New Books in Science, Technology, and...

Interviews with Scholars of Science, Technology, and Society about their New Books

Science
Social Sciences
1901
Doug Specht, "Mapping Crisis: Participation, Da...
The digital age has thrown questions of representation, participation and humanitarianism back to the fore, as machine learning, algorithms and big data centres take over the process of mapping the subjugated and subaltern...
72 min
1902
M. Newhart and W. Dolphin, "The Medicalization ...
Medical marijuana laws have spread across the U.S. to all but a handful of states. Yet, eighty years of social stigma and federal prohibition creates dilemmas for patients who participate in state programs...
46 min
1903
Li Zhang, "Anxious China: Inner Revolution and ...
Zhang offers an in-depth ethnographic account of how an unfolding “inner revolution” is reconfiguring selfhood, psyche, family dynamics, sociality, and the mode of governing in post-socialist times...
73 min
1904
Michael E. McCullough, "The Kindness of Strange...
Why Give a Damn About Strangers?
32 min
1905
D. Bilak and T. Nummedal, "Furnace and Fugue. A...
In 1618, on the eve of the Thirty Years’ War, the German alchemist and physician Michael Maier published Atalanta fugiens, an intriguing and complex musical alchemical emblem book designed to engage the ear, eye, and intellect..,
55 min
1906
Dan Royles, "To Make the Wounded Whole: The Afr...
In the decades since it was identified in 1981, HIV/AIDS has devastated African American communities...
69 min
1907
Valerie Olson, "Into the Extreme: U.S. Environm...
What if outer space is not outside the human environment but, rather, defines it?
64 min
1908
Kristina M. Lyons, "Vital Decomposition: Soil P...
Lyons presents an ethnography of human-soil relations...
39 min
1909
Rene Almeling, "GUYnecology: The Missing Scienc...
Almeling provides an in-depth look at why we do not talk about men’s reproductive health and this knowledge gap shapes reproductive politics today...
33 min
1910
Scholarly Communication: An Interview with Joer...
Open Access is spelled with a capital O and a capital A at the Public Library of Science (or PLOS, for short), a nonprofit Open Access publisher...
65 min
1911
Ernest Freeberg, "A Traitor to His Species: Hen...
In Gilded Age America, people and animals lived cheek-by-jowl in environments that were dirty and dangerous to man and animal alike...
59 min
1912
Margaret Heffernan, "Uncharted: How to Map and ...
Hefferman explores the people and organizations who aren’t daunted by uncertainty: ‘We are addicted to prediction, desperate for certainty about the future...
33 min
1913
Boel Berner, "Strange Blood: The Rise and Fall ...
In the mid-1870s, the experimental therapy of lamb blood transfusion spread like an epidemic across Europe and the USA. Doctors tried it as a cure for tuberculosis, pellagra and anemia...
56 min
1914
John Whysner, "The Alchemy of Disease" (Columbi...
Whysner offers an accessible and compelling history of toxicology and its key findings....
47 min
1915
Eric Weiner, "The Geography of Genius: Lessons ...
Living, as we do, in a time in which a U.S. president anoints himself “a very stable genius”, we are particularly appreciative of Eric Weiner, a former foreign correspondent for NPR who writes with humility and humor, as he brings us along with him on his travels to times and places that produced genius...
37 min
1916
Arleen Tuchman, "Diabetes: A History of Race an...
Tuchman describes the history of how the perception of diabetes has evolved over the past two centuries...
54 min
1917
Anthony Hodgson, "Systems Thinking for a Turbul...
In the view of Anthony Hodgson, fragmentation of local and global societies is escalating, and this is aggravating vicious cycles...
46 min
1918
Daniel Macfarlane, "Fixing Niagara Falls: Envir...
The first people to record their reactions to the falls in North America were fascinated by its beauty and power...
59 min
1919
Jeremy England, "Every Life is on Fire: How The...
“How did life begin? Most things in the universe aren't alive, and yet if you trace the evolutionary history of plants and animals back far enough, you will find that, at some point, neither were we....
96 min
1920
Thom van Dooren, "The Wake of Crows: Living and...
van Dooren offers an exploration of the entangled lives of humans and crows...
66 min
1921
Robert M. Geraci, "Temples of Modernity: Nation...
What is the relationship between science, religion and technology in Hinduism?
42 min
1922
Yves Citton, "Mediarchy" (Polity Press, 2019)
We think that we live in democracies: in fact, we live in mediarchies...
63 min
1923
James L. Nolan, Jr., "Atomic Doctors: Conscienc...
After his father died, James L. Nolan, Jr., took possession of a box of private family materials. To his surprise, the small secret archive contained a treasure trove of information about his grandfather’s role as a doctor in the Manhattan Project...
38 min
1924
Durba Mitra, "Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and th...
Mitra shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society...
43 min
1925
Robert Kolker, "Hidden Valley Road: Inside The ...
This is the story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease....
43 min