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

Franklin W. Olin College Of Engineering, Needham MA

Investigators

Abstract

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.