Event Description The Center for STS invites you to attend a lecture by guest speaker Joseph Klett, titled "Organizing Sound: Instruments, Infrastructure, and the Moral Order of Auditory Culture."
How should we hear the world?” This talk presents an ethnography of morality and practice among engineers working to develolp new forms of audio technology. Engineers are responsible for blending science and aesthetics into a single technological form -- despite all the ambiguities this entails. Rather than a competition between idealism and pragmatism, the process of engineering may be better imagined as a reconciliation of abstract values and material culture in interaction. The realization of morality through technical design has real, overt and covert implications for auditory culture at large. By studying situated engineering practices in the broader context of group projects, STS scholars may offer a more nuanced interpretation of moral order in the very making of technology.
Joseph Klett is a sociologist of culture and technology. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the reproduction os knowledge within audio engineering and music education. Prior to joing the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF), Joseph was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. At CHF he conducts research on culture and the regional development of technoscience.
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