New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

We’ve been ​“saving the planet” for decades…and environmental crises just get worse. All this Tesla driving and LEED building and carbon trading seems to accomplish little to nothing — all while low-income communities continue to suffer the worst consequences.Why aren’t we cleaning up the toxic messes and rolling back climate change? And why do so many Americans hate environmentalists?Jenny Price says, enough already! — with this short, fun, fierce manifesto for an environmentalism that is hugely more effective, a whole lot fairer, and infinitely less righteous. In Stop Saving the Planet!: An Environmentalist Manifesto (W. W. Norton, 2021), she challenges you, Exxon, and the EPA alike to think and act completely anew — and to start right now — to ensure a truly habitable future.Jenny Price is a public writer and artist, and a Research Fellow at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University-St. Louis. Author of Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America, she is co-founder of the public art collective LA Urban Rangers and a co-creator of the Our Malibu Beaches mobile-phone app. She has been a resident artist at MOCA and the Orange County Museum of Art, and has held visiting professorships at Princeton University. She is currently working on “St. Louis Division,” a hometown collection of projects about environmental justice.Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Twitter. Website 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

No Laughing Matter: Race Joking and Resistance in Brazilian Social Media (Vernon Press, 2020) examines the social phenomenon of construction and dissemination of colonial-like racist discourses fostered against upwardly-mobile black women through disparagement humour on social media platforms, adopting a fresh and innovative perspective. In this book, Luiz Valério P. Trindade explores the idea that disparagement humour might not be as exempt of social impact as the jokers might believe, and that, in fact, this kind of humour reveals the hidden facet of deep-seated colonial ideologies still present in Brazilian society despite being hailed as a unique model of a post-racial society. The author argues that these ideologies establish and naturalise superior social positions and symbolic privileges to whites while undermining and delegitimising black women's upward social mobility. Social media platforms enable the proponents of these beliefs not only to engage in the practice of online hate speech but also to attract a considerable number of like-minded people, creating a long-lasting echo chamber effect in the cyberspace. This way, they manage to amplify the reach and reverberation of their racist discourses in the online environment in ways not commonly seen in Brazilian offline social contexts.Candela Marini is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Spanish at MSOE University. 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

Joseph Gfroerer spent nearly 40 years working as a statistician for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Starting in 1988, when the American drug war was taking its current shape, he led the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), one of the federal government’s largest and most important ongoing health surveys that tracks Americans’ use of illegal drugs, prescription drugs, alcohol and tobacco. War Stories from the Drug Survey: How Culture, Politics, and Statistics Shaped the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (Cambridge UP, 2018), written after he retired, shows where the survey came from, details how it gathers information, and tracks the impact that the shifting cultural and political climate surrounding drug use played on how these statistics were understood. Gfroerer provides necessary insight on what drug use statistics have meant, how they’ve been used (and misused), and what this means for our understanding of drug use in America today.Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. 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

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? DM us your suggestion on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.In this episode you’ll hear about: Ros Pyne’s path through higher education, how she found her way to her current job, her role at Bloomsbury Publishers, what Open Access [OA] is and is not, how OA can democratize knowledge, and what she’s hopeful about.Our guest is: Ros Pyne, who is the Global Director of Research and Open Access at Bloomsbury Publishers. She has worked in academic publishing since 2007, initially as an editor, and for the last eight years in roles focusing on open access. She has a particular interest in bringing open access to long-form scholarship and to the humanities, and is the co-author of several reports on open access books. She holds a degree in English from the University of Cambridge, and an MA in early modern English literature from King’s College London.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode might be interested in: Open access at Bloomsbury Directory of Open Access Books OAPEN OA Books Toolkit (for anyone interested in learning more about what open access books are and how they work) Open Access Books Network (a free online network for people working on open access books or interested in getting involved) Open Access and the Humanities (a 2014 book by an open access expert Martin Paul Eve that’s still an excellent primer on this topic) 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

A rich examination of the history of trans medicine and current day practice Surfacing in the mid-twentieth century, yet shrouded in social stigma, transgender medicine is now a rapidly growing medical field. In Trans Medicine: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender (NYU Press, 2021), stef shuster makes an important intervention in how we understand the development of this field and how it is being used to “treat” gender identity today. Drawing on interviews with medical providers as well as ethnographic and archival research, shuster examines how health professionals approach patients who seek gender-affirming care. From genital reconstructions to hormone injections, the practice of trans medicine charts new medical ground, compelling medical professionals to plan treatments without widescale clinical trials to back them up. Relying on cultural norms and gut instincts to inform their treatment plans, shuster shows how medical providers’ lack of clinical experience and scientific research undermines their ability to interact with patients, craft treatment plans, and make medical decisions. This situation defies how providers are trained to work with patients and creates uncertainty. As providers navigate the developing knowledge surrounding the medical care of trans folk, Trans Medicine offers a rare opportunity to understand how providers make decisions while facing challenges to their expertise and, in the process, have acquired authority not only over clinical outcomes, but over gender itself.Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. 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

