Langdon Winner
| Langdon Winner | |
|---|---|
Langdon Winner at Madrid on July 1, 2010
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| Born |
August 7, 1944 San Luis Obispo, California |
| Occupation | Thomas Phelan Chair, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute |
| Spouse(s) | Gail P. Stuart |
| Children | 3 |
| Website | [2][3] |
Langdon Winner (born August 7, 1944) is Thomas Phelan Chair of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York.
Langdon Winner was born in San Luis Obispo, California on August 7, 1944. He received his B.A. in 1966, M.A. in 1967 and Ph.D. in 1973, all in political science at the University of California, Berkeley.
He has been a professor at Leiden, MIT, University of California, Los Angeles and at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Since 1985 he has been at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; he was a visiting professor at Harvey Mudd College.
Winner lives in New York. He is married to Gail P. Stuart and has three children. His interests include science, technology, American popular culture, and theories of sustainability.
Winner is known for his articles and books on science, technology, and society. He also spent several years as a reporter, rock music critic, and contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine.
In 1980 Winner proposed that technologies embody social relations i.e. power. To the question he poses "Do Artifacts Have Politics?", Winner identifies two ways in which artifacts can have politics. The first, involving technical arrangements and social order, concerns how the invention, design, or arrangement of artifacts or the larger system becomes a mechanism for settling the affairs of a community. This way "transcends the simple categories of 'intended' and 'unintended' altogether, representing “instances in which the very process of technical development is so thoroughly biased in a particular direction that it regularly produces results heralded as wonderful breakthroughs by some social interests and crushing setbacks by others" (Winner, p. 25-6, 1999). It implies that the process of technological development is critical in determining the politics of an artifact; hence the importance of incorporating all stakeholders in it. (Determining who the stakeholders are and how to incorporate them are other questions entirely.)
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