New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (MIT Press), by Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, demonstrates that this technology – which is mostly associated with covert surveillance and remote warfare – has also served as a vital tool for activists, social movements, and defenders of human rights to effect pro-social campaigns.Through stories of exemplar initiatives and analyses of thousands of civil uses of drones, Choi-Fitzpatrick argues that scholars and others interested in the implications of emergent technologies for democracy need to look beyond the networks of social media and consider as well the material devises that populate our world.Despite the risks and the nefarious (and obnoxious) applications of drones, these machines also have the capacity to “democratize surveillance,” putting a preeminent tool of statecraft in the hands of civil society. By tracing such uses, The Good Drone is an inspiring call for creativity, experimentation, and optimism regarding the humanitarian possibilities of emerging material technologies.Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor of Political Sociology at the Kroc School of Peace Studies at the University of San Diego and concurrent Rights Lab Associate Professor of Social Movements and Human Rights at the University of Nottingham's School of Sociology and Social Policy.Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the pedagogical applications of the digital humanities and the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine. More at http://empiresprogeny.org. 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

From their earliest encounters with Indigenous Pacific Islanders, white Europeans and Americans saw Polynesians as almost racially white, and speculated that they were of Mediterranean or Aryan descent. In Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania (Duke University Press, 2020) Maile Arvin argues that a logic of possession through whiteness animates settler colonialism in which Polynesians become exotic, feminized belongings of whiteness.This provided white settlers with the justification needed to claim Polynesian lands and resources. Understood as possessions, Polynesians were and continue to be denied the privileges of whiteness. Yet Polynesians have long contested these classifications, claims, and cultural representations, and Arvin shows how their resistance to and refusal of white settler logic have regenerated Indigenous forms of recognition.In this episode of the podcast Maile talks to host Alex Golub about her book and its implications. She describes what 'possessing Polynesians' entails and how it plays out in anthropology. The discussion then shifts to ways in which Hawaiians are 'possessed' by this racial logic and use it in their own self-understanding and legal and political struggles. Finally, Maile discusses the concept of 'regenerative refusal' and how this strategy is being used by Hawaiians today.Maile Arvin is an assistant professor of History and Gender Studies at the University of Utah. She is Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and studies historical and contemporary issues of race, indigeneity and science.Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is the author of the article "Welcoming the New Amateurs: A future (and past) for non-academic anthropologists" as well as other books and articles. 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 “flip,” writes Jeffrey J. Kripal, is “a reversal of perspective,” “a new real,” often born of an extreme, life-changing experience. The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge (Bellevue Literary Press, 2019) is Kripal’s ambitious, visionary program for unifying the sciences and the humanities to expand our minds, open our hearts, and negotiate a peaceful resolution to the culture wars. Combining accounts of rationalists’ spiritual awakenings and consciousness explorations by philosophers, neuroscientists, and mystics within a framework of the history of science and religion, Kripal compellingly signals a path to mending our fractured world.Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University and is the associate director of the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. He has previously taught at Harvard Divinity School and Westminster College and is the author of eight books, including The Flip. He lives in Houston, Texas.Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School. His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.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

How have we used twentieth- and twenty-first-century sound technologies to carve out sonic space out of the hustle and bustle of contemporary life?In search for an answer, in this episode I speak with Mack Hagood, Blayney Associate Professor of Comparative Media Studies at Miami University, writer, and podcaster about his book, Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control (Duke University Press, 2011).In Hush, Hagood examines a variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century technologies of sonic self-control that includes nature recordings, clinical audiometric tools, and “sound conditioners” through to top-selling white noise apps and the noise-canceling headphones offered under the commercially succesfull Bose and Beats brands.What this assortment of tools and technologies have in common, Hagood argues, is that they are all “orphic media”: kinds of media that carry or generate content that is designed to efface itself as such. Orphic media can be understood as tactics and technologies that offer us respite from postmodern conditions of excess and distraction, even if that promise is not always fulfilled.Hagood draws on a variety of sources, including the results of his own ethnographic work, patent documents, and archival material, to develop a critical account of these media that—ironically—fight sound with yet more sound, one that is both grounded in the technical detail of how specific devices do this work and is sensitive to their various use-contexts, both actual and intended.Mack Hagood produces and hosts the Phantom Power podcast, an aural exploration of the sonic arts and humanities that launched in 2018 with the support of the Miami University Humanities Center and The National Endowment for the Humanities, and can be subscribed to wherever you get your podcasts.Eamonn Bell (@_eamonnbell) is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in the Department of Music. His current research project examines the story of the compact disc from a viewpoint between musicology and media studies. 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

