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Dissertation Information for Katherine Nielsen

NAME:
- Katherine Nielsen

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2002)

ADVISORS:
- Sharon Jean Traweek

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Janice L. Reiff
- Valerie Hartouni

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Knowledge, discovery, violence, and ethics: Technique embodied in martial arts and physics in the nuclear age

Abstract: The explosion of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was a turning point in the history of technology, popular culture, and politics, marking profound changes in the ways knowledge was produced and performed as well as the ways culture circulated globally and hybridized locally. Tremendous awe and horror of nuclear weapons inspired both expansion of support for techno-science and criticism of ways of knowing associated with technique and technology.

Rejecting the notion that technique necessarily involves violent ways of knowing, my focus on technique highlights embodied knowledge practices that are fluid, engaged in the world, and ethically complicit. Both physics and martial arts are fields that rely on techniques--repeatable actions measured by effectiveness--as a means for research. Transmitting to graduate students these practices of physics, such as the sense of what kind of adjustments to experiments will be most fruitful for creating new knowledge, was as difficult for physicists as it was for martial arts masters to pass on a capacity to refine a stylistic tradition. Accommodating larger numbers of students, a result of expanding circulation and consumption of knowledge, required both to compromise mentorship teaching modes.

Although martial arts and physics are very different disciplines with divergent methodologies; both made the rhetorical leap that even though they were engaged in weapons research, their true aim is uplifting for humanity: truth (physics) and perfection of character (martial arts). Ironically, the strategies both used for explaining this leap did not reflect new understanding, but can be found in the ancient text, The Bhagavad Gita .

Because of feminist and post-colonial movements, ethics that transformed violence in the nuclear age came not in the form of universal rules but in cultural frames chosen by actors. Popular culture spun stories where cyborgs represented the dissolution and reconstructions of boundaries whose rigidity was exploded by nukes. Martial arts and cyber-nuke film genres provide genealogies for the movie The Matrix (1999) illustrating a shift from perceiving the technological as separate from the human to recognition of the connection between technology and humanity.

MPACT Scores for Katherine Nielsen

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-08-18 12:51:14

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Students under Katherine Nielsen

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None