The ‘Meanings’ and ‘Enactments’ of Science and Technology: ANT-Mobilities’ Analysis of Two Cases

In this work I study two cases involving practices of science and technology in the backdrop of related and recent curricular reforms in both settings. The first case study is based on the 2005 South Asian earthquake in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan which led to massive losses including large scale injuries and disabilities. This led to reforms at many levels ranging from disaster management to action plans on disability, including educational reforms in rehabilitation sciences. Local efforts to deal with this disaster led to innovative approaches such as the formation of a Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR) model by a local NGO, which I study in detail. The second case study is based on the recent reform of science and technology curriculum in Ontario, which is related to the release of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) reports. With climate change science driving this reform with curricular demands for students to learn ‘what scientists do’, my second case study details the formation of the Canadian CloudSat CALIPSO Validation Project (C3VP) and scientific practices which depict cutting edge science related to climate change. Towards contending with the complexity inherent in these cases, I have developed a hybrid framework which is based on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and the mobilities paradigm while drawing on some aspects of the Annales school of historians. The resulting historical sociology or historiography depicts how these various networks were formed via mobilities of various actor-networks and vice versa. The practices involved in both cases evolved over time and required innovation in times of crises and challenges, and are far more than simple applications of method as required by biomedical and positivist representations of science inherent in both educational reforms. Non-human agency in the form of crisis and disaster also emerges as a key reason for the formation of these networks. Drawing from both cases, I introduce the concept of “transectionalities” as a metaphor which represent configurations of actor-networks in science and technology geared towards dealing with crisis and disaster scenarios. Based on these findings, I also extend the idea of “multiple ontologies” by Mol (2002) to “Epistemic-Ontologic-Techne-” configurations which is sensitive to considerations of time. Moreover, I also find that mathematics is a key mobilizing actor and material semiotic which mediates communication between humans and non-humans and term these dynamics as “mathematical mobilities.” Based on case study one, I also suggest the notion of “affective care” in clinical reasoning, which is based on enhancing the beneficial effect of human to human relationships in these engagements

The Canonical Structure of the First Order Einstein-Hilbert Action with a Flat Background

It has been shown that the canonical structure of the first order Einstein-Hilbert (1EH) action involves three generations of constraints and that these can be used to find the generator of a gauge transformation which leaves the action invariant; this transformation is a diffeomorphism with field-dependent gauge function while on shell. In this paper we examine the relationship between the canonical structure of this action and that of the first order spin-2 (1S2) action, which is the weak field limit of the Einstein-Hilbert action. We find that the weak field limit of the Possion Brackets (PB) algebra of first class constraints associated with the 1EH action is not that of the 1S2 action.Comment: 9 pages, LaTeX2e, published versio

The Apparent Velocity and Acceleration of Relativistically Moving Objects

Although special relativity limits the actual velocity of a particle to $c$, the velocity of light, the observed velocity need not be the same as the actual velocity as the observer is only aware of the position of a particle at the time in the past when it emits the detected signal. We consider the apparent speed and acceleration of a particle in two cases, one when the particle is moving with a constant speed and the other when it is moving with a constant acceleration. One curious feature of our results is that in both cases, if the actual velocity of the particle approaches $c$, then the apparent velocity approaches infinity when it is moving toward the observer and $c/2$ when it is moving away from the observer.Comment: 9 pages, LaTeX forma