Synopses & Reviews
During the tech boom, Silicon Valley became one of the most concentrated zones of wealth polarization and social inequality in the United States--a place with a fast-disappearing middle class, persistent pockets of poverty, and striking gaps in educational and occupational achievement along class and racial lines. Low-wage workers and their families experienced a profound sense of exclusion from the techno-entrepreneurial culture, while middle class residents, witnessing up close the seemingly overnight success of a “new entrepreneurial” class, negotiated both new and seemingly unattainable standards of personal success and the erosion of their own economic security.
The Burdens of Aspiration explores the imprint of the regions success-driven public culture, the realities of increasing social and economic insecurity, and models of success emphasized in contemporary public schools for the regions working and middle class youth. Focused on two disparate groups of students--low-income, “at-risk” Latino youth attending a specialized program exposing youth to high tech industry within an “under-performing” public high school, and middle-income white and Asian students attending a “high-performing” public school with informal connections to the tech elite--Elsa Davidson offers an in-depth look at the process of forming aspirations across lines of race and class. By analyzing the successes and sometimes unanticipated effects of the schools' attempts to shape the aspirations and values of their students, she provides keen insights into the role schooling plays in social reproduction, and how dynamics of race and class inform ideas about responsible citizenship that are instilled in America's youth.
Review
"These essays are valuable first forays into the history of prosthetics." -Technology and Culture,
Review
"Wonderfully imaginative and skillfully done, Davidson offers a searing assessment of the aspirations and asymmetries in attainment for working-class and middle-class youth as they navigate the real and imaginary geography of Silicon Valleys techno-entrepreneurial landscape, confronting vast economic uncertainties in search of success."-Amy L. Best,author of Fast Cars, Cool Rides: The Accelerating World of Youth and Their Cars
Review
“Davidson evokes the particulars of unequal schooling framed by the politics and economy of Silicon Valley. Davidson compares students management of aspirations as they try to grow into responsible, always flexible, citizens as the schools communicate to them that they are either at risk or exceptional. The students emerge in this rich account as both fully human and deeply conflicted members of a harshly polarized world.”-Brett Williams,American University
Synopsis
From the wooden teeth of George Washington to the Bly prosthesis, popular in the 1860s and boasting easy uniform motions of the limb, to today's lifelike approximations, prosthetic devices reveal the extent to which the evolution and design of technologies of the body are intertwined with both the practical and subjective needs of human beings.
The peculiar history of prosthetic devices sheds light on the relationship between technological change and the civilizing process of modernity, and analyzes the concrete materials of prosthetics which carry with them ideologies of body, ideals, body politics, and culture.
Simultaneously critiquing, historicizing, and theorizing prosthetics, Artificial Parts, Practical Lives lays out a balanced and complex picture of its subject, neither vilifying nor celebrating the merger of flesh and machine.
Synopsis
The peculiar history of prosthetic devices sheds light on the relationship between technological change and the civilizing process of modernity, and analyzes the concrete materials of prosthetics which carry with them ideologies of body, ideals, body politics, and culture.
About the Author
Katherine Ott is a curator of Science, Medicine, and Society at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, which houses the largest collection of medical artifacts in the U.S.
David Serlin is a research historian and exhibitions curator in the History of Medicine Division at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.
Stephen Mihmis a doctoral candidate in history at New York University.