Human societies have not always taken on new technology in appropriate ways. Innovations are double-edged swords that transform relationships among people, as well as between human societies and the natural world. Only through successful cultural appropriation can we manage to control the hubris that is fundamental to the innovative, enterprising human spirit; and only by becoming hybrids, combining the human and the technological, will we be able to make effective use of our scientific and technological achievements.
This broad cultural history of technology and science provides a range of stories and reflections about the past, discussing areas such as film, industrial design, and alternative environmental technologies, and including not only European and North American, but also Asian examples, to help resolve the contradictions of contemporary high-tech civilization.

This second companion volume on engineering studies considers engineering practice including contextual analyses of engineering identity, epistemologies and values. Key overlapping questions examine such issues as an engineering identity, engineering self-understandings enacted in the professional world, distinctive characters of engineering knowledge and how engineering science and engineering design interact in practice. Authors bring with them perspectives from their institutional homes in Europe, North America, Australia\ and Asia. The volume includes 24 contributions by more than 30 authors from engineering, the social sciences and the humanities. Additional issues the chapters scrutinize include prominent norms of engineering, how they interact with the values of efficiency or environmental sustainability. A concluding set of articles considers the meaning of context more generally by asking if engineers create their own contexts or are they created by contexts. Taken as a whole, this collection of original scholarly work is unique in its broad, multidisciplinary consideration of the changing character of engineering practice.

This inclusive cross-cultural study rethinks the nexus between engineering education and context. In so doing the book offers a reflection on contextual boundaries with an overall boundary crossing ambition and juxtaposes important cases of critical participation within engineering education with sophisticated scholarly reflection on both opportunities and discontents. Whether and in what way engineering education is or ought to be contextualized or de-contextualized is an object of heated debate among engineering educators. The uniqueness of this study is that this debate is given comprehensive coverage – presenting both instrumentally inclined as well as radical positions on transforming engineering education. In contextualizing engineering education, this book offers diverse commentary from a range of disciplinary, meta- and interdisciplinary perspectives on how cultural, professional, institutional and educational systems contexts shape histories, structural dynamics, ideologies and challenges as well as new pathways in engineering education. Topics addressed include examining engineering education in countries ranging from India to America, to racial and gender equity in engineering education and incorporating social awareness into the area. Using context as “bridge� this book confronts engineering education head on. Contending engineering ideologies and corresponding views on context are juxtaposed with contending discourses of reform. The uniqueness of the book is that it brings together scholars from the humanities, the social sciences and engineering from Europe – both East and West –  with the United States, China, Brazil, India and Australia.

This second companion volume on engineering studies considers engineering practice including contextual analyses of engineering identity, epistemologies and values. Key overlapping questions examine such issues as an engineering identity, engineering self-understandings enacted in the professional world, distinctive characters of engineering knowledge and how engineering science and engineering design interact in practice. Authors bring with them perspectives from their institutional homes in Europe, North America, Australia\ and Asia. The volume includes 24 contributions by more than 30 authors from engineering, the social sciences and the humanities. Additional issues the chapters scrutinize include prominent norms of engineering, how they interact with the values of efficiency or environmental sustainability. A concluding set of articles considers the meaning of context more generally by asking if engineers create their own contexts or are they created by contexts. Taken as a whole, this collection of original scholarly work is unique in its broad, multidisciplinary consideration of the changing character of engineering practice.

This inclusive cross-cultural study rethinks the nexus between engineering education and context. In so doing the book offers a reflection on contextual boundaries with an overall boundary crossing ambition and juxtaposes important cases of critical participation within engineering education with sophisticated scholarly reflection on both opportunities and discontents. Whether and in what way engineering education is or ought to be contextualized or de-contextualized is an object of heated debate among engineering educators. The uniqueness of this study is that this debate is given comprehensive coverage - presenting both instrumentally inclined as well as radical positions on transforming engineering education. In contextualizing engineering education, this book offers diverse commentary from a range of disciplinary, meta- and interdisciplinary perspectives on how cultural, professional, institutional and educational systems contexts shape histories, structural dynamics, ideologies and challenges as well as new pathways in engineering education. Topics addressed include examining engineering education in countries ranging from India to America, to racial and gender equity in engineering education and incorporating social awareness into the area. Using context as "bridge" this book confronts engineering education head on. Contending engineering ideologies and corresponding views on context are juxtaposed with contending discourses of reform. The uniqueness of the book is that it brings together scholars from the humanities, the social sciences and engineering from Europe - both East and West - with the United States, China, Brazil, India and Australia.

