Matching Items (4)
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- All Subjects: Imaginaries
- All Subjects: LGBTQ studies
- Language: English
- Creators: Richter, Jennifer
- Status: Published
Description
This dissertation explores the functional purpose of imagination as it is enacted in the context of shaping large transitions in sociotechnical systems. Large sociotechnical systems undergoing profound transitions embody instantiations where societies experience profound changes in the ‘rules of the game’ that underpin the conduct of daily life. The forms of imagination that guide these transformations, known in the political theory literature as ‘imaginaries,’ play a profound yet undertheorized role in transition of sociotechnical systems from one configuration to another. Expanding on this relationship, the study draws on three case studies of energy systems change in the United States during 20th and 21st century. Each case study explores unique element of how actors at a variety of levels – transnational governance, regional electrification, and in-home energy marketing – define and the possibilities for ideal human and technological action and interaction through a transition. These actors defining the parameters of a new form of systems operation and configuration are as equally focused on defining how these new configurations shape fundamental ideas that underpin American democratic sensibility. Moreover, in the process of articulating a new configuration of energy and society – be that in terms of managing global resource flows or the automation of energy use in a residential home – questions of what makes an ideal member of a society are interlinked with new contractual relationships between energy producers and energy users. Transitions research could and should pay greater attention to the normative commitments emergent systems actors – as it is in these commitments we can chart pathways to redefine the parameters that underpin emergent transitions.
ContributorsTidwell, Abraham (Author) / Miller, Clark (Thesis advisor) / Adamson, Joni (Committee member) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Richter, Jennifer (Committee member) / Smith, Jessica (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Mexico City has an ongoing air pollution issue that negatively affects its citizens and surroundings with current structural disconnections preventing the city from improving its overall air quality. Thematic methodological analysis reveals current obstacles and barriers, as well as variables contributing to this persistent problem. A historical background reveals current programs and policies implemented to improve Mexico’s City air quality. Mexico City’s current systems, infrastructure, and policies are inadequate and ineffective. There is a lack of appropriate regulation on other modes of transportation, and the current government system fails to identify how the class disparity in the city and lack of adequate education are contributing to this ongoing problem. Education and adequate public awareness can potentially aid the fight against air pollution in the Metropolitan City.
ContributorsGarcia, Lucero (Author) / Duarte, Marisa E. (Thesis advisor) / Arzubiaga, Angela (Committee member) / Richter, Jennifer (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Software systems can exacerbate and cause contemporary social inequities. As such, scholars and activists have scrutinized sociotechnical systems like those used in facial recognition technology or predictive policing using the frameworks of algorithmic bias and dataset bias. However, these conversations are incomplete without study of data models: the structural, epistemological, and technical frameworks that shape data. In Modeling Power: Data Models and the Production of Social Inequality, I elucidate the connections between relational data modeling techniques and manifestations of systems of power in the United States, specifically white supremacy and cisgender normativity. This project has three distinct parts. First, I historicize early publications by E. F. Codd, Peter Chen, Miles Smith & Diane Smith, and J. R. Abrial to demonstrate that now-taken-for-granted data modeling techniques were products of their social and technical moments and, as such, reinforced dominant systems of power. I further connect database reification techniques to contemporary racial analyses of reification via the work of Cheryl Harris. Second, I reverse engineer Android applications (with Jadx and apktool) to uncover the relational data models within. I analyze DAO annotations, create entity-relationship diagrams, and then examine those resultant models, again linking them back to systems of race and gender power. I craft a method for performing a reverse engineering investigation within a specific sociotechnical context -- a situated analysis of the contextual epistemological frames embedded within relational paradigms. Finally, I develop a relational data model that integrates insights from the project’s reverse and historical engineering phases. In my speculative engineering process, I suggest that the temporality of modern digital computing is incommensurate with the temporality of modern transgender lives. Following this, I speculate and build a trans-inclusive data model that demonstrates uses of reification to actively subvert systems of racialized and gendered power. By promoting aspects of social identity to first-order objects within a data model, I show that additional “intellectual manageability” is possible through reification. Through each part, I argue that contemporary approaches to the social impacts of software systems incomplete without data models. Data models structure algorithmic opportunities. As algorithms continue to reinforce systems of inequality, data models provide opportunities for intervention and subversion.
ContributorsStevens, Nikki Lane (Author) / Wernimont, Jacqueline D (Thesis advisor) / Michael, Katina (Thesis advisor) / Richter, Jennifer (Committee member) / Duarte, Marisa E. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
This research interconnects three case studies to examine survivability as a framework through which to explore historic, current, and future collaborations in the face of existential threats, social-ecological-technical uncertainty, and indeterminate futures. Leveraging archival research, document analysis, and ethnographic field work, this study focuses on artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s mid-20th-century construction of a nuclear fallout shelter, the COVID Tracking Project’s response work in the first year of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, and three decades of future-facing scientific research performed at Biosphere 2. These cases demonstrate multidisciplinary collaborations across individual, organizational, and institutional configurations at local, national, and international scales in threat contexts spanning nuclear weapons, pandemics, and increasing climate catastrophe. Within each of the three cases, I examine protagonists’ collaborations within knowledge systems, their navigation of scientific disciplinary boundaries, their acknowledgement and negotiation of credibility and expertise, and how their engagements with these systems impact individual and collective survivability. By combining complex adaptive systems (CAS) framings with Science and Technology Studies concepts, I explore ways in which transformations of hierarchy and epistemological boundaries impact, and particularly increase, social-ecological-technical systems (SETS) survivability. Including notions of who and what systems deem worthy of protection, credibility, expertise and agency, imaginations, and how concepts of systems survivability operate, this work builds a conceptual scaffolding to better understand the dynamic workings of quests for survival in the 21st century.
ContributorsWasserman, Sherri (Author) / Selin, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Richter, Jennifer (Committee member) / Jalbert, Kirk (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022