Michael M.J. Fischer - US grants

This dissertation proposes ethnographic fieldwork in the strategic arena of "informatics and biology" within contemporary international healthcare. In particular the researcher will investigate the sciences and technologies driving or facilitating the changing transnational medical care markets, as a crucible for analyzing and re-mapping the changing structures and ever-present dilemmas of health care, the welfare state, decision-making in clinical practice, and the display, manipulation and transformation of information within and across healthcare systems. The project is divided into three sections-Macro, Micro, and Margin-which are supported by empirical fieldwork in several sites. The 'Macro' section outlines the theoretical dimensions of the shift from the national welfare-state provision of healthcare to the international market-oriented welfare capitalism of the emerging healthcare market. These empirical changes will be yoked to the theories of Ulrich Beck and Francois Ewald on risk, responsibility, and rights, requiring a theoretical synthesis of political economy, history and anthropology. The 'Micro' section includes detailed empirical fieldwork (first phase, completed) on the sciences and technologies that facilitate and exacerbate the changes outlined in the Macro section. This research focuses on the design and implementation of information and communication technologies by both large and small organizations within an Academic Medical Center; in particular, the studies focus on technologies for the manipulation and communication of visual images on the internet. The researcher has explored and will continue to study the tension between contingent design and standardization, and among academic, medical and industry research strategies. The 'Margin' section will follow the technologies in 'Micro' to several international and national remote sites. Under the assumption that the unevenly porous boundaries of nations produce global centralizations of capital and expertise, the researcher intends to study how a new international geography of center and periphery is built up around the marketing and use of networked healthcare; in particular how the technologies designed in Boston are used and understood by the doctors, technicians, and administrators away from the center. The potential sites for extended fieldwork (based on the existing connections established by the field sites I am currently working in) include Istanbul, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Central Maine, and Roxbury, Massachusetts. The research funds applied for here are primarily for the international fieldwork component of the dissertation: for travel and living expenses, and for the audio-visual equipment used for interviews and participant observation.

This dissertation, funded by the Science and Society Program, will investigate the changing nature of public engagement in the U.S., specifically as it relates to media, the environment, scientific authority, and public relations. The study will focus specifically on four social groups who are seeking to inform the American public of the urgency and action needed regarding climate change: 1) the Inuit Circumpolar Conference which has worked closely with American environmental groups to bring a human rights claim before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights regarding U.S. inaction on curbing greenhouse gas emissions, 2) the Evangelical Climate Initiative, comprised of loosely affiliated multi-denominational Christian groups that are attempting to mobilize American Christians based on combinations of moral and scientific imperatives, 3) efforts by Ceres, a non-profit network organization comprised of "environmentalists and investors," in conjunction with the Chicago Climate Exchange to expose and marshal corporate and industry responsibilities regarding the proactive reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and 4) efforts by hurricane and climate scientists to intervene in public debate and the regulation of coastal development based on climate change-related predictions and research. Operating outside formal government or policy frameworks and the mainstream environmental movement, each of these groups is looking to "reframe" climate change by putting a human, legal, moral, financial, or scientific face on an issue that has, until very recently, languished at the bottom of environmental concerns despite mainstream media coverage since the 1980s. By mapping the terrain and intersections of these social groups, this study will offer insight into the communication of complex scientific and science-policy debates, revealing fractures in credibility, expertise, and authority for both science and mainstream media, as well as the presence of "spin" and public relations that has, from the perspective of many actors, acted to supplant "the facts of the matter." As such, this study provides a clear case study of the flexibility of environmental discourse, the evolving role of media change and fragmentation in making scientific issues public, and an account of the struggles within science to prevent science from being reduced to "spin" and public relations. This study will make an important contribution to Science and Technology Studies (STS), media studies, and anthropologies of media and science by bringing them into dialogue in novel ways. Doing so will offer crucial interdisciplinary insight into studies of media change, environmentalism, democratic engagement, and social movements. Climate change provides a rich conceptual site for understanding: a) how U.S. public debate is mediated, driven, and redirected, b) the changing nature of mainstream American media and its semi-autonomous role as a so-called fourth estate, c) the turn towards advocacy and/or authentication of facts by scientists and journalists, and d) the ubiquitous, pervasive presence of public relations that has spread from commercial sectors throughout civic life, enrolling social movements and governmental organizations. Thus, for journalists, scientists, policy-makers, and activists working on climate change and other complex science and science-policy debates, this study provides valuable insight into how and what shapes public engagement. NSF funding will enable continuing and completing a multi-sited investigation of these geographically dispersed social groups. It will be used primarily for travel and accommodation costs to conduct in-depth interviews with primary actors and spokespersons for the selected social groups.

This Science and Society Dissertation Improvement Grant provides specific "field" research funds for a Ph.D. dissertation that examines the emergence of personal coaching as a field of expertise and a new profession with over 15,000 coaches and ongoing growth in the United States alone. Coaching is a professional service providing clients with action-based guidance in their daily lives and work. There are currently several discrete fields of coaching with different histories and accrediting practices, including coaching for executives, for graduate students, or for the mundane tasks of everyday living. This project will analyze the development of coaching as a new field of expertise and professionalization as well as a crucible for changing notions of the American self. Using ethnographic methods, it will combine data from interviews with professional coaches and clients of coaching with participant observation at coaching workshops and conferences and analysis of publications in the coaching field. The data collection and analysis will draw from theoretical work and existing research in science studies, cultural anthropology, and sociology. The initial hypotheses guiding the study are: (1) Coaching is becoming professionalized through internal and external differentiations that help define coaching as a legitimate form of expertise over the domain of everyday life. (2) Coaching is an emergent profession that is making use of academic theories of self, but packaging them as a new form of expert self-help. In the process, it seems to be developing a new vocabulary of talking about the self that focuses on pragmatic action and practice rather than self reflection. (3) While coaching can be seen as an extension of American self-help traditions it is also paradoxically innovative in positing self-improvement as expert dependent. My dissertation hypothesizes that this new kind of expertise is influencing how people negotiate the meanings of self and individualism. Coaching, thus provides a new and strategic site to contribute to (a) the study of expertise and professionalization, on which there exist literatures both in sociology and Science and Technology Studies (STS); (b) the shifts in notions of the self (self-reliance, self-improvement and self-fashioning) in American culture, on which there exists literatures in sociology, social history and psychology, as well as an important emerging literature at the interface of medical anthropology and STS; and (c) the emerging culture and political economy of the changing notions of the self.

The project on the Theory and Practice of Accountable Systems investigates computational and social properties of information networks necessary to provide reliable assessments of compliance with rules and policies governing the use of information. In prior research, project leaders have demonstrated that achieving basic social policy goals in open information networks will require increased reliance on information accountability through after-the- fact detection of rule violations. This approach stands in contrast to the traditional mechanisms of policy compliance in network environments that rely on security technology to enforce rules by denial of access to resources at risk of abuse. So, access-based systems must be supplemented with accountability-based systems. To ensure that accountable systems can provide a stable, reliable, trustworthy basis on which to ground social policy arrangements in the future, it is necessary: 1) to research practical engineering approaches to designing these systems at scale, and 2) to develop a theory of the operating dynamics of accountable systems in order to establish what types of accountability assessments can be made, when those assertions are reliable, and what vulnerabilities accountable systems may have to attack, intrusion and manipulation. The key hypothesis to be tested regarding Information Accountability is that people are more likely to comply with rules (social or legal) if they believe that their non-compliance will be noticed. Successful study and development of accountable systems will ultimately enable real people, communities and institutions to take advantage of Information Accountability as a means of achieving better privacy and compliance with other information usage rules.