colonial policies on science, culture and education.