New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Colin MilburnView on AmazonColin Milburn's wonderful new book looks carefully and imaginatively at the relationship between nanotechnology and play. Mondo Nano: Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter (Duke University Press, 2015) considers the many ways in which the research methods of nanotech and related fields blend with the practices of gaming, fiction, and fantasy in a world where scientists become gamers and gamers become scientists, a world filled with nanocars, nanotoilets, nanotaurs (nano-scale Minotaurs!), and nanopants. Milburn explores the spaces of this world, from islands to Second Life to a NanoCity. Incorporating chapters that are counted in binary (0000, 0001, 0010, 0011, etc.) and clues to a game hidden inside the narrative (!), Milburn's book embodies the kind of play that the book explores. It's a fun and fabulous work that blends literature, STS, and history.

Somatosphere is "a collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry, psychology and bioethics." Founded in July 2008, Somatosphere has evolved into an innovative platform for collaborative experiments, interdisciplinary exchange, and intellectual community. As such, it reveals how websites–and the communities of discourse that create and read them–have become important sites of intellectual production, authorship, and exchange. In editorial departments such as "In the Journals" and "Web Roundup," authors distill recent scholarly contributions across disciplines and spaces. More recently, the editors have incubated creative digital endeavors such as Commonplaces, a "collaborative cabinet" that itemizes the technological present, with entries devoted to topics such as the petri dish, the brain, and the waiting room. Book Forum invites commentary from a range of authors, representing not only different scholarly disciplines but offering intriguing, timely, and often original angles on recent important texts. Thanks to its editorial vision and the palpable energy of its contributors, Somatosphere has become informative, creative, and essential reading.

James E. StrickView on Amazon"Life must have a father and mother…Science! I'm going to plant a bomb under its ass!" The author of the line above – who scrawled it in his private diary in the midst of a series of experiments in which he thought he was creating structures that were some kind of transitional stage between the living and nonliving – had quite a life. A "midwife to the sexual revolution of the 1960s" who was famed for his work on the science of orgasm, was widely maligned as a charlatan and pseudoscientist, did extensive work on the science of cancer, had his books and instruments publicly burned by the US government, and died in prison: it's hard not to find Wilhelm Reich fascinating. In his new book, James E. Strick reminds us that Reich was also a diligent and accomplished laboratory scientist whose work has potentially important implications for the modern biosciences. Wilhelm Reich, Biologist (Harvard University Press, 2015) takes readers into the making of this modern scientist, from his early relationships with Freud and dialectical materialism, to his work on the orgasm as a kind of "electrophysiological discharge," to his research into potential treatments for cancer. The book concludes by considering why understanding Reich's scientific work matters for us today, including a brief introduction to some recent experimental work related to Reich's research. It is an absorbing story that's also a pleasure to read, and pays careful attention to Reich's scientific work while still translating it in clear terms for non-specialist readers.

Joseph M. ReagleView on AmazonWhat do we know about the individuals who make comments on online news stories, blogs, videos and other media? What kind of people take the time to post all manner of information and context to material created by others? Joseph M. Reagle, assistant professor of communication studies at Northeastern University and a faculty associate at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, examines these online pontificators and provocateurs in his new book Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web (MIT, 2015). Reagle categorizes the different kinds of comments, thereby organizing the different kinds of commenters into groups. In addition, Reagle considers both the function and value of comments in society. Just listen.

View on AmazonIn their book, Saving Babies? The Consequences of Newborn Genetic Screening (University of Chicago Press, 2012) UCLA sociologist and current department chair Stefan Timmermans and Mara Buchbinder, assistant professor of social medicine and anthropology at the University of North Carolina address tough questions about the efficacy of genetic testing through a longitudinal study of a genetics clinic. Screening for common genetic disorders is a high opportunity area for the application of biomedical knowledge to the clinic. However, this population health measure can quickly precipitate personal crises and emotional upheaval in the process of confirming results that often turn out to be false positives. For many families, this taxing diagnostic ordeal profoundly shapes the experience of starting or growing their family, and for some it is only the beginning of a greater therapeutic odyssey. Newborn genetic screening undoubtedly saves lives, but its social repercussions require greater scrutiny. This is precisely the task to which Saving Babies? sets itself: an ethnographically-informed assessment of the intended and unintended consequences of genetic screening as they impact families in the clinic and beyond. While newborn screening is meant to provide actionable certainty, its reality is far less clear-cut. Uncertainty is not simply lack of knowledge that the application of technology can eradicate, but rather an intrinsic characteristic of the clinical situation that more information, even more precise information, can often exacerbate. Moreover, longstanding inequalities in the U.S. healthcare system often prevent conditions that can be easily diagnosed from being treated. Saving Babies? is a serious exercise in the sociology of knowledge driven by engaging personal narratives that get at the urgency of newborn screening as a felt phenomenon, as much as an important public health program. As such, it is great reading for sociologists, anthropologists, and clinicians interested in the broader social dimensions of medical practice.

