Standard Grant: Textiles, Technology, and the Return of Manufacturing in the United States

一般观众摘要 该奖项支持对美国全球化和去工业化的日常影响的研究，正如在一家拥有160年历史的新英格兰小型纺织厂的车间和董事会会议室所看到的那样，这是美国最古老的纺织厂之一。它研究了技术变革在工厂保持业务的努力中的作用;在这样做的过程中，它希望展示当代美国的个人和社区如何从以手工劳动和大规模生产为中心的旧形式的制造业过渡到新的数字化装备。该项目的理论目标是通过开发关于人类-自动机兼容性的更复杂的叙述，为STS中关于工作场所中人类-技术交互的研究做出贡献。该项目将涉及密集的合作工厂为基础的人种学研究和工程项目，涉及工程专业的学生和材料科学和机械工程/机器人高级人员。PI的目标是通过她的研究成果接触到不同的受众。她是一位人类学家，向工程师教授人类学，并重视将人类学的理解带给公众和工程课堂。她将与工程专业的学生分享她在这个项目中的研究成果，作为持续努力的一部分，参与影响工程专业学生在工程工作中做出选择的关键问题。该项目也将成为消费者和商业人士的重要资源;它将指出从纺织品及其制造的社会学生活中吸取的重要教训，包括美国其他制造业的更大教训。技术总结PI旨在分析人们的经验以及沿着纺织厂现场生产过程的这些经验的背景;她计划对总统的目标和压力以及最低工资生产工人的目标和压力给予同等关注。她将利用工程同事的专业知识来分析人类和机械如何在当代美国制造业中共同转变。更广泛地说，她将把人类学方法带到技术史上长期研究的问题中，例如人机交互，工作场所的自动化以及劳动的意义变化。她的分析将包括材料，机械，工人和管理人员之间的关系，以及自动化如何影响所有劳动力水平的人的工作的意义，结构和体验。该项目将参与经济学和STS研究，研究机器人和自动化是否有一天会使人类劳动过时。她的工作假设是，工人和管理人员采用模拟和数字技术相结合的方式，以寻求以新颖的、未被充分研究的方式继续在国内制造。她的目标是打破机器人将取代人类在工作场所的流行叙事，假设数字技术和流程可以让工人就业，并可以刺激新的感官体验，而不仅仅是消除它们。

General Audience Summary This award supports a study of the daily impact of globalization and deindustrialization in the US, as seen on the shop floor and in the boardroom of a small 160-year-old New England textile mill, one of the oldest in the US. It examines the role of technological change in efforts of the mill to stay in business; in doing so, it expects to show how individuals and communities in the contemporary US transition from an old form of manufacturing centered on manual labor and mass production to a new digitally equipped one. The theoretical aim of the project is to contribute to studies in STS on human-technology interactions in the workplace by developing more complex narratives about human-automata interchangeability. The project will involve both intensive collaborative factory-based ethnographic research and engineering projects involving engineering students and senior personnel in materials science and mechanical engineering/robotics. The PI aims to reach a diverse audience with her research findings. She is an anthropologist who teaches anthropology to engineers, and values bringing anthropological understandings to public audiences and into the engineering classroom. She will share her research findings from this project with engineering students as part of a continual effort to engage with critical questions that impact the choices engineering students make in their engineering work. The project will also be an important resource for consumers and business people; it will point to important lessons to be learned from the sociological life of textiles and their fabrication, including larger lessons for other manufacturing in the US.Technical Summary The PI aims to analyze the experiences of people and the contexts of those experiences all along the production process at the textile factory site; she plans to pay equal attention to the goals and stresses of the president and to those of the minimum-wage production worker. She will leverage the expertise of engineering colleagues to analyze how humans and machinery are transformed together in contemporary US manufacturing. More broadly, she will brings anthropological methods to long-studied questions in the history of technology, such as human-machine interaction, automation in the workplace, and the changing meanings of labor. Her analysis will include relationships among materials, machinery, workers, and managers, and how automation impacts the meaning, structure, and experience of work for people at all workforce levels. The project will engage with work in economics and in STS studies on whether robotics and automation will someday render human labor obsolete. Her working hypothesis is that workers and managers enroll a combination of analog and digital technologies in their quest to continue manufacturing domestically in novel, understudied ways. She aims to disrupt the popular narrative that robots will replace humans in the workplace, by hypothesizing that digital technology and processes can keep workers employed and can stimulate novel sensory experiences as opposed to merely eliminating them.