Published On: Jul 30 2026
This book explores the relationship between reading science in fiction and engaging with science, showing how reading speculative fiction can make sense of technoscientific societies and the futures they generate. Focusing on embodied readers and empirical approaches to fiction reading, the authors examine contemporary social, cultural, biographical and political contexts in which science fictions come to matter.
Published On: Jul 30 2026
Each year, Australia faces increasingly unprecedented wildfires, marked both by their scale and by the intense public disagreements about their political, cultural, and ecological causes. How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent, written by Timothy Neale, is a critical and ethnographic exploration of wildfire management in Australia and the technoscientific systems of control that shape its current and future possibilities.
Published On: Jun 30 2026
In 100% Utilization, Andrew Lison explores the consequences of pushing computing power to its limits for a culture seemingly reliant on automation as much as human labor. In accounting for this contradiction, Lison offers a corrective to theories of digital mediation emphasizing its symbolic and representational capabilities. He connects the looming end of Moore’s law to trends in semiconductor manufacturing, custom hardware, and parallelized software techniques, including AI.
Published On: Jun 30 2026
From genome sequencing to large sky surveys, digital technologies produce massive datasets that promise unprecedented scientific insights. But data, for being good to use and reuse, need people—scientists, technicians, and administrators—as embodied, evaluative, social humans. In this book, Götz Hoeppe draws on an ethnography of astronomical research to examine the media and practices that scientists and technicians use to instruct graduate students, make diagrams for data calibration and discovery, organize collaborative work, negotiate the ethics of open access, encode their...
Published On: May 29 2026
Smart as a City provides a rich ethnographic investigation into how smartness is received and negotiated in a midsize US city. Burcu Baykurt follows the work of civic entrepreneurs, local residents, and city officials in Kansas City, Missouri, where Google tested a citywide gigabit service and the local government launched a series of smart city pilot projects in transportation, public housing, and municipal services. Baykurt redefines smartness as a collective effort to spotlight a city’s enduring local problems and align solutions with the often buggy, partially developed systems offer...
Published On: Apr 25 2026
In Machineries of Similarity and Difference, David Ribes theorizes interoperability, or how to make different things work together. For the last 30 years, standardization has been the dominant social scientific motif for understanding coordination and collaboration across time and space. But across those years much has changed, in part through computational and other technical advances, in part through a new orientation to the value of similarity and difference. Interoperation is an ascendent social form.
Published On: Apr 25 2026
Biodiversity loss now ranks alongside climate change as a threat to human survival. The United Nation’s secretary general has declared that “humanity is waging a war on nature.” According to some observers, humans are failing to do enough to avoid an extinction crisis. In Conservation by the People, Taylor Dotson challenges the catastrophic story that often gets told about the world’s ecosystems, uncovering the complex scientific, political, and cultural reasons why people disagree about conservation.
Published On: Mar 31 2026
Do our tools for knowing about the world actually obscure important knowledge? Anne Beaulieu's 'Revealing Relations" uncovers how knowledge infrastructures—including satellite tracking, climate models, machine learning and citizen science apps—shape our understanding of contemporary crises. Rooted in logics of resource assessment, these systems often reinforce extractive thinking, even when intended to protect.
Published On: Mar 31 2026
Doing science is an increasingly prevalent strategy of social and environmental justice movements. But while it seems apparent that science can aid in the pursuit of justice, it can be hard to explain how it does so--and thus hard to know how to deploy science most strategically. In 'The Science of Repair,' Gwen Ottinger offers transformative account of the role science plays in combatting injustice: While proving that people have been harmed, in itself, rarely advances justice, the process of investigating injustice can deepening our moral commitments to each other. Specifically, research can...
Published On: Mar 31 2026
Attending to the development and instantiation of an ethic of access in mental health, Martyn Pickersgill's new book, 'Configuring Psychology,' examines how political, economic, legal, and social dynamics intertwine with clinical norms and expertise. These interactions configure broader healthcare contexts, defining not only entry into therapy but also exclusion from it. Through close attention to policy developments, professional strategies, and psychologists' experiences, Pickersgill examines how access reforms shape clinical knowledge, therapeutic practice, and understandings of the psychol...