Jessica Baldwin-PhilippiView on AmazonJessica Baldwin-Philippi is the author of Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2015). She is an assistant professor of new media at Fordham University. Baldwin-Philippi's book fits into a larger Oxford series on Digital Politics which has been featured on the podcast in the past. She uses an ethnographic approach focused on understanding how political campaigns in 2010 had incorporated various technologies. She also collects original data on specific digital strategies, especially social media. But the book is not just about technology; Baldwin-Philippi tries to understand how campaigns shape citizenship and democracy through the tools they use.

View on AmazonValuation is a central question in contemporary social science. Indeed the question of value has a range of academic projects associated with it, whether in terms of specific questions or in terms of emerging fora for academic publications. In Value Practices in the Life Sciences and Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2015), Isabelle Dussauge, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, and Francis Lee bring together a range of authors to outline a new research programme. Alongside individual essays that range from the allocation of transplant organs, questions of plagiarism in science, the ownership of generically modified organisms though to desire and neuroscience, the book points to a new way to think through questions of valuation. As a result its importance moves beyond an STS audience to establish value practices as a vital framework for understanding contemporary life.

Leonard CassutoView on AmazonThe discontented graduate student is something of a cultural fixture in the U.S. Indeed theirs is a sorry lot. They work very hard, earn very little, and have very poor prospects. Nearly all of them want to become professors, but most of them won't. Indeed a disturbingly large minority of them won't even finish their degrees. It's little wonder graduate students are, as a group, somewhat depressed. In his thought-provoking book The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (Harvard University Press, 2015), Leonard Cassuto tries to figure out why graduate education in the U.S. is in such a sad state. More importantly, he offers a host of fascinating proposals to "fix" American graduate schools. Listen in.

Federico MarconView on AmazonFederico Marcon's new book opens a fascinating window into the history of Japan's relationship to its natural environment. The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan (University Of Chicago Press, 2015) traces practices and practitioners of natural knowledge from the late-sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, arguing that the Tokugawa period (1600-1868) saw Japan desacralizing the natural environment, and eventually developing a way to systematically study natural objects that was" surprisingly similar to European natural history without being directly influenced by it." Marcon's study traces the objectification of Japan's natural species, showing how plants and animals were transformed into physical and intellectual commodities and leaving a fascinating pictorial archive that developed as part of this commodification. The book charts transformations not only of natural objects and studies of them in Japan, but also of the professional and social identity of scholars, the disciplinary identity of the field, the popular engagement with natural history, and the illustration of the natural world. The chapters are framed by epigraphs from some of the intellectual and philosophical touchstones of Marcon's book – including Horkheimer, Adorno, and others – and the text weaves readings and echoes of these thinkers into inspiring readings of Japanese history. It is a must-read for historians of early modern science, natural history, and Tokugawa studies!

Dana SImmonsView on AmazonDana Simmons's marvelous and thoughtful new book takes on a question that many of us likely take for granted: "What is a need; what is a want, a desire, a luxury?" Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France (University of Chicago Press, 2015) offers an answer that emerges from and is embedded in the particular historical context of nineteenth century France, but has consequences that range well beyond modern French history. Early in this fascinating study, Simmons articulates an argument that threads through the book: "a science of human needs undergirded the modern wage economy and the welfare state." That science was collaboratively built by a diverse community of agronomists, chemists, doctors, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, amateur data gatherers, trade unions, and others who collectively attempted to define and then measure human needs for the sake of better social organization. How to do this was not at all self-evident, and fierce debates were waged that challenged participants to rethink the most basic elements of a notion of society: What were the "needs" that must be fulfilled in order to keep persons productive? Were those needs physical and/or psychological? What were the characteristics of a model "person," anyway? The chapters of the book narrate the traces that these debates left on the bodies of workers, the pages of history, and the basic notions (like "minimum wage," like "citizen") that make up modern conceptions of civil society. Highly recommended!

