Cultures of Technoscience: A Study of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) Research in the United States and India (2004)
Prasad, Amit (Author)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Pickering, Andrew
Edition Details: Advisor: Pickering, Andrew
Physical Details: 224 pp.
Language: English
Debates on development and diffusion of science and technology, when they involve nations in the ``west'' and the ``non-west'', are often over-determined by discourses on colonialism, cultural and material dominance of the west, and constructed attributes of ``modern science''. This dissertation seeks to ground these debates and map the architecture of techno-scientific-globalization through a theoretically informed empirical study of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) research and development in the United States (US) and India. It deploys a hybrid methodology of archival research and ethnographic interviews of scientists, government officials, and employees of multinational companies to construct the social history of MRI research and development in the US and India and shows how centers and peripheries of techno-scientific research are created and sustained within global and local/national networks of power and administration. A starting point for this study is that even though the relationship is asymmetrical, techno-scientific research in and between non-western and western nations cannot be understood through simple conceptual dichotomies of center/periphery, dominant/dominated, or globalism/localism. The development of MRI, since its birth in the early 1970s, has been located within a transnational network. This network has been constituted by a fairly flexible flow of scientists, knowledge, and artifacts across national boundaries. However, relationships between research groups based in different nations are asymmetrical and their location critically affects their research. Thus, even though many of the significant MRI research and development did not even take place in the US in the 1970s, it became a major center of MRI research because of its socio-technical network, which allowed possibilities for socio-technical tuning. On the other hand, MRI related research in India existed much before first MRIs were imported to clinics in India in the second half of the 1980s. Yet the trajectories of these researches remained disconnected and did not lead to any significant development of the MRI technology. This study shows that the culture(s) and epistemic trajectories of techno-sciences are embedded within and dialectically related to historically specific practices and discourses, which exist and operate within wider global and local/national socio-technical networks.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 65/11 (2005): 4355. UMI pub. no. 3153403.
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