Technoscientific Imaginaries

What is it like to be a scientist at the end of the 20th century? How have shifts in power and in assumptions about knowledge affected scientific practice? Who are the people behind the new technologies, and how do they address the difficult moral and professional issues during a time of global change? This work explores these and other important questions at the approach of the next millennium. 24 contributors from a broad range of fields present the voices of the scientists themselves. Through interviews, conversations and memoirs the text presents: Lithuanian physicists who discuss science after Communism and their own fantasies about what Western science is; a Japanese-American woman struggling with her ambivalence over designing nuclear weapons; political activists in India who examine relations among science, environmental politics and government ideology in the aftermath of the Bhopal disaster; and many others, including biologists, physicians, corporate researchers and scientists working with virtual reality and other cutting-edge technologies.