Search

This dissertation studies the emergence of an economic technocracy in Colombia between 1948 and 1974. It accounts for the advent of professional economists as experts and shows how they succeeded at carving their way into the state to intervene in economic decision-making. Before the mid-twentieth century, men with practical knowledge about public and private finances had generally overseen the administration of economic affairs. In the period under consideration in this dissertation, economics departments and research centres were established in universities, allowing state institutions to incorporate a new type of specialist with a more technically and scientifically grounded expertise about the economy. Based on research in Colombian and US archives as well as interviews, this dissertation explores the resulting professionalisation of economics and institutionalisation of economic expertise in the state. It shows that these processes were embedded in the redemocratisation project of the National Front (1958-1974), following a decade of political turmoil during La Violencia (1948-1957). They were also shaped by the transnational exchanges with foreign actors and institutions that the post-WWII international order made possible for governments in developing countries. Colombia became a favorite client of multilateral institutions and philanthropic foundations, which sponsored several development and technical assistance missions to this country from the late-1940s to the mid-1970s. Hence, the Colombian case provided a privileged lens to analyse more broadly how the transnational circulation of expertise about economic development in the post-WWII period triggered the educational and institutional reforms that entrenched the position of economists in government.

This thesis examines the politics of country of origin information (COI). This form of knowledge production is of crucial importance to all those involved in refugee status determination procedures, especially asylum seekers. But while the recent expansion, professionalisation and standardisation of COI in Europe is striking, so far, its effects on asylum regimes has received insufficient attention. The aims of this thesis are both empirical and theoretical. On the one hand, it provides detailed analyses of the ways in which country of origin information is produced and used. On the other hand, these accounts serve to advance the debate on the politics of knowledge in migration management. The investigation begins with a public knowledge controversy over two COI reports in the UK, revealing the various practices and arrangements involved in stabilising asylum-relevant knowledge. This is followed by an ethnographic analysis of knowledge practices at the COI unit in Austria. Using the concept of 'tinkering' from science and technology studies, the ad hoc character of COI research is described and specified in relation to decision-makers. Next, the thesis examines the role of COI in realising the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). It demonstrates that the harmonisation of country research between Member States and experimental engagements with civil society enact different imaginaries of European order. The thesis then addresses the appropriation of COI in the Dutch immigration courts. Drawing on Foucault, it highlights the way in which COI both underpins decision and, at the same time, is contested in court. Finally, the way in which citizen researchers produce COI is further explored with Asylos. It shows that the efforts of citizen researchers address the lack of care in current asylum systems. The findings of this thesis contribute to the literature (at the intersection) of migration studies and science and technology studies. They indicate that COI is a powerful object for migration government that risks objectification of asylum seekers and bypassing legal procedures. But the results also underline that COI is an uncertain, fragile and agonistic object that gathers a whole range of publics and their struggles. The thesis therefore also has implications for practitioners, as it provides an opportunity to rethink knowledge practices and arrangements so that they better address the concerns of those seeking protection.

The following study investigates German dystopian literature. Until now, such literature has been subsumed under the much broader and poorly defined utopian genre. As a result, German dystopianism has not yet been identified as a coherent cultural phenomenon. A primary aim of the project is therefore to establish the field of dystopian research in the German context. At the heart of the dissertation are four works, which I consider representative of the genre: Bernhard Kellermann's novel Der Tunnel (1913), Georg Kaiser's Gas plays (1917-1920), and two works by Ernst Jünger: Der Arbeiter (1932) and Gläserne Bienen (1957). Besides novelists and playwrights, close attention is paid to various contemporary thinkers, from the industrialist Walther Rathenau and the anarchist Gustav Landauer to the conservative philosophers Friedrich Georg Jünger and Martin Heidegger. In many cases, such figures were in direct contact with my primary authors. Georg Kaiser routinely ran his manuscripts past Landauer, while the work of Heidegger and the Jünger brothers is closely interrelated. The latter two were both in the audience when Heidegger first presented his 'Frage nach der Technik' in Munich in 1953. Following this interdisciplinary approach, the dissertation also contains 35 images, including contemporary stage designs and examples from Jünger's numerous photo anthologies. As my research shows, German dystopias are characterised by a set of recurring themes: massification and the end of the individual, the (social) engineer or technocrat, anti-rationalism, and technology. The genre turns against the progressivist optimism of the nineteenth century and takes inspiration from both Rathenau's notion of the "mechanization of the world" (coined in 1912) and the contemporary reception of America ("Americanism"). The latter phenomenon turns out to be central to the development of dystopian literature across Europe. A further, defining characteristic of the genre is a widely denied anti-utopianism. The reflexive denial of this characteristic in the scholarship points, not least, towards a sloppy understanding of utopia as a concept. Far from a benign longing for a better world, the term denotes the desire to re-engineer humanity, which is conceived as dangerously deficient in the utopian imagination. The thesis thus challenges prevailing conceptions of utopia, which is revealed as fundamentally misanthropic.