Kristin PetersonView on AmazonKristin Peterson's new ethnography looks carefully at the Nigerian pharmaceutical market, paying special attention to the ways that the drug trade links West Africa within a larger global economy. Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2015) takes reads into a story that is part medical anthropology, part careful analysis of global economy, and shows that understanding one is vital to understanding the other in the modern West African pharmaceutical landscape. Peterson pays special attention to the Idumota market, an area that was strictly residential in the 1970s and has since become one of the largest West African points of drug distribution for pharmaceuticals and other materials from all over the world. Peterson looks at the consequences of major local and global historical factors in that transformation, including civil war in the late 1960s and migration that followed, a 1970s oil boom and bust, and changes in the global pharmaceutical market in the 1980s. By the early 1980s, Nigeria was deep into an economic crisis that had profound implications for the production, circulation, and marketing of pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceutical industry remade itself by becoming tied to the speculative marketplace, with wide-ranging implications that included the rise of new professional relationships & market formations in Nigeria, new relationships with firms in China and India, new forms of speculation, and new questions about the ontology of markets. Peterson demonstrates that these transformations continue to have important consequences for the bodies of individual Nigerians, including major problems with drug resistance and a mismatch between existing drug therapies and existing diseases. The book avoids the usual discourse of corporate greed, instead focusing on the "structural logics of pharmaceutical capital through which corporate practices can be understood." It is a timely and fascinating study.

Sandra HardingView on AmazonSandra Harding's new book Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research (University of Chicago Press, 2015) raises new questions about two central concepts in STS – objectivity and diversity – and in doing so it allows us to animate them in new kinds of relationships and shows that objectivity and certain forms of diversity can be mutually supportive. Harding does this in two major ways: by considering specific cases where science has been shaped by social values and interests and drawing conclusions about the "logical positivist legacy" from them; and by locating these issues within particular historical contexts. Though the "social" tends to be treated as an impediment to scientific research rather than a source of new resources and pathways, social and political movements have deeply shaped the practices and philosophy of science. Ch. 1 offers a historical context in which to understand the approaches that dominate today's analytic philosophy of science, describing and analyzing the ways in which the social conditions for scientific research and its philosophy were created in two eras of significant institutional change: the postwar era of the 1940s-1950s, and the 1960s-1970s. Three science studies research fields that have emerged since the 1960s – science studies, postcolonial STS, and feminist STS – show that sciences and their societies co-produce and co-constitute each other and they deeply influence the project of the book and its remaining chapters. Ch. 2 – 7 explore six major arguments for the claim that the "social norm of diversity and the epistemic norm of objectivity can provide mutual support for each other" and they introduce helpful case studies that both illustrate Harding's arguments and model a methodology for bringing about the kind of integration of philosophy and socially-aware STS that the book advocates. It's a wonderful, clear read and is highly assignable in undergraduate and graduate courses devoted to science, policy, philosophy, and/or STS!

Liz McFallView on AmazonThe role of financial services in individuals' and communities' everyday lives is more important than ever. In Devising Consumption: Cultural Economies of Insurance, Credit and Spending (Routledge, 2014), Liz McFall charts the rise of one particular element of financial services, door-to-door sales, to understand the role of insurance and credit in society. In doing so McFall aims to 'ventriloquise the lives and consumption practices of the silent poor', as well as charting a the history of a very neglected element of the story of finance's role in contemporary life. The book contains a wealth of historical data, alongside a theoretical engagement with the meaning of 'the device' within current social theoretical literature. Moreover the book offers reflections on the role and workings of markets and states, both with regard to finance and more broadly to the government of social life. The combination of these perspectives offers an important new lens through which to understand the sociology of consumption and thus, more generally, the social world itself.

Cass SunsteinView on AmazonThe political tradition of liberalism tends to associate political liberty with the individual's freedom of choice. The thought is that political freedom is intrinsically tied to the individual's ability to select one's own path in life – to choose one's occupation, one's values, one's hobbies, one's possessions, and so on – without the intrusion or supervision of others. John Stuart Mill, who held a version of this view, argued that it is in choosing for ourselves that we develop not only self-knowledge, but autonomy and personality. Yet we now know that the image of the individual chooser that Mill's view seems to presuppose is not quite accurate. It is not only the case that environmental factors of various kinds exert a great but often invisible influence over our choices; we must also contend with the limits of our cognitive resources. Sometimes, having to choose can be a burden, a hazard, and even an obstacle to liberty. In Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice (Oxford University Press, 2015), Cass Sunstein examines the varied phenomena of choice-making. Bringing a range of finding from behavioral sciences, Sunstein makes the case that sometimes avoiding or delegating choice is an exercise of individual freedom.

Kelly J. WhitmerView on AmazonKelly J. Whitmer's new book offers a history of science set in the Halle Orphanage, a building that was founded in the middle of the 1690s in the Prussian city of Halle by a group of German Lutherans known as Pietists. The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism, and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2015) understands this orphanage as a scientific community, thereby countering a tendency to approach the history of science in a way that treats science and religion and distinct and oppositional endeavors, and problematizing previous ways of understanding the space as an enclave of Pietists who were "enthusiastically opposed to rational approaches to knowing the natural world, and to science and the Enlightenment more generally." As the fascinating story unfolds, Whitmer's account meaningfully contributes to histories of observation, material culture, models and modeling, and education.