New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Rina Bliss, a sociology professor at Rutgers who studies how genetic research shapes ideas about race. She traces the messy history of race in genetics and why scientists keep using racial labels. The conversation covers sociogenomics, polygenic scores, clinical and policy pitfalls, and a forthcoming project on AI, genomics, and everyday guidance.

Angus Burgin, Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins who studies intellectual and political history, discusses the 1990s internet boom. He recalls dial-up, early chatrooms, and email's cultural shift. He examines 90s optimism, Al Gore's tech rhetoric and its fallout, cyberpunk and libertarian visions, and how early hopes gave way to critiques by the 2000s.

Peter S. Soppelsa, historian of technology and assistant professor, explores Paris between 1870 and 1914. He discusses how hidden infrastructure was revealed and politicized. Topics include housing inequalities, politicized streets and tramways, contested metro purposes and construction disruptions, water pollution and sewer risks, and public practices of scrutinizing urban systems.

Olivier Sylvain, a law professor and former FTC senior advisor, critiques how platform design and surveillance-advertising hook users and skirt accountability. He traces cyber-libertarian roots of internet law, tackles Section 230 and First Amendment expansions, examines AI chatbot harms, and outlines alternatives like data protection, limits on behavioral targeting, and contextual ads.

Mallory Stewart, former Assistant Secretary for Arms Control and current CEO focused on space security, discusses the Space Force’s shift toward space superiority and the blurry line between militarization and weaponization. She covers rising counterspace capabilities worldwide, the limits of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, and the role of public-private partnerships and international norms to avoid a destabilizing arms race.

Can art change the contemporary world? In Feminism, Art, Capitalism Angela Dimitrakaki, a Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the university of Edinburgh, offers a Marxist Feminist perspective on a variety of issues in both society and the cultural sector. Engaging with a huge range of examples, as well as theorising key issues such as work and labour, the long modern, communing practices and technology, the book offers a global perspective on the contradictions that feminism faces under capitalist culture. A rich examination of the book will be of interest across the humanities, as well as for anyone interested in the importance of art today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Max Morris's Not Sex Work: Queer Intimacy, Post-identity, and Incidental Encounters in the Digital Era (Routledge, 2025) brings together feminist theory, media studies, and queer research methodologies to offer new, compelling insight the relationships between money, digital platforms, and sex. Through longstanding engagement with gay, queer, and bisexual men who do not describe themselves as sex workers and who exchange sex or sexual services for money through digital platforms, Morris highlights how ‘incidental sex work’ problematizes commonly-held assumptions of both work and intimacy. By starting from the position of unsettling what sex work might be, Morris holds space for ambivalences about labour, risk, and sex itself—destabilizing binaries found within both research and policy work. Not Sex Work's attention to how economics and intimacy shapes identity offers important analyses of not only what we might understand sex work to be, but also how digital platforms shape and reshape understandings of gender and sexuality. Max Morris is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Sociology at Oxford Brookes University. Using creative and feminist methodologies, their research focuses on gender, sexuality, HIV, digital platforms, and sex work. Rine Vieth is an FRQ Postdoctoral Fellow at Université Laval. They are currently studying how anti-gender mobilization shapes migration policy, particularly in regards to asylum determinations in the UK and Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Burç Köstem, scholar of peripheries and infrastructure in Turkey; Megan Wiessner, researcher on green data capitalism and ruralization; Patrick Brodie, researcher on data centers and rural media industries; Darin Barney, researcher of rural media and political economy. They explore infrastructure as a lens on rural mediation. Topics include green data capitalism, data centers and energy, colonial infrastructures, mega-projects, and infrastructural path dependency.

Scott Solomon, evolutionary biologist and Rice University professor, explores how living off Earth could reshape our bodies and minds. He discusses Mars’ environment, challenges of growing food and shielding radiation, reproductive unknowns and accelerated evolution off-world. He also covers microbes, gene editing possibilities, and ethical debates about experimenting with future settlers.

Thomas Patteson, a musicologist who studies imagined instruments, and Deirdre Loughridge, a music scholar and professor at Northeastern, tour centuries of devices that never existed. They trace imaginary electronics, cosmophones and living instruments. They explore satire, speculative futures and computational instruments. The conversation maps how analogy and cultural change shape ideas about sound and invention.