This thesis explores the role of partisanship in shaping the policy choices and legitimizing discourses of governments during the global financial crisis. To do this, it uses comparative case studies, examining the experience of left- and right-wing governments in both the UK and Spain between 2008 and 2014. The study combines analytical narratives with content-discourse analysis, drawing on an original corpus of political speeches. This research finds that, under significant political-economic constraints, parties make choices contrary to their partisan identity. Following the global financial crisis, conservative governments bailed out private banks with public funds. Liberal parties previously committed to 'tax-cuts-always-work' raised taxes across the board and social-democratic governments slashed public spending in the wake of the Great Recession. The dissertation also finds that parties across the ideological spectrum adapt their legitimization discourses. Appeals to ideological discourses of left and right lose traction as these appeals become less effective in justifying parties' choices in an ideologically coherent way. In their place, other political discourses gain salience as legitimization strategies for policy choice. In particular, governments increasingly appeal to expertise and competence (technocracy), legality and legal obligations (legalism) and emergencies and exceptions (exceptionalism). The comparative analysis finds in both the British and Spanish cases a form of what the thesis calls constrained partisanship. All four governments adapted their crisis choices as a consequence of external constraints. Yet the analysis also reveals two relevant differences. As a result of euro membership, the Spanish executives governed under more severe constraints than their British counterparts. Consequently, the way in which constrained partisanship emerged in each national context was different. In constraining partisanship, the actual effects of political-economic constraints were decisive in the Spanish case. In contrast, the internalisation of those constraints by the Labour and Tory leaders were more determinant than their actual effects. In the UK and Spain, nonetheless, politicians governed most of the time as if they were deeply constrained to act in certain ways. As a result, left- and right-wing governments adapted their legitimization discourses. The corpus analysis shows that the leaders of the four governments relied on technocratic, legalistic and exceptionalist claims to justify key policy measures throughout the crisis. At critical moments, different parties ended up speaking the same political language. Looking at economic policymaking and party discourses, this study offers a more encompassing understanding of constrained government. In doing so, the thesis contributes to an ongoing inter-disciplinary debate about the changing nature of partisanship in European politics. Technocratic, legalistic and exceptionalist discourses cut across ideological and party lines. The endurance of these discourses questions the relevance of the language of left and right as a way of making sense of political competition in contemporary European democracies.

This thesis examines the communication strategy of the UK nuclear industry between 1975 to 1990. By refocusing the histories of this long-standing and contentious industry, I change our understanding of how the publicly funded nuclear industry saw and negotiated with, the UK publics. It makes new arguments about how nuclear science was communicated in post-war Britain and explores the inner workings of one of the best-funded industrial science communication projects during the period. The sixth report on nuclear power from the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution intensified opposition to nuclear power and pushed the industry to reimagine how it communicated with the public. I argue that this required the industry to not just present data that showed that nuclear power was safe but to actively demonstrate it. Using previously unexplored primary material, I show that while the focus of the industry's efforts was at public inquiries, it was through demonstrations, lectures, and the development of visitor centres where the industry used new communication methods for making not just a scientific argument for nuclear power, but an emotional one as well. Nevertheless, while the industry embarked on these new public relation ventures, it also maintained an extensive lobbying effort within the UK parliament, to ensure it maintained its legitimacy to exist. This lobbying effort spilt into its wider public relations effort as key industry figures such as Lord Walter Marshall and Sir John Hill created a hierarchy of communication, whereby decision-makers and influential people, such as parliamentarians and journalists were the focus of its communication strategy. While populations around nuclear sites also received additional attention in comparison to the wider public. The conclusion of this thesis reflects on what this untold history means for how we understand how the UK government and public bodies communicate science and how we view the relationship between government, parliament, and industry.

