Whence and W(h)ither Technology Ethics

Author(s):  
Don Howard

Will there be a future for technology ethics as a respected academic discipline among philosophers, scientists, engineers, and the general public? We hope that the answer is, “Yes.” But for that to be so, the field must undertake a frank assessment of its historical origins in Heidegger’s ideology-laden, technology critique and in the environmental crisis of the 1960s and 1970s, along with the nuclear arms race and protests against newer technologies of war deployed in Vietnam. Moreover, technology ethics for the twenty-first century will thrive and will have an impact on technologists and policymakers only if it finds its way to complement its traditional emphasis on risk with an analytical framework that foregrounds the promotion of the human and the common good independent of received assumptions about the moral valence of technology, itself.

Author(s):  
Hazel Gray

This chapter sets out the analytical framework of political settlements and elaborates the framework to account for the socialist experiences of Tanzania and Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. A political settlement, as defined by Mushtaq Khan, is a combination of power and institutions that is mutually compatible and also sustainable in terms of economic and political viability. The chapter clarifies the core building blocks of the approach and sets out the main differences between political settlements and new institutional economics. The chapter then defines a socialist political settlement where productive rights are formally held by the collective and formal institutions protect common and collectively owned assets. The attempts to construct a socialist political settlement left important institutional, political, and economic legacies. These shaped incentives and constraints which influenced a number of critical processes at the heart of economic development—related to technological learning, accumulation for investment, and political stabilization.


Author(s):  
Poorvi Chitalkar ◽  
David M. Malone

India’s engagement with the institutions and norms of global governance has evolved significantly since independence in 1947. This chapter traces the evolution—beginning with early engagement with international organizations under Nehru, to the waning of its enthusiasm for multilateralism in the 1960s and 1970s, and its struggle for greater voice and recognition internationally in the twenty-first century. Through the prism of its quest for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council, its approach to climate change negotiations, global economic diplomacy, and its engagement with global norms, this chapter traces India’s rise as a vital player in the rebalancing of international relations in a multipolar world. However, despite its tremendous progress, some ongoing challenges continue to constrain India’s meaningful participation in global governance at times. The chapter concludes with an assessment of India’s contribution to global governance and its prospects as a stakeholder and shareholder on the global stage.


Author(s):  
Pamela E. Pennock

As we approach the third decade of the twenty-first century, the United States continues to wrestle with defining its role in Middle East conflicts and fully accepting and fairly treating Arab and Muslim Americans. In this contentious and often ill-informed climate, it is crucial to appreciate the struggles, priorities, and accomplishments of Arab Americans over the past several decades, both what has set them apart and what has integrated them into the politics and culture of the United States. Arab American organizing in the environment of minority rights movements in the 1960s and 1970s fostered a heightened consciousness of and pride in Arab American identity....


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
CASIS

The purpose of this analysis is to differentiate social movements. In this instance, we will be using the hippie/counterculture movements during the 1960s and 1970s in Canada, and those that are occurring in the second decade of the twenty-first century. In particular, this analysis distinguishes right-wing extremist movements in 2016 from groups like the Hippie Movement and the Black Panther Party Movement. Specific reference will be made to contrast the social movements of the twenty-first century that are non-political in nature but are identity-based, versus movements during the 60s and 70s that were political by design and intent. Due to the non-political nature of twenty-first century Violent Transnational Social Movements, they might be characterized as fifth generation warfare, which we identify as identity-based social movements in violent conflict with other identity based social movements, this violence may be soft or hard. ‘Soft violence damages the fabric of relationships between communities as entrenches or highlights the superiority of one group over another without kinetic impact. Soft violence is harmful activities to others which stops short of physical violence’. (Kelshall, 2019) Hard violence is then recognized as when soft violence tactics result in physical violence. Insurgencies are groups that challenge and/or resist the authority of the state. There are different levels of insurgencies; and on the extreme end, there is the resistance of systemic authority.


Author(s):  
Cynthia Wu

Chapter 12 addresses the ways in which Asian American Studies’ overriding insistence on recovering a useable resistant past via the aforementioned rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s has made it troublingly reluctant to examine relevant accommodation. As the title suggests, Wu considers how the intellectual trajectory of the field, dominated by a limited U.S.-centrism, has proved largely ineffective with regard to the twenty-first century influx of international students from Asian countries at U.S. universities.


1994 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Giles

While American Studies continues to be a popular subject in universities and colleges on both sides of the Atlantic, several influential critics have recently expressed some sense that its methodological direction appears increasingly uncertain. To be sure, there never was a time when this field's methodology has not been problematic: arguments about what American Studies should include, and indeed whether its eclectic narratives could reasonably be said to constitute an academic discipline at all, have circulated many times since the rapid growth of the subject in the late 1940s. This development has been well documented over the last few years. Philip Gleason has shown how the end of the Second World War led to a patriotic desire to identify certain specifically American values and characteristics; this led to various mythic idealizations of the American spirit in seminal critical works of the 1950s; and this in turn was followed by a more empiricist reaction in the 1960s and 1970s, when social scientists and historians of popular culture were concerned to demystify those earlier, holistic images of a “virgin land” and an “American Adam.” These are old controversies, and I do not intend to rehearse them in detail here. From the perspective of the early 1990s, what is more urgent is to consider how, or indeed if, the field of American Studies might continue to make an important contribution to our understanding of the United States, as well as a significant intervention within the world of learning more generally.