Imagine that you volunteer for the clinical trial of an experimental drug. The only direct benefit of participating is that you will receive up to $5,175. You must spend twenty nights literally locked in a research facility. You will be told what to eat, when to eat, and when to sleep. You will share a bedroom with several strangers. Who are you, and why would you choose to take part in this kind of study?This book explores the hidden world of pharmaceutical testing on healthy volunteers. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in clinics across the country and 268 interviews with participants and staff, it illustrates how decisions to take part in such studies are often influenced by poverty and lack of employment opportunities. It shows that healthy participants are typically recruited from African American and Latino/a communities, and that they are often serial participants, who obtain a significant portion of their income from these trials.This book reveals not only how social inequality fundamentally shapes these drug trials, but it also depicts the important validity concerns inherent in this mode of testing new pharmaceuticals. These highly controlled studies bear little resemblance to real-world conditions, and everyone involved is incentivized to game the system, ultimately making new drugs appear safer than they really are.Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals (New York University Press) provides an unprecedented view of the intersection of racial inequalities with pharmaceutical testing, signaling the dangers of this research enterprise to both social justice and public health.Jill A. Fisher is Associate Professor of Social Medicine and Bioethics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.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

Open source is the once-radical idea that code should be freely available to everyone. Open-source software was once an optimistic model for public collaboration, but is now a near-universal standard. But most open-source code is not developed by big teams or equitable collaborations; it’s maintained by unseen individuals who work tirelessly to write and publish code that's consumed by millions.In Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software (Stripe Press), Nadia Eghbal takes an inside look at modern open source software development and its evolution over the last two decades. The book draws from hundreds of interviews with developers, and serves as a first-of-its-kind anthropological investigation of the open source community.Eghbal examines the role of GitHub as a platform for hosting code, the way software developers are (and often aren’t) compensated for their work, and the complex dynamics between maintainers, contributors, and users of open-source software.Nadia Eghbal is a writer and researcher who explores how the internet enables individual creators. From 2015 to 2019, she focused on the production of open source software, working independently and at GitHub to improve the open source developer experience.Matthew Jordan is a professor at McMaster University, where he teaches courses on AI and the history of science. You can follow him on Twitter @mattyj612 or his website matthewleejordan.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

The nostalgic mist surrounding farms can make it hard to write their history, encrusting them with stereotypical rural virtues and unrealistically separating them from markets, capitalism, and urban influences. The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North (University Of Chicago Press) aims to remake this staid vision.Emily Pawley examines a place and period of enormous agricultural vitality—antebellum New York State—and follows thousands of “improving agriculturists,” part of the largest, most diverse, and most active scientific community in nineteenth-century America. Pawley shows that these improvers practiced a kind of science hard for contemporary readers to recognize, in which profit was not only a goal but also the underlying purpose of the natural world.Far from producing a more rational vision of nature, northern farmers practiced a form of science where conflicting visions of the future landscape appeared and evaporated in quick succession. Drawing from environmental history, U.S. history, and the history of science, and extensively mining a wealth of antebellum agricultural publications, The Nature of the Future uncovers the rich loam hiding beneath ostensibly infertile scholarly terrain, revealing a surprising area of agricultural experimentation that transformed American landscapes and American ideas of expertise, success, and exploitation.New Books Network listeners can purchase The Nature of the Future for 25% off using the coupon code PAWLEY here.Emily Pawley is Associate Professor of History at Dickinson College. Twitter.Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. He lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy. 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

Psychedelic drugs are making a comeback. In the mid-twentieth century, scientists actively studied the potential of drugs like LSD and psilocybin for treating mental health problems. After a decades-long hiatus, researchers are once again testing how effective these drugs are in relieving symptoms for a wide variety of psychiatric conditions, from depression and obsessive–compulsive disorder to posttraumatic stress disorder and substance addiction. In Acid Revival: The Psychedelic Renaissance and the Quest for Medical Legitimacy (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), Danielle Giffort examines how this new generation of researchers and their allies are working to rehabilitate psychedelic drugs and to usher in a new era of psychedelic medicine.As this team of researchers and mental health professionals revive the field of psychedelic science, they are haunted by the past and by one person in particular: psychedelic evangelist Timothy Leary. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews with people working on scientific psychedelia, Giffort shows how today’s researchers tell stories about Leary as an “impure” scientist and perform his antithesis to address a series of lingering dilemmas that threaten to rupture their budding legitimacy. Acid Revival presents new information about the so-called psychedelic renaissance and highlights the cultural work involved with the reassembly of dormant areas of medical science.This colorful and accessible history of the rise, fall, and reemergence of psychedelic medicine is infused with intriguing narratives and personalities—a story for popular science aficionados as well as for scholars of the history of science and medicine.Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.  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

Stuart Ritchie, a professor of psychology, discusses how the scientific enterprise falls short of its truth-seeking ideals due to systemic issues. He exposes unreliable, exaggerated, and fraudulent papers that influence widely accepted theories and claims. Ritchie highlights the biases introduced by even well-meaning scientists and the inadequate training they receive. The discussion covers the replication crisis, data manipulation, media hype, unconscious priming, the issue of replication, statistical analysis, and the role of open science in combating fraud and bias in the scientific community.

How are algorithms shaping our experience of the internet?In Making it Personal: Algorithmic Personalization, Identity, and Everyday Life (Oxford University Press), Tanya Kant, a lecturer in Media And Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex interrogates the rise of algorithmic personalization, in the context of an internet dominated by platform providers and corporate interests.Using detailed empirical case studies, along with a rich and deep theoretical framework, the book shows the negative impact of algorithmic personalization, the nuances and ambivalences in user behaviours, and their modes of resistance.As we increasingly live our lives online, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding how algorithms regulate our lives. 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