New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

The 1980s saw the peak of a moral panic over fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. A coalition of moral entrepreneurs that included representatives from the Christian Right, the field of psychology, and law enforcement claimed that these games were not only psychologically dangerous but an occult religion masquerading as a game. Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds (University of California Press, 2015) by Joseph Laycock, explores both the history and the sociological significance of this panic.Fantasy role-playing games do share several functions in common with religion. However, religion—as a socially constructed world of shared meaning—can also be compared to a fantasy role-playing game. In fact, the claims of the moral entrepreneurs, in which they presented themselves as heroes battling a dark conspiracy, often resembled the very games of imagination they condemned as evil. By attacking the imagination, they preserved the taken-for-granted status of their own socially constructed reality. Interpreted in this way, the panic over fantasy-role playing games yields new insights about how humans play and how they construct and maintain meaningful worlds together.Joseph Laycock is an associate professor of religious studies at Texas State University. He has written several books on new religious movements and American religious history, including one on The Satanic Temple. He is also a co-editor for the journal Nova Religio.Carrie Lynn Evans is currently a PhD student of English Literature with Université Laval in Quebec. 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

In a world that purports to know more about the future than any before it, why do we still need speculation? Insubstantial speculations – from utopian thinking to high-risk stock gambles – often provoke backlash, even when they prove prophetic. Why does this hypothetical way of thinking generate such controversy?Gayle Rogers, author of Speculation: A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI (Columbia UP, 2021), speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about the intellectual history of speculation: from the mirror and the watch tower, the Calvinist reformation, the scientific revolution, through Jane Austen, to the founding of the United States, and the shape of contemporary capitalism – with booms, manias, busts, and bubbles along the way. Unraveling these histories and many other disputes, Rogers argues that what has always been at stake in arguments over speculation, and why it so often appears so threatening, is the authority to produce and control knowledge about the future.Gayle Rogers is professor and chair of English at the University of Pittsburgh.Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. 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

What influence can online and visual activism have on protest movements? With a wave of anti-establishment protests sweeping over East and Southeast Asia over the past couple of years, the online phenomenon of the #MilkTeaAlliance has gained increasing international recognition. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast Chiara Elisabeth Pecorari is joined by Wasana Wongsurawat and Mai Corlin Fredriksen to discuss the Milk Tea Alliance. Departing from the Thai and Hong Kong contexts, they explore what role this alliance plays in the broader political context, and what future it may have.Wasana Wongsurawat is an associate professor at the Department of History at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. Her research has focused on the Chinese diaspora and Thai nationalism.Mai Corlin Fredriksen is a Carlsberg Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Her current work focuses on the role of protest walls and the use of visual material in the 2019 Hong Kong protests.Chiara Elisabeth Pecorari is a student of social anthropology at the University of Bergen in Norway.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcastAbout NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk 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

The image most of us have of whalers includes harpoons and intentional trauma. Yet eating commercially caught seafood leads to whales' entanglement and slow death in rope and nets, and the global shipping routes that bring us readily available goods often lead to death by collision. We--all of us--are whalers, marine scientist and veterinarian Michael J. Moore contends. But we do not have to be.Drawing on over forty years of fieldwork with humpback, pilot, fin, and in particular, North Atlantic right whales--a species whose population has declined more than twenty percent since 2017--Moore takes us with him as he performs whale necropsies on animals stranded on beaches, in his independent research alongside whalers using explosive harpoons, and as he tracks injured whales to deliver sedatives. The whales' plight is a complex, confounding, and disturbing one. We learn of existing but poorly enforced conservation laws and of perennial (and often failed) efforts to balance the push for fisheries profit versus the protection of endangered species caught by accident.But despite these challenges, Moore's We Are All Whalers: The Plight of Whales and Our Responsibility (U Chicago Press, 2021) is an optimistic one. He shows us how technologies for rope-less fishing and the acoustic tracking of whale migrations make a dramatic difference. And he looks ahead with hope as our growing understanding of these extraordinary creatures fuels an ever-stronger drive for change. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. 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

What would it feel like to wake up inside the head of someone who writes about science for a living? John Horgan, acclaimed author of the bestseller The End of Science, answers that question in his genre-bending new book Pay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science (MIT Press, 2020), a stream-of-consciousness account of a day in the life of his alter ego, Eamon Toole--a blogger, college professor, and divorced father.This work of fact-based fiction, or "faction," follows Toole as he wakes up in his rented apartment in upstate New York, meditates with the mantra "Duh," commutes via train and subway to an engineering school in New Jersey, teaches a William James essay on consciousness to freshmen, squabbles about Thomas Kuhn with colleagues over lunch, takes a ferry to Manhattan and spends the evening with his bossy, Tarot-reading girlfriend, Emily, on whom he plans to spring a big question. Throughout the day, Toole struggles to be rational while buffeted by fears and yearnings. Thoughts of sex and death keep intruding on his ruminations over quantum spookiness, the neural code, the Singularity and free will. Pay Attention is a profane, profound meditation on the entanglements of our inner and outer worlds and the elusiveness of truth.Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. 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

In Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty (Duke UP, 2020), Rahul Mukherjee explores how the media coverage of nuclear power plants and cellular phone antennas in India—what he calls radiant infrastructures—creates environmental publics: groups of activists, scientists, and policy makers who use media to influence public opinion. In documentaries, lifestyle television shows, newspapers, and Bollywood films, and through other forms of media (including radiation-sensing technologies), these publics articulate contesting views about the relationships between modernity, wireless signals, and nuclear power. From testimonies of cancer patients who live close to cell towers to power plant operators working to contain information about radiation leaks and health risks, discussions in the media show how radiant infrastructures are at once harbingers of optimism about India's development and emitters of potentially carcinogenic radiation. In tracing these dynamics, Mukherjee expands understandings of the relationship between media and infrastructure and how people make sense of their everyday encounters with technology and the environment.Noopur Raval is a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of Information Studies, STS, Media Studies and Anthropology. 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

