Month: November 2017

Rider Foley—Assistant Professor, Science, Technology & Society, UVA

“From Engagement to Intervention: Reconstructing Two Events at the Motorola 52nd Street Superfund Site.”

Scientific knowledge and technological artifacts are built into a city’s urban fabric. Such knowledge and artifacts in turn affect the lived experiences of the city’s residents. From Jane Jacobs’s streetscapes to Lewis Mumford’s livable city, the constitution of power and authority can be seen in the city’s very infrastructure. Scholars have recently experimented with novel engagements intending to shift de facto power and authority arrangements between citizens and technical experts. However, those experimental engagements are rarely understood as interventions in urban techno-politics. This article aims to reconstruct two interventions in Phoenix, Arizona at the Motorola 52nd Street Superfund Site, the largest urban subsurface contamination zone in the United States. The research design aims to reconstruct two specific interventions through the use a semi-structured analytical framework. Findings suggest the interventions “opened up” technical decisions and government officials later repurposed the participatory technology assessment at their quarterly meeting. The other intervention influenced a binding decision by elected officials. These events suggests how roles and relationships allowed boundaries to be crossed and for experiential and empirical knowledge to be unified and thus influence decisions within the sphere of urban techno-politics. The pursuits of science, technology and society (STS) scholars, I argue, are well positioned to move from engagement to intervention.

As many of you know, A.D. Carson, Assistant Professor of Hip and Hop and the Global South in the McIntire Department of Music at UVA, will be in the Libraries as a featured panelist for the Digital Literacy Symposium.

A.D. has further and graciously agreed to lead an informal workshop and open discussion, in Athenaeum the following morning, focused on new approaches to the production of knowledge and publication of scholarship. Please do join us for that discussion. Details:

More on A.D.: