Concern about the growing rate of obesity in the United States and globally has been constructed as a public health problem referred to as the “obesity epidemic.” Massive public health efforts have been marshalled to address this concern, all premised upon a hegemonic idea about the meaning, measure, and etiology of obesity. This meaning of obesity is presented to the public as a matter of settled science. However, a close reading of the scientific literature reveals multiple, ongoing disputes and controversies within the field of weight science around the meaning, measurement, and control of obesity. This dissertation applies a Science and Technology Studies (STS) lens to the obesity epidemic. Using social worlds analysis and the STS tradition of controversy studies to analyze multiple, on-going debates within weight studies with their resultant contests over authority, validity and meaning-making around obesity I trace the history of three debates within weight-science: the crisis of evidence around long-term weight maintenance, the “obesity paradox,” and the growing support for a Health At Every Size approach to weight. I further investigate the public impacts of knowledge production around obesity through a discussion of weight-related stigma and an ethnographic analysis of fat activist online spaces (sometimes referred to as the Fat-O-Sphere). These groups represent both implicated others and lay-experts in knowledge production about the obesity epidemic.

This study combines archival research and oral history interview data to construct a single case temporal comparison of organizational reforms in the National Cancer Institute (NCI) that were designed to foster innovation by directing basic science findings around virally induced cancers toward the development of vaccines. This project is poised to make a significant contribution by addressing an unresolved theoretical problem: how can sociologists and interdisciplinary science, technology, and society (STS) scholars understand how formal organizations affect scientific knowledge production and innovation? My work contributes to sociological theory and the sociology of culture by offering a coherent theoretical framework that unifies process theories of organization and pragmatist social theory. I develop this “pragmatist process theory of organization” to analyze organizational culture as a temporal process comprising iterative cycles of meaning-making anchored in sequences of organizational problem-solving. I apply this pragmatist process theory of organization to analyze virus-cancer research programs under organizational cultures of “targeted research” in 1961-1976 and “translational research” in 1991-2008.

In each period, I show how NCI researchers drew upon local understandings of the relationship between basic and applied science articulated in these organizational cultures to address the scientific and administrative problems they faced around routine organizational events. Over time, sequences of problem-solving fed back into strategic planning and collaborative scientific practices to further articulate these organizational cultures in ways that affected science going forward. In the first period, this process yielded consensus around a limited number of RNA and herpes-like viruses identified early in the development of the program. Priority-setting around operational reporting and contract funding allowed virus-cancer program scientists to justify de-prioritizing DNA viruses more promising for vaccine development, such as hepatitis-B. In the second period, the ambiguity of cultural understandings of translation encouraged a more dispersed collaborative structure. This cultivated an environment of distributed cognition based on fluid and dynamic collaborations that utilized emerging technologies to develop a biomedical innovation—the HPV vaccine. Arguing against existing models, I show how the substantive understandings embedded in organizational cultures as they are produced over time provide centripetal or centrifugal forces that make a difference in the possibilities for innovation.

Recent theoretical interventions have clarified how city dwellers claim their rights to a city are entangled with urban infrastructure and city governance. This focus on the technicalities of a city and urban governance helps scholars to analyze the material, empirical realities of citizenship, which has been reflected in philosophical discourses of modernity. Scholars have discussed how the crisis of city dwellers’ rights has occurred along the ways that neoliberal urbanism has caused the breakdowns of public infrastructure as well as sustainability issues have jeopardized the legitimacy of urban planners and designers in urban governance. What is lacking is an investigation of how the recent ascendancy of reflexive methodologies in planning and design gives rise to the rationalities that problematize the forms of urban infrastructure and the fields of city governance, which reshape the lived experiences of city dwellers’ rights in the post-neoliberal times.

This dissertation fills the gap by examining urban regeneration in Seoul, South Korea over the last two decades. It traces a shift in urban planning and design from established, top-down interventions to designerly interventions that mobilize reflexive methodologies, which originate from behavioral economics, cognitive sciences, and data sciences, to endeavor to be human-scaled, inclusive, and participatory. Empirically investigating the construction of public squares, the establishment of new street markets, and residents-driven urban regeneration in low-income neighborhoods, this dissertation shows how designerly interventions aim at creating an assortment of human-scaled infrastructural devices to mediate the human-environmental feedback, which renders infrastructure work without malfunction and failure. The identification of infrastructural devices in designerly interventions explains how the legitimacy crisis of experts in urban planning is strategically mobilized, namely, how the ignorance of planners and designers is arranged to fashion laypersons not as recipients of infrastructure but as its producers. This dissertation shows how designerly interventions make city dwellers claim their rights as “city-users” who participate in designing human-scaled infrastructural devices and possess rights as a practical capacity to live well. Finally, it develops new modes of critical inquiry to diagnose the danger of designerly intervention that is lurking in its seemingly reflexive methodologies.