Drawing together 18 contributions from leading international scholars, Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice (Routledge, 2021) conceptualizes the history and theory of cinema’s century-long relationship to modes of exploration in its many forms, from colonialist expeditions to decolonial radical cinemas to the perceptual voyage of the senses made possible by the cinematic apparatus. In my conversation with them, James and Leo review the theory behind cinema of exploration and discuss how they recruited the hours of the various essays.The essays in this collection are ideal for a broad range of scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students in cinema and media studies, cultural studies, and cognate fields. James Leo Cahill is Director of the Cinema Studies Institute and Associate Professor of Cinema Studies and French at the University of Toronto. He is author of Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé (2019) and general editor of Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture.Luca Caminati is Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. He is the author of Orientalismo eretico. Pier Paolo Pasolini e il cinema del Terzo Mondo (2007), Il cinema come happening: Pasolini's Primitivism and the Sixties Italian Art Scene (2010), and Roberto Rossellini documentarista. Una cultura della realtà (2012), along with many articles and book chapters on Italian cinema and media. He is currently serving as associate editor for the journal Italica.Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. 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

In Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Global Public Health (MIT Press, 2020), physician-anthropologist Eugene T. Richardson explores how public health practices—from epidemiological modeling to outbreak containment—help perpetuate global inequities.This book questions the Global North's "monopoly on truth" in global public health science, making a provocative claim: that public health science manages and maintains global health inequity. Richardson, a physician and anthropologist, examines the conventional public health approach to epidemiology through the lens of a participant-observer, identifying a dogmatic commitment to the quantitative paradigm. This paradigm, he argues, plays a role in causing and perpetrating public health crises. The mechanisms of public health science--and epidemiology in particular--that set public health agendas and claim a monopoly on truth stem from a colonial, racist, and patriarchal system that had its inception in 1492.Deploying a range of rhetorical tools, including ironism, “redescriptions” of public health crises, Platonic dialogue, flash fiction, allegory, and koan, Richardson describes how epidemiology uses models of disease causation that serve protected affluence (the possessing classes) by setting epistemic limits to the understanding of why some groups live sicker lives than others—limits that sustain predatory accumulation rather than challenge it. Drawing on his clinical work in a variety of epidemics, including Ebola in West Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, leishmania in the Sudan, HIV/TB in southern Africa, diphtheria in Bangladesh, and SARS-CoV-2 in the United States, he concludes that the biggest epidemic we currently face is an epidemic of illusions—one that is propagated by the coloniality of knowledge production.Eugene T. Richardson, MD, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Visiting Faculty at the University of Global Health Equity in Butaro, Rwanda, and Chair of the Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice.Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. Her current work concerns the politics of travel in Cold War US; she has previously published on US intervention in the 2013-16 Ebola epidemic. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. 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

Andrew Jenks' book Collaboration in Space and the Search for Peace on Earth (Anthem Press, 2021) explores the era of space collaboration (from 1970 to the present). This period has been largely ignored by historians in favor of a focus on the earlier space race. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, a key program and catalyst for Détente, marked the transition to the new age of space collaboration, which continued through the Soviet Interkosmos missions, the Mir-Shuttle dockings of the early 1990s, and on through the International Space Station. Europeans, Americans, and Russians envisioned space collaboration as a way to reconfigure political and international relations.The shift toward collaboration was a result of a new focus on safety, which displaced the earlier emphasis on risk-taking in the first phase of the space race, when military imperatives often overshadowed peaceful goals. Apollo-Soyuz (ignored by Cold War historians) was thus imagined as a test project for a docking mechanism that would allow a manned-capsule stranded in orbit to dock with another capsule and provide an escape hatch back to earth (it was actually inspired, in part, by the 1969 Hollywood film “Marooned” with Gene Hackman). The focus on engineering for safety grew out of the broader concerns about environmental degradation and nuclear war that in turn reflected a growing sense in the 1970s and 1980s of the dangers associated with excessive risk-taking in politics and engineering. Few historians or social scientists have examined the social construction of safety and its use in engineering and politics.The book draws on the Russian Academy of Sciences Archives, Nixon and Reagan libraries and National Archives Collections, NASA headquarters library documents, and various memoirs and other published sources in English and Russian.Paul Werth is a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. 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

It’s hard to imagine a place more central to American mythology today than Silicon Valley. To outsiders, the region glitters with the promise of extraordinary wealth and innovation. But behind this image lies another Silicon Valley, one segregated by race, class, and nationality in complex and contradictory ways. Its beautiful landscape lies atop underground streams of pollutants left behind by decades of technological innovation, and while its billionaires live in compounds, surrounded by redwood trees and security fences, its service workers live in their cars.With arresting photography and intimate stories, Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America (U Chicago Press, 2021) makes this hidden world visible. Instead of young entrepreneurs striving for efficiency in minimalist corporate campuses, we see portraits of struggle—families displaced by an impossible real estate market, workers striving for a living wage, and communities harmed by environmental degradation. If the fate of Silicon Valley is the fate of America—as so many of its boosters claim—then this book gives us an unvarnished look into the future. Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future. 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