Australia and dingos - we have a past and future, and not without controversy. Dingo Bold: The Life and Death of K'gari Dingoes (Sydney UP, 2021) examines this relationship, with Rowena Lennox's encounter with a dingo, 'Bold', on K'gari (Fraser Island). There are intense, polarised opinions over dingo conservation and control. How should we live with dingos? Native wildlife or feral dogs? Wild or domesticated? A tourist attraction or a threat?Rowena Lennox has worked as a book editor for many years and now teaches creative writing. She has published essays, fiction, memoir and poems in Hecate, Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin, New Statesman, Seizure, Social Alternatives and Southerly, among others. Her first book, Fighting Spirit of East Timor, won a New South Wales Premier’s History Award.Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com 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

Leah DeVun is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Leah DeVun focuses on the history of gender, sexuality, science, and medicine in pre-modern Europe and on contemporary queer and transgender studies. Her first book Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time won the 2013 John Nicholas Brown Prize for an outstanding first book on medieval history. She has published articles in the GLQ, WSQ, Journal of the History of Ideas, among others, and co-edited Trans Historicities, a special issue of the Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2018. Leah is also an artist and curator whose work explores queer, feminist, and gender nonconforming history. Her work has appeared in the ONE Archives Gallery, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and the Houston Center for Photography, among other venues. This episode discusses Leah’s second book The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance published in 2021 by Columbia University Press and which sold out of its first printing.Leo Valdes is a Ph.D. student in the History department at Rutgers University. They study 20th century Black American and Latinx history centering trans and gender variant people’s politics and resistance. 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

On this episode, J.J. Mull interviews scholar and historian Camille Robcis. In her most recent book, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Robcis grapples with the historical, intellectual, psychiatric and psychoanalytic meaning of institutional psychotherapy as articulated at Saint-Alban Hospital in France by exploring the movement’s key thinkers, including François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Anchored in the history of one hospital, Robcis's study draws on a wide geographic context—revolutionary Spain, occupied France, colonial Algeria, and beyond—and charts the movement's place within a broad political-economic landscape, from fascism to Stalinism to postwar capitalism.J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and graduate student at Smith College School for Social Work currently living in Northampton, MA. He can be reached at jmull@smith.edu. 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 Getting to the Heart of Science Communication (Island Press, 2021), Dr. Faith Kearns unpacks science communication as so much more than the “sage from the stage” perspective. Dr. Kearns, through decades of experience and countless interviews, writes to further a conversation for best practices and necessary training for science communication practitioners. In this interview, we discuss the past, present, and future of science communication. We dig into Part II of the book, The Tools of Science Communication, which for those newer to the field or practice, might be shocked to hear has little to do with speaking. Instead, we talk about relating, listening, conflict, and trauma. While Dr. Kearns is clear this book is not intended to be a final word on the topic, it does force readers to think about how the sciences might adopt training from other fields. We finish our talk with an unanswered question – how do trained generalists fit into the expertise-focused world of science? 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

“…and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”-Isaiah 2:4The instinct to fight may be innate in human nature, but war—organized violence—comes with organized society. War has shaped humanity’s history, its social and political institutions, its values and ideas. Our very language, our public spaces, our private memories, and some of our greatest cultural treasures reflect the glory and the misery of war. War is an uncomfortable and challenging subject, not least because it brings out both the vilest and the noblest aspects of humanity.Margaret MacMillan looks at the ways in which war has influenced human society and how, in turn, changes in political organization, technology, or ideologies have affected how and why we fight. War: How Conflict Shaped Us (Random House, 2020) explores such much-debated and controversial questions as: When did war first start? Does human nature doom us to fight one another? Why has war been described as the most organized of all human activities? Why are warriors almost always men? Is war ever within our control?Drawing on lessons from wars throughout the past, from classical history to the present day, MacMillan reveals the many faces of war—the way it has determined our past, our future, our views of the world, and our very conception of ourselves. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com. 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