This dissertation is a multi-sited ethnography of the valuation of used clothing in Poland and the United Kingdom (UK), along one of the world’s major value chains of used clothing. The central question guiding this research is: How is used clothing made valuable? Economic sociology has long been concerned with understanding the workings of cultural logics of exchange and the social mechanisms that make economic valuation possible. Studies of valuation in economic sociology and neighboring disciplines are increasingly pragmatic and situated in concrete material contexts, focusing on the constitutive use of material devices and infrastructures in the production of value. This dissertation focuses on the objects of exchange, how they are produced, and what role those material-semiotic objects play in relations of exchange, evaluation, and value production. Data are drawn from participant observation, in-depth, semi-structured interviews with key informants, and informal interviews in sites of collection, sorting, and retail in the UK and Poland. Analysis is informed by theoretical approaches to commodities, gifts, and waste from economic sociology, anthropology, human geography and Science and Technology studies. Four empirical chapters trace the movement of used clothing from donation through resale. In UK charity shops, commodities and gifts are produced alongside each other in competing assemblages. The wholesale market for collected textiles produces commodities by balancing value production with concerns of waste production. In the Polish retail market, sellers must produce knowable and desirable commodities from heterogeneous things. Polish consumers judge the quality and value of used clothing in material encounters. In each of these spaces, used clothing is made valuable through its material and symbolic production as gifts, commodities, and waste. This dissertation contributes to economic sociological studies of commodification and valuation with a discussion of the valuation of heterogeneous, non-standardized goods. This is the first research carried out on the global used clothing industry in an Eastern European country and in a country that is a major re-exporter of used clothing.

In recent years, one of the primary topics in human genetics discourse has been the diversity problem, or the fact that most published analyses are conducted in near-exclusively European ancestry populations. To rectify the diversity problem and ensure that genomic applications do not exacerbate existing population health disparities, new initiatives have focused on recruiting “underrepresented” and “underserved” communities into genomic studies. These initiatives, in turn, have reignited the conversation about how to distance population categories used in genomics from race realism, and launched a new debate about the meaning of health equity in the context of genomic knowledge and applications. This dissertation examines how the concept of “population” has come to be so critical and yet so uncertain in genomic research, and what some of the consequences of this ambiguity have been as genomic technologies make their way into healthcare. I focus specifically on how population concepts are intertwined with notions of population health management, in the historical intersections between genetics and epidemiology, and in the contemporary projects of precision health research and genetic risk screening. Using an historical genealogy of the discipline of genetic epidemiology, I first show how the statistical style of scientific reasoning shared between population genetics and epidemiology enabled a form of methodological interdisciplinarity, even as the meaning of population health research has become more of a tension between the fields. Second, using case studies of NIH’s All of Us Research Program and Geisinger Health’s MyCode project, I demonstrate how the translation of genomic research into technologies for genetic risk detection exacerbates this tension by creating new forms of populations at-risk. This project draws together medical sociology’s interest in the structural causes of health outcomes with science and technology studies’ focus on the coproduction of knowledge and social order, to reveal how genetic understandings of populations redefine population health. I show that the process through which genomics has become a population-based science has also rendered it distinctly unable to respond to fundamental causes of health inequalities, forcing the field to into repeat conflicts over the meaning of racial and ethnic categories in social and biological terms.

This work is an ethnographic and ethnomethodological study of the community of an interdisciplinary genomics laboratory in San Diego, California. Twenty-first century genomics laboratories require this community in order to conduct their research. This study takes “community” in a broad, encompassing sense, including not only the human but also biological and technological agents of the lab. Brought together in situated, co- operative interaction, these phenomena make up an ecology. This ecology is brought about by interconnections between agents and their environment as they develop through unfolding interaction. As such, this study is focused on the ways that situations in the laboratory organize their inhabitants rather than the other way around. In this, it proposes a radically social perspective. This study specifies its topics in that everyday, ordinary, and developing work. It sets these topics amidst the history of molecular biology and bioinformatics as well as a blend of feminist and ethnomethodological theory. Based on four years of ethnographic observation and participation, video recordings and analysis, this study also reflexively incorporates the ethnographer and explores new possibilities for ethnomethodological video and its analysis.

This dissertation examines the nuances of multidisciplinary teamwork on a biometric device to fingerprint newborns. Since 2015 a group of engineers, medical professionals, social scientists, and designers have worked on a non-contact scanner that would capture infant fingerprints and create a digital record of one’s identity for vaccination purposes. My research opens critical space for imagining alternatives for the two competing perspectives of either infant biometrics as the pure evil or the ultimate solution for all problems.I analyze an online collaboration software called Slack, which the team used, as an additional lens in my ethnographic account of the team. I examine to what extent Slack mirrors offline team interactions and project progress. My research shows how to visualize the team’s multidisciplinary collaboration throughout the project, the phases of biometric design by discipline, and what the limitations of such representations are. I observe how the team wanted to go beyond just making a tool and redesign the whole healthcare delivery system to make it more equitable and accessible. Unable to solve all global health problems, after conducting multiple tests in the field, the project ends up centered on the technical side of making a device work. I also find how ethics is practiced from distinct disciplinary vantage points in the daily entanglements of limited resources and interpersonal relationships. At the team level, I demonstrate which concerns are voiced and draw attention to the role of the team leader in many key decisions. At the project level, the story of a particular biometric device is an invitation for a dialogue between those who make technologies of the future, and those who are rightfully skeptical and emphasize the unintended consequences of any biometrics. Ultimately, I suggest an approach to the biometric device not as one static deliverable but as a boundary object that brings together all the different stakeholders. I demonstrate how human the making of future technologies is; and how from numerous daily interactions the final device is created, influenced by people who, at some point, participate in the project as employees, volunteers, and study participants.

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