This dissertation analyzes the sociotechnical practices through which nanoengineering is produced as a new disciplinary and professional site of “innovation for the benefit of society.” I argue that innovation constitutes a rationalizing discourse that serves to justify the establishment of a field, department, and major. Additionally, it serves as an organizing logic that constitutes the nanoengineer as an inherently ethical actor, and nanoengineering as a benefactor of a universalized consumer-subject. I contribute an empirically grounded feminist science studies perspective on how material and discursive practices of innovation rationalize, define, and justify a new scientific discipline; how moral and ethical reasoning is figured within technical practices and pedagogies; and how sociocultural, historical, political, and technical imaginaries figure and are themselves refigured in the constitution of nanoengineering. My analysis is based on an ethnography I conducted from 2010-2014 of one of the world’s first nanoengineering departments and its new undergraduate nanoengineering major, located at the University of California, San Diego. This included observing most of the undergraduate courses; conducting 85 interviews with faculty, students, and administrators; observing a nanoengineering laboratory; participating in department meetings and events; collaborating with the department to produce a new department newsletter; and analyzing the media used in the department and curriculum. More specifically, my dissertation chapters examine how popular culture is enrolled in the consolidation of a new discipline; how a particular ethos, with a moral stance and value positions, gets taught in the context of technical education; how liberal and neoliberal logics of rational individualism, autonomy, and the invisible hand get worked into the material and discursive practices of self-assembly in the nanoengineering laboratory; how the institutional goal of producing human capital manifests in the undergraduate major in the form of entrepreneurialism; how translational research as a paradigm of innovation becomes the right tool for the job of aligning nanoengineering’s commitments to innovation and utility with the institutional imperative to produce intellectual capital; and how the higher-ed science classroom is an important site for considering the ethics and politics of knowledge production. I present my work in both prose and graphic novel style narrative illustration.

Representations of the nineteenth-century American West, including media, reenactments, and edutourism sites have long informed political constructions of ‘Americanness’ in popular culture. The American Western frontier, once hailed “the most American part of

America,” often exemplifies the United States’ perceived distinctness from the rest of the world in respect to individualism, ingenuity, resilience, economic equality, opportunity, and strength (Slatta, 2010; Katz, 1971, p. xii; Turner, 1903). As such, frontier mythology plays a pivotal role in embedding particular notions of race, place, gender, and ‘Americanness’ into our national consciousness. This dissertation focuses on one particular (re)telling of the American West: the ‘birth’ of California as historically and culturally located in San Diego, the site of Europe's first permanent settlement on the Pacific Coast. This examination traces how a particular cultural remembrance of the West remains culturally entrenched not only because of continuous reiteration, as prevalent scholarship generally discusses American Western mythology (Limerick, 1988; Brown, 2007; Smith, 1950), but also on the important ways in which this origin story adapts and shifts over time when aspects of it are no longer serviceable. Charting this evolution through specific cultural, historical, and civic projects of remembrance, this dissertation examines what falls in and out of this narrative in the face of sociocultural, economic, and political change. And it reveals how this origin story’s recalibrations not only ensure its survival and keep the past relevant, but how, despite these repairs, the overall cultural work of the story remains intact: reaffirming notions of American exceptionalism. In doing so, this examination interrogates the ways in which recalibrated forms of racial, social, ideological, and political power work and operate, even--and especially--within seemingly celebratory, festive, and ‘innocent’ American commemorative practices, foregrounding the entangled relationship between memory and politics at the core of our national imagination. Deploying historical, archival, and textual analysis, media archaeology, and visual ethnography methods, this dissertation bridges insights and approaches from Media & Cultural Studies, Performance Studies, and the Learning Sciences to create new knowledge about how we make meaning, imagine a nation, and shape adjacent notions of identity, power, and belonging in the process.

What is malaria? Ackerknecht wrote malaria was “fundamentally social” (1945); anthropologists Kelly and Beisel believe malaria’s “historical, sociological and political life . . . exceeds the moment of the parasitological exchange” (2011). In this dissertation, I argue malaria’s complexities make it impossible to divorce the ontological question (What is malaria?) from the epistemological question of How do we know what we know about malaria? To address these questions, I analyze malaria control efforts in British India and in the Allies’ Pacific campaign of World War II, tracking the creation and institutionalization of knowledge production and control practices, as well as the infrastructures that were created or adapted to control malaria in ways that became natural and common sense. I focus on the articulations and practices of coordination between humans, landscapes, and non-human agents (parasites, mosquitoes, maps, surveys, DDT, etc.) in the resistances and successes of human malaria control practices.

I begin in British India and trace the stabilization of knowledge around the mosquito as the malaria vector and the development of mapping practices central to creating and standardizing understandings and articulations of malaria, as well as in shaping official control policies. Engaging a neglected era in malaria’s history, the rest of the dissertation focuses on the Allies’ Pacific malaria control efforts, analyzing the creation of infrastructures and implementation of practices that helped to articulate malaria as a local, multi-species disease, and significantly lowered malaria infection rates. I follow the work of malariologists, entomologists, parasitologists, engineers, cartographers, cartoonists, and enlisted men through their practices of creating reports, catching and dissecting mosquitoes, conducting and analyzing surveys and blood smears, making maps, creating public health campaigns, and engineering projects that relocated populations of people and reduced or eliminated populations of mosquitoes. These practices and objects required coordination and translation to articulate malaria as a legible object across specializations as well as up and down command hierarchies.

Using civilian and military archival sources, and theories from critical geography, science and technology studies, and communication, this dissertation attends to the complex practices, multi-species coordinations, and work of translation needed for effective malaria control strategies.

Before the Dobbs v. Jackson (2022) decision overturned the constitutional right to abortion, the 21st-century anti-choice movement was focused on establishing informed consent statutes as a means to discourage or prevent abortions. Often titled “A Woman’s Right to Know,” these laws require that patients are warned of alleged risks of breast cancer, infertility, and psychological trauma following abortions. In some states, patients must undergo an ultrasound and wait at least 24-hours before receiving an abortion. These statutes have been shown to delay or hinder care.This dissertation is a genealogy of these informational requirements. I analyze how Roe v. Wade (1973) and ensuing abortion jurisprudence in the 1970s enshrined the abortion right in a medicalized framework of abortion access. This framing eschewed feminists’ requests that women be solely responsible for deciding when and why to undergo an abortion. Instead, the Court articulated a qualified first-trimester privacy right in which pregnant women were tasked with making a responsible abortion decision in consultation with their physician. Through historical and legislative analysis, this dissertation traces how the medicalized right to abortion enabled the later development of informed consent statutes. The informed consent doctrine ideally seeks to protect patient autonomy from medical paternalism. But the noun “patient” acts as a qualifier that configures someone’s autonomy and available choices according to their status as a patient. The doctrine was thus an ideal vehicle for anti-choice efforts to implement restrictions meant to protect abortion patients. It enabled statutes that nominally promoted pregnant women’s autonomy, while infusing informational requirements with religious views of well-being that confused motherhood with health. I argue that the discourse of “abortion regret”, which produced motherhood as the rational, retroactive, even if foregone choice, legitimized these informational requirements. From Roe onwards, pregnant people were tasked with making responsible abortion decisions in light of their health. Throughout the decades, however, 1) how “women’s health” was conceptualized and 2) whether physicians or the State were the rightful shepherds of the abortion decision became battlegrounds for pro- and anti-choice organizing.