Managerial practices such as strategic planning, audit, and performance appraisal pervade global governance regimes, including the regime of international criminal justice (ICJ). The mainstream view is that such practices are objective tools which optimise institutional performance and thereby assist them in attaining their goals. Against this view, I offer an alternative understanding of managerial practices. Viewing international criminal justice as a technocratic imaginary, and defining managerial practices as tools of power/knowledge, I explore the discursive effects of management upon the contemporary project of ICJ. I problematize the assumptions inherent in the mainstream approach to managerial practices, relying on critical international law and critical management scholarship to provide a comprehensive sociology and history of management. Employing a genealogical method, I trace the historical journey of managerial practices from the steel factories of the American Midwest to the structures of the United Nations after decolonization. This genealogy reveals the political significance of management as a set of tools deployed to reinforce extant distributions of institutional power. At the International Criminal Court (ICC), I trace the expansion of managerial practices and find them to have certain reality- and identity-making effects on the organisation and its professional staff. Managerial practices produce the court as an efficient, modern institution, reinforcing the image of ICJ as the optimal allocation of institutional resources by experts. Such practices also produce the identity of the ICC lawyer as an efficient cog in the ICJ machine. Collectively, managerial practices enact a discursive closure around an institutional and expert-driven ICJ project. That discursive closure is illustrated further in two detailed studies: the ICC Presidency and the reorganisation of the Registry. Demonstrating the mechanics of managerial knowledge, the thesis reveals how international criminal justice is governed.

This thesis is an exploration of liberalism in Romania and in anthropology. Liberalism is frequently represented in contemporary anthropology as a hegemonic technocratic practice, rationalist ideology and hypocritically exclusionary politics. I challenge this representation through an ethnography of a British-Romanian rural revitalisation and conservation programme in the Saxon villages region of southern Transylvania, Romania, and the vernacular liberalism of the cosmopolitan youth who have taken this project up. Douglas Holmes has asserted that in the European Union (EU) in the twenty-first century, communities and people are experimenting with new identity projects that fuse the liberal and illiberal in innovative ways. I trace how the rural revitalisation programme brought together romantic, "integralist" visions of the Saxon villages with the EU's liberal technologies of governance to create a set of projects the value of which could be translated between diverse sets of actors, from British tourists through European bureaucrats and Transylvanian farmers. This provided local youth with the possibility of making a life in their home region in a context of significant economic decline and massive emigration. The seemingly disparate liberal and romantic elements, initially brought together in a transnational context, were "domesticated" by Transylvanian liberals as complementary resources that could be mobilised to combat entrenched problems of Romanian society and modernity, as liberals saw it, notably the failure of the state to provide key services and the stagnation of the public sphere. The state's failures had led liberals to abandon it is a source of hope, turning instead to voluntary action, which made the dilemmas of how to mobilise engaged publics all the more crucial. Village liberals' attempts to foster such publics frequently ended up reproducing their own marginality, however. Against conventional representations of liberalism, I argue that its technocratic pretensions can be an object of hope in a milieu where expertise is perceived to be absent as much as an institutional hegemony. I further conclude that the multiple ways in which the liberal and the romantic are combined challenges dominant images of liberal ideology and practice as purely abstract and formal.

Fierce political and ideological upheaval, world wars, and economic distress characterized the years between 1910 and 1950. As more traditional forms of politics appeared to fail, three renowned British biologists —J.B.S. Haldane, J.D. Bernal, and Julian Huxley—used their scientific stature to promote their vision of technocracy: government controlled by scientists and engineers. They publicized this vision in science fiction and popular science articles, venues where they were unconstrained by peer review or real-world practicality. My talk will analyze how the three transformed their views on science, evolution, and the future of humankind into technocratic propaganda supporting the government by scientific experts.

This dissertation is an ethnographic study about how “data-driven” technologies are transforming environmental governance in Indonesia. It documents the increasing application of data science techniques by government research agencies to predict peatland fires, and how these techniques are reorganizing the work and livelihoods of technocrats. I argue that the promise of data-driven environmental governance is to create order out of uncertainty in rural Indonesia. This promise to quantify and control uncertainty has expanded the reach of the police and military state in Indonesia, undermining democracy in Indonesia that had largely been considered successful by public commentators internationally. My findings are based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with two government engineering and science research institutions, the National Institute of Aeronautics and Space and the Agency for Application and Assessment of Technology in Indonesia, and with tech corporations and federal science agencies from the United States. I use two case studies to support my argument that peatland fire prediction efforts have motivated the expansion of the military state in Indonesia: 1) the redesign of fire detection algorithms and methodologies developed in collaboration between the National Institute of Aeronautics and Space and North American federal science agencies; and 2) the design and deployment of a peatland fire prediction system using agile software development strategies and data science by the Agency for the Application and Assessment of Technology and the contracted tech corporation IBM. The analyses that follow in this dissertation are inspired by postcolonial science and technology studies (STS) and critical data studies. As part of my dissertation, I show how what was framed as an opportunity to both resolve the failures of technocratic knowledge production and efficiently monitor the environment for endemic fire risk produced a system of automated surveillance upon poor smallholder farmers. Not only were scientists becoming para-law enforcers through the use of predictive technologies, but their datafied predictions rested on cultural stereotypes of farmers as uncivilized subjects who are unable to manage peatland. A aim of the dissertation is to answer the question: how are political responsibility and regulation in Indonesia outsourced to code and predictive systems? What kind of state ideologies and practices are reinforced or transformed as a result? In asking these questions, I situate my research amid literature in critical data studies, examining how it is that algorithms “enact governance” and what this means for a newly democratic country.