Author(s):  
Jason Maxwell

The Two Cultures of English examines the academic discipline of English in the final decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the new millennium. During this period, longstanding organizational patterns within the discipline were disrupted. With the introduction of French theory into the American academy in the 1960s and 1970s, both literary studies and composition studies experienced a significant reorientation. The introduction of theory into English Studies not only intensified existing tensions between those in literature and those in composition but also produced commonalities among colleagues that had not previously existed. As a result, the various fields within English began to share an increasing number of assumptions at the same time that institutional conflicts between literary studies and composition studies became more intense than ever before. Through careful reconsiderations of some of the key figures that helped shape (and were shaped by) this new landscape—including Michel Foucault, Kenneth Burke, Paul de Man, Fredric Jameson, James Berlin, Susan Miller, John Guillory, and Bruno Latour—the book offers a more comprehensive map of the discipline than one would find from histories on either side of the literature/composition divide.


Author(s):  
Larry L. Hench ◽  
Ian Thompson

During the 1960s and 1970s, a first generation of materials was specially developed for use inside the human body. These developments became the basis for the field of biomaterials. The devices made from biomaterials are called prostheses. Professor Bill Bonfield was one of the first to recognize the importance of understanding the mechanical properties of tissues, especially bone, in order to achieve reliable skeletal prostheses. His research was one of the pioneering efforts to understand the interaction of biomaterials with living tissues. The goal of all early biomaterials was to ‘achieve a suitable combination of physical properties to match those of the replaced tissue with a minimal toxic response in the host’. By 1980, there were more than 50 implanted prostheses in clinical use made from 40 different materials. At that time, more than three million prosthetic parts were being implanted in patients worldwide each year. A common feature of most of the 40 materials was biological ‘inertness’. Almost all materials used in the body were single-phase materials. Most implant materials were adaptations of already existing commercial materials with higher levels of purity to eliminate release of toxic by-products and minimize corrosion. This article is a tribute to Bill Bonfield's pioneering efforts in the field of bone biomechanics, biomaterials and interdisciplinary research. It is also a brief summary of the evolution of bioactive materials and the opportunities for tailoring the composition, texture and surface chemistry of them to meet five important challenges for the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Ben Highmore

Georges Perec died in 1982 at the age of forty-five. What is he for us now, thirty-three years later, in the second decade of the twenty-first century? How do we make him our contemporary? To make Perec’s work part of our present-day involves (perhaps counter-intuitively) grasping his project in its historical specificity. It isn’t by cherry-picking useable aspects of the work that we will ensure some relevance to its afterlife: rather, it will be by recognising his larger project as a response to a particular historical situation. While Perec’s situation in the 1960s and 1970s in France is not ours, it still has a relation to our world. Perec becomes our contemporary in the act of seeing these relations, how a continuity of feeling and mood percolates through historical ruptures, and how changes in mood and feeling activate historical continuities. The central claim of this chapter is that a central aspect of Perec’s project was the latter’s attempt to register actuality, that is, that this project was a form of realism. Moreover, like many forms of realism, it was a quest and a question rather than an answer or solution.


2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 263-287
Author(s):  
Tom Frost ◽  
C R G Murray

Good governance requires the accommodation of multiple interests in the cause of decision-making. However, undue regard for particular sectional interests can take its toll upon public faith in government administration. Historically, broad conceptions of the good of the commonwealth were employed to outweigh the interests of groups that resisted colonisation. In the decision-making of the British Empire, the standard approach for justifying the marginalisation of the interests of colonised groups was that they were uncivilised and that particular hardships were the price to be paid for bringing to them the imperial dividend of industrial society. It is widely assumed that with the dismantling of the British Empire, such impulses and their accompanying jurisprudence became a thing of the past. Even as decolonisation proceeded apace after the Second World War, however, the UK maintained control of strategically important islands with a view towards sustaining its global role. In an infamous example from this twilight period of empire, in the 1960s imperial interests were used to justify the expulsion of the Chagos islanders from the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Into the twenty-first century, this forced elision of the UK’s interests with the imperial ‘common good’ continues to take centre stage in courtroom battles over the islanders’ rights, being cited before domestic and international tribunals in order to maintain the Chagossians’ exclusion from their homeland. This article considers the new jurisprudence of imperialism which has emerged in a string of decisions which have continued to marginalise the Chagossians’ interests.


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