Consulting Interests
- Technical
- Innovation Management
- Technological Diffusion
- Technological Forecasting
- Motivational/Reflective
- Excellence 101
- Ethics and Social Responsibility
- Career Counseling/Academic Consulting/Student Skills
Building
Research Interests
- Sociology and Anthropology of Knowledge, Science, and Technology:
Questions about the foundations of science and technology are important to
contemporary culture and politics. My scholarship, theoretical and practical
work, focusses on the ways in which both ordinary knowledge and
institutionalized science are constituted, and the ways systems of knowledge
interact. For example, bodybuilders negotiate legitimate pharmaceutical and
nutritional knowledge for their own, often transgressive, purposes. Or
consider the ambiguity of pain, as a subjective experience, and the complexity
of various attempts to measure it 'objectively.' These are both projects
within a larger agenda to delineate 'alternative' epistemologies and theories
of knowledge.
- Rehabilitation and Biomechanical Engineering: One of my primary
topics of interest has been the human body, and attempts to model and modify
it. One research area is the outlining of interactions of disability
activism, changes in legislation and public policy, and research outcomes.
The goals are to improve design process for people with disabilities, and to
improve design education for engineers. Another project is an historical and
cross-cultural analysis of prosthetics and orthotics, and the social contexts
of the design and use of these technologies. Also, the image of the cyborg as
a combination of human and machine is one of my favorite studies of both a
cultural icon in popular media, and a technical agenda for researchers.
- Engineering and Science Education: Engineers and scientists work
in complicated social and cultural contexts, but often without sufficient
appreciation of that complexity, or their social and professional
responsibilities. I have been conducting research on their social and
personal characteristics, as well as studies of the profession, and the
workplaces of engineers and scientists. I hope that this work will facilitate
changes in engineering and science education, including enhancing the
diversity of these professions.
- Technology and Institutional Change: As part of an NSF supported Small
Grant for Research and Training (SGRT), I collaborate with Sheila Slaughter
and Gary Rhoades of Higher Education in a program which examines the
intersection of information technology (IT), intellectual property (IP), and
ethics and values changes in higher education.
- Other interests
- Vanilla Beans, The Political Economy
of/Cultural Politics of the "Nature Of," with Kyle Ackerman
- Historiography and Sociology of Archaeology with Stephen Nash
- Instrumentation and Infrastructure: Theory and Technology in Contemporary
Ground-Based Astronomy with W. Patrick McCray
- Methodology in Science and Technology Studieswith W. Patrick
McCray