I first heard the term,'procrastiwork' from a 2nd year student during my first year in the graduate program in Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer. 'What's that?" I asked Gareth, ever so innocently. Since then, I have become intimately familiar with the word. Especially now that I have some deadlines for my dissertation writing coming up. Let me try and catalog all of the ways that I have WORKED HARD on NOT writing my dissertation in the last ten days:
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I just read chapter 3 of Kyle Siler's dissertation, entitled “Nascent Institutional Strategy in Dynamic Fields: The Diffusion of Social Studies of Science”. Apparently it has been accepted in the American Behavioral Scientist journal which is wonderful news for Siler, and thankfully he has been kind enough to put up an earlier draft on his personal webpage.
Regardless of some limitations (see my comments below), his quantitative data is interesting. It appears that, at the present time, more U.S. science and technology studies scholars are affiliated with (in the following order): (1) general academic/ interdisciplinary departments; (2) sociology departments; (3) science and technology studies departments; (4) history departments. The online version of my co-authored article in Minerva (a science, education and policy journal) with Thomas S. Woodson is currently available from Springer publishing. The unofficial draft copy is available for free on my website. I am excited about my first STS-y publication, and invite feedback from anyone who is interested in providing it.
I have just returned from Woods Hole, Massachusetts near Martha's Vineyard, where I participated in a four day workshop run by Peter Taylor (UMASS-Boston). In the New England Workshop on Science and Social Change, I learned several activities that can help bring about open spaces for dialogue, creative exploration of ideas, and collaborative planning, with the potential of inclusion and empowerment of many diverse participants. I believe that we all came away thinking the experience was very positive. While I found the experience to be very emotionally charged, and thus 'risky', I am also coming back from it excited about the tools that we used and how effective they seemed. I am interested in the potential of such tools as: autobiographical introductions, free-writing, theatre therapy, figure/ground diagramming, narrative therapy, etc. to name a few.
I hope to use such tools to encourage critical thinking among engineering undergraduate students, especially mechanical engineers. |
 AuthorLogan primarily uses this blog to: reflect on policy and professionalization issues in STS (e.g. research funding, discipline formation, skill building, job-hunting, policy applications of STS theory) and to disseminate her own scholarship. Archives
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