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Dissertation Information for Sharon Jean Traweek

NAME:
- Sharon Jean Traweek

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Cultural Anthropology

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Santa Cruz (USA) (1982)

ADVISORS:
- None

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- None

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Not_Inspected

Title: UPTIME, DOWNTIME, SPACETIME, AND POWER: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE PARTICLE PHYSICS COMMUNITY IN JAPAN AND THE UNITED STATES

Abstract: This study begins with an introduction to the particle physics community and a survey of works on science and technology, focusing on their enabling assumptions and the key debates in the field. The first chapter explores the laboratory as a massive spatial mnemonic device for determining who someone is and what they should be doing. The organization of research, including the processes of funding, designing, executing, and analyzing an experiment and how new information is exchanged within the community, both in Japan and the United States, are described in the second and fourth chapters, respectively. The stages of a career in particle physics is the topic of the third chapter, emphasizing the training of a particle physicist as an emblem of the community's sense of its shared past, present, and future. The final chapter establishes the congruence of theories of time and space in physics and the physicists' social construction of time and space, or as an anthropologist would express it, the correlation that exists in any culture between its cosmology and its norms of social behavior. In this work I have addressed three specific questions raised by the social study of science: how is "normal science" practiced; how does the technology of "big science" affect scientific research and its organization; and is science supracultural (that is, do "objectivity," "realism," and "rationalism" represent a barrier to culture)? Anthropological fieldwork for this study has been conducted at three main sites over a period of three years: Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) near San Francisco, Tsukuba Laboratory for High Energy Physics (Ko-Enerugie butsurigaku Kenkyusho, or KEK) near Tokyo, and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) near Chicago. For purposes of comparison I have also visited university departments of physics and other laboratories in Japan, the United States, and Europe.

MPACT Scores for Sharon Jean Traweek

A = 4
C = 10
A+C = 14
T = 4
G = 1
W = 4
TD = 4
TA = 0
calculated 2009-01-15 15:41:56

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