This dissertation examines the evolution of a shifting network of experts and elites, interrogating what is considered to be expertise in the context of governance. Through a study of Indian think tanks, political consulting firms, and policy research organisations, I argue that two forms of political legitimacy govern contemporary India: 1) populist politics, which appeals to the masses/majority by defining nationalism through rigid boundaries of caste, class, and religion; and 2) technocratic policy, which produces a consensus of pragmatism and neutralises charges of hyper-nationalism. I emphasise the relational dynamic between the two: they function through different, often contradictory, logics and content yet are able to work towards the same goals in key moments of mutual reinforcement. At its core, this dissertation is motivated by a desire to make sense of how political and policy elites have gradually normalised Hindu supremacy. Through a study of powerful actors and institutions, I examine the: a) mechanics of the process (for example, think tanks, consulting firms, IT cells, government advisory groups, political parties) and b) the emergent multiple discourses they form. Each chapter shows how these mechanisms work through different but interactively linked effects to produce the political field. My research is based on semi-structured interviews with over fifty politicians, policy makers, government officials, consultants, and other socially anointed intellectuals, several years of participant observation (between 2016-2020) in three prominent New Delhi think tanks, and discourse and documentary analysis.

“This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Criminal Justice Ethics on Mar. 16, 2020, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0731129X.2020.1736371." "© 2020 John Jay College of Criminal Justice of The City University of New York."

Este ensayo pretende discutir las ideas que inspiraron la vuelta al “dibujo académico” en las Escuelas de Arquitectura españolas en los años setenta y ochenta, así como las contradicciones en las que este proyecto académico incurriría. No se ahondará una vez más en las distintas teorías del dibujo, la percepción, la creatividad o el proyecto que tanto abundaron en aquellos años, ni tampoco se intentará un relato detallado sobre el inicio de los Departamentos de Expresión Gráfica y sus protagonistas. Lo que se pretende investigar son la causas, diversas y contradictorias, que impulsaron este protagonismo del dibujo en las Escuelas de Arquitectura españolas, que pronto se extendería a la producción arquitectónica. Para ello, este ensayo se situará más allá de los aspectos meramente gráficos del dibujo, para establecer una reflexión sobre la propia disciplina, la figura profesional, la transmisión del conocimiento arquitectónico, así como sobre el papel protagonista que jugaron las escuelas en el contexto arquitectónico del último cuarto del siglo XX.

La política cultural, económica y social del franquismo vino marcada por las características ideológicas del grupo que en cada momento controlaba la agenda del régimen. En un primer periodo (1939-57) esta pugna se establece entre falangistas y el grupo del CSIC/Arbor. En el segundo (1957-75) contenderán para tomar las riendas el grupo falangista y los tecnócratas. Es fácil postular la continuidad de ideas, aunque con personas distintas. Entre los falangistas la realización de su revolución pendiente será la guía de acción. Más problemática es la continuidad del 2º grupo. Es posible identificar vínculos entre los tradicionalistas y la institución religiosa Opus Dei. Pero subsiste la duda sobre la existencia de una estrategia tradicionalista/Opus Dei de control del Estado que se crearía como una plataforma cultural, para más tarde convertirse en proyecto político/económico.

Carbon Technocracy argues for the centrality of fossil fuel energy to the making of global industrial modernity and to the emergence of East Asian technocratic imaginaries in the first half of the twentieth century. It advances the premise that coal and later oil enabled not only the transformation of human society’s material foundations, but also allowed for new kinds of publics and politics.

As an artist in metal living and working in the last part of the twentieth century, I feel it to be important that my work relate to this specific period of time. That is, to look where we are going becomes more important than where we have been. The most powerful single influence on where we are going, in my judgment, is technology. The images of technology, not the things of it, become my starting place. My intent, however, is not merely to celebrate technology. That is an uncritical attitude.

If this is your thesis or dissertation, and want to learn how to access it or for more information about readership statistics, contact us at STARS@ucf.edu