Gary Lee Downey

Gary Lee Downey presenting

Biography

Gary Lee Downey, trained as a mechanical engineer with a B.S. from Lehigh and as a cultural anthropologist with a Ph.D. from Chicago. He is Alumni Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech. He describes himself as an ethnographic listener.

He joined Virginia Tech in 1983 to help build the graduate program in science and technology studies, after helping build a comparable undergraduate program at Michigan Tech. He was conferred emeritus status by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors in 2022.

He has published five books, 55 peer-reviewed articles and chapters, and given more than 150 presentations. He chaired 18 Ph.D. committees.

He was elected president of the Society for Social Studies of Science in 2012 and served from 2013 to 2015. He is a fellow of the American Anthropological Association.

Awards include the Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award in 2011, the commonwealth's highest honor for faculty; the 4S STS Infrastructure Award in 2019; the American Society for Engineering Education's Sterling Olmsted Award for distinguished contributions to liberal education in engineering education; and, at Virginia Tech, the William E. Wine Award in 2004 for career excellence in teaching, the XCaliber Award, and the Diggs Teaching Scholar Award. His work has been cited more than 4,500 times.

Projects

Cyborg Anthropology

Downey, with Joseph Dumit and Sarah Williams, published "Cyborg Anthropology" in Cultural Anthropology in 1995, the paper that proposed the term as a research program for the discipline rather than as a metaphor. The same year he and Dumit edited Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies, which grew out of a School of American Research advanced seminar.

The volume sets two problems side by side. The Citadel problem concerns how science acquires the authority to determine what counts as true. The Cyborg problem concerns the boundary between humans and machines, and how science, technology, and medicine participate in making everyday lives and selves. The field sites include a prenatal sonogram clinic, an inner-city AIDS clinic, a molecular biotechnology lab, a conference on Marfan syndrome, a brain imaging center, a particle physics lab, and an undergraduate engineering program.

Engineering Studies

Downey co-founded engineering studies as a subdiscipline. The infrastructure he built for it includes the International Network for Engineering Studies, the indexed journal Engineering Studies, which he co-founded and edited for a decade, a book series at MIT Press, and the Global Engineering series at Morgan & Claypool. He also led the process that expanded the Liberal Education Division of the American Society for Engineering Education to include Engineering in Society.

The premise he brought to Virginia Tech in 1983 was that engineers could become leaders in anticipating and addressing the social effects of new technologies. His research examines the relationship between the technical and nontechnical dimensions of engineering education and practice, and how that relationship changes over time and from place to place. He calls his own approach critical participation in discussions and debates about engineering education, research, practice, policy, and representation.

Engineering Cultures

A long-running undergraduate curriculum, later produced in a multimedia version, designed to help engineering students reflect critically on their own knowledge, identities, and commitments.

STS Making and Doing

Downey led the founding of this movement beginning in 2014. It theorizes and enacts engaged science and technology studies scholarship, with particular attention to forms of expressing knowledge that go beyond the academic paper or book. It now has a dedicated program at the 4S annual meeting, and members responding to a society survey named it the most exciting recent development in 4S.

Selected Works

• Downey, Gary Lee, Joseph Dumit, and Sarah Williams. "Cyborg Anthropology." Cultural Anthropology 10, no. 2 (1995): 264-269.
• Downey, Gary Lee, and Joseph Dumit, eds. Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1997.
• Downey, Gary Lee. The Machine in Me: An Anthropologist Sits Among Computer Engineers. New York: Routledge, 1998.
• Han, Kyonghee, and Gary Lee Downey. Engineers for Korea. Morgan & Claypool, 2014.
• Downey, Gary Lee, and Kacey Beddoes, eds. What Is Global Engineering Education For? The Making of International Educators. Morgan & Claypool, 2011.

Further Reading

• Cyborgs and Citadels
• Cyborgs & Citadel s: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies
• Cyborgs@Cyberspace?: An Ethnographer Looks to the Future
• An Illustrated Dictionary of Cyborg Anthropology
• Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
• The Cyborg Handbook
• Careers in Digital Anthropology

External Links

• Personal site, Virginia Tech
• Google Scholar
• 2019 STS Infrastructure Award citation, 4S