This book discusses the ways in which engineering educators are responding to the challenges that confront their profession. On the one hand, there is an overarching sustainability challenge: the need for engineers to relate to the problems brought to light in the debates about environmental protection, resource depletion, and climate change. There are also a range of societal challenges that are due to the permeation of science and technology into ever more areas of our societies and everyday lives, and finally, there are the intrinsic scientific and technological challenges stemming from the emergence of new fields of "technosciences" that mix science and technology in new combinations. In the book, the author discusses and exemplifies three contending response strategies on the part of engineers and engineering educators: a commercial strategy that links scientists and engineers into networks or systems of innovation; an academic strategy that reasserts the traditional values of science and engineering; and an integrative strategy that aims to combine scientific knowledge and engineering skills with cultural understanding and social responsibility by fostering what the author terms a "hybrid imagination." Professor Jamison combines scholarly analysis with personal reflections drawing on over forty years of experience as a humanist teaching science and engineering students about the broader social, political and cultural contexts of their fields. The book has been written as part of the Program of Research on Opportunities and Challenges in Engineering Education in Denmark (PROCEED), funded by the Danish Strategic Research Council, for which Professor Jamison has served as coordinator.

Human societies have not always taken on new technology in appropriate ways. Innovations are double-edged swords that transform relationships among people, as well as between human societies and the natural world. Only through successful cultural appropriation can we manage to control the hubris that is fundamental to the innovative, enterprising human spirit; and only by becoming hybrids, combining the human and the technological, will we be able to make effective use of our scientific and technological achievements.
This broad cultural history of technology and science provides a range of stories and reflections about the past, discussing areas such as film, industrial design, and alternative environmental technologies, and including not only European and North American, but also Asian examples, to help resolve the contradictions of contemporary high-tech civilization.

The image on the book cover to the right is one of the top news images of our time. Immediately upon seeing it, we asked ourselves, "How could that happen? It would take a miracle " In the providence of God, one of the passengers on board was a Christian fourth-year medical student who got on the flight home to Charlotte, SC, standby, because his residency interviews in New York City, January 15, 2009 were concluded sooner than expected. From the book: "As I took my seat, I pulled out two books I had been reading on the interview trail. One, The Sovereignty of God, by Arthur W. Pink, was a heavy theological book that had been convincing me of just how sovereign God is. The other was a little lighter read, Prince Caspian, by CS Lewis. This is a children's book with great biblical allegories.... "During this time on the taxiway, the flight attendants went through their typical speech of what to do if, "In the unlikely event of a water landing, your seat cushion may be used as a flotation device." I only half-way registered what she said, but I guarantee you, those words will never fly past my brain again, unattended." From the Foreword, by Dr. David Stevens, CEO of the Christian Medical & Dental Associations: "When you're hurtling toward death, the character already developed in you takes over like an auto-pilot, and finds expression in one way or another. In Andrew's case, while others might have screamed in terror, his response was to ask the nearby passengers if he could PRAY with them. Now that's the kind of doctor I want to attend me when things are taking a turn for the worse, or as the saying goes, when it seems like the wings are about to fall off."

The second collection of papers written within the research project, Public Participation and Environmental Science and Technology Options (PESTO). The aim is to compare the reconstitution of environmental science and technology policy in eight European countries. The contention is that the involvement of the general public is crucial for the successful implemantation of policies for "sustainable development" and that, in this regard, the countries of Europe have a great deal to learn from each other's experiences.

Music and song are central to modern culture--social movements to cultural change. Building on their studies of the sixties culture and the theory of cognitive praxis, the authors examine the mobilization of cultural traditions and the formation of new collective identities through the music of activism. Specific chapters examine American folk and country music, black music, music of the sixties, and the transfer of the American experience to Europe. This highly readable book is among the first to link social movement and cultural theory.

The Making of Green Knowledge provides a wide ranging introduction to the politics of the environment and the development of environmental knowledge. Focusing in particular on the quest in recent years for more sustainable forms of socio-economic development, it attempts to place environmental politics within a broad historical perspective, and examines the different political strategies and cultural practices that have emerged. The Making of Green Knowledge is a uniquely personal exploration of the relationship between sustainable development, public participation, and cultural transformation. Through a highly accessible mix of theory, practical analysis and personal reflection it seeks to bring the making of green knowledge to life. Andrew Jamison is an American who has lived in Sweden since 1970 and is now Professor of Technology and Society at Aalborg University, Denmark. He is the co-author with Ron Eyerman of Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach (1991), Seeds of the Sixties (1994) and Music and Social Movements (1998).

"The Sixties." The powerful images conveyed by those two words have become an enduring part of American cultural and political history. But where did Sixties radicalism come from? Who planted the intellectual seeds that brought it into being? These questions are answered with striking clarity in Andrew Jamison and Ron Eyerman's book. The result is a combination of history and biography that vividly portrays an entire culture in transition.
The authors focus on specific individuals, each of whom in his or her distinctive way carried the ideas of the 1930s into the decades after World War II, and each of whom shared in inventing a new kind of intellectual partisanship. They begin with C. Wright Mills, Hannah Arendt, and Erich Fromm and show how their work linked the "old left" of the Thirties to the "new left" of the Sixties. Lewis Mumford, Rachel Carson, and Fairfield Osborn laid the groundwork for environmental activism; Herbert Marcuse, Margaret Mead, and Leo Szilard articulated opposition to the postwar "scientific-technological state." Alternatives to mass culture were proposed by Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, and Mary McCarthy; and Saul Alinsky, Dorothy Day, and Martin Luther King, Jr., made politics personal.
This is an unusual book, written with an intimacy that brings to life both intellect and emotion. The portraits featured here clearly demonstrate that the transforming radicalism of the Sixties grew from the legacy of an earlier generation of thinkers. With a deep awareness of the historical trends in American culture, the authors show us the continuing relevance these partisan intellectuals have for our own age.
""In a time colored by 'political correctness' and theascendancy of market liberalism, it is well to remember the partisan intellectuals of the 1950s. They took sides and dissented without becoming dogmatic. May we be able to say the same about ourselves.""--from Chapter 7

The Making of Green Knowledge provides a wide ranging introduction to the politics of the environment and the development of environmental knowledge. Focusing in particular on the quest in recent years for more sustainable forms of socio-economic development, it attempts to place environmental politics within a broad historical perspective, and examines the different political strategies and cultural practices that have emerged. The Making of Green Knowledge is a uniquely personal exploration of the relationship between sustainable development, public participation, and cultural transformation. Through a highly accessible mix of theory, practical analysis and personal reflection it seeks to bring the making of green knowledge to life. Andrew Jamison is an American who has lived in Sweden since 1970 and is now Professor of Technology and Society at Aalborg University, Denmark. He is the co-author with Ron Eyerman of Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach (1991), Seeds of the Sixties (1994) and Music and Social Movements (1998).

Starting around 1900, technology became a lively subject for debate among intellectuals, writers, and other opinion leaders. The expansion of the machine into ever more areas of social and economic life had led to a need to interpret its meanings in a more comprehensive way than in the past. World War I and its aftermath shifted the terms of this ongoing debate by underlining both the potential dangers of technology and its centrality to modern life.This book examines the broad range of social and intellectual responses to technology in the first four decades of this century, and suggests that these responses set the terms that continue to govern contemporary debates. Focusing on the broader contexts within which intellectual positions are formed, the book highlights the ways in which attitudes toward technology were shaped in a wide variety of national and organizational settings. A common theme is that, in debating technology, people drew on their distinctive national symbols and cultural traditions. By emphasizing the interplay between debates on technology and the making of modernity, the book challenges standard historical accounts of the early twentieth century.Contributors: Ketil G. Andersen, Aant Elzinga, Tor Halvorsen, Mikael Hard, Kjetil Jakobsen, Andrew Jamison, Catharina Landstrom, Conny Mithander, Sissel Myklebust, Dick van Lente, Peter Wagner."