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PODCAST

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

New Books Network

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox:

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All Episodes

40:40

Ysabel Gerrard, "The Kids Are Online: Confronting the...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/04/13

How do young people use digital platforms? In The Kids are Online: Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life (U California Press, 2025), Ysabel Gerrard, a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Society at the University of Sheffield explores the understandings and experience of young people as they navigate both the online and offline world. Drawing on a range of sociological, digital and creative methods, the book punctures many myths around young people’s digital lives, showing both

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32:57

Milena Droumeva, "Playthrough Poetics: Gameplay as...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/04/12

Game streamers and live commentators are producing increasingly comprehensive analyses of gameplay, yet scholarship still tends to flatten the experiential media of video games into text for close reading. By shifting focus toward the immersiveness of video games, Playthrough Poetics: Gameplay as Research Method (Amherst, 2024) makes the case for gameplay as a necessary, alternate method. Contributors to this volume engage widely with the activity of play through autoethnographies, meta-analyses of

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47:45

Brain Rot: How Screens Affect the Minds of Middle-Age...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/04/10

In episode 5 Dr. Karyne Messina and Dr. Harry Gill talked about what can happen when middle-age and older adults watch screens too much as opposed to engaging in other important tasks in life during Erik Eriksson’s last two stages of development.In the “Generativity versus Stagnation” stage (ages 40-65), productive individuals focus on contributing to society by raising families, engaging in meaningful work, and connecting with their communities. This can’t be done in optimal ways when people spend

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70:10

Jeremy Braddock on "Firesign: The Electromagnetic...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/04/09

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Jeremy Braddock, Associate Professor of Literatures in English and Coordinator of the Media Studies Initiative at Cornell University, about his book, Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums. The book explores themes of media and technology through nine albums made by Firesign Theatre, an experimental, surrealistic comedy troupe formed in the mid-1960s that created art across several media forms. The theme of

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41:59

Rebecca Heisman, "Flight Paths: How a Passionate and...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/04/08

In Flight Paths (HarperCollins, 2023), Rebecca Heisman illuminates the stories and methods of the scientists who unlocked the secrets of bird migration. How and why birds navigate the skies has continually fascinated the human imagination, but only recently have we been able to fully understand these amazing journeys. Flight Paths is the never-before-told saga of how a group of passionate scientists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries engaged nearly every branch of science to understand bird

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96:29

Paddy Walker, "War Without Oversight: Why We Need...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/04/07

Amid the fanfare around AI and autonomous weapons, decision-makers - both military and political - are imagining an augmented future for warfare that minimises human influence and connection. But in their rush for speed and lethality, leaders have failed to understand the behavioural and technical challenges that accompany these new weapon types, as well as the detail of their operation and the practicalities involved in deploying these assets on tomorrow's battlefields. Indeed, as autonomy starts

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75:07

John Alekna, "Seeking News, Making China:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/04/06

Contemporary developments in communications technologies have overturned key aspects of the global political system and transformed the media landscape. Yet interlocking technological, informational, and political revolutions have occurred many times in the past. In Seeking News, Making China: Information, Technology, and the Emergence of Mass Society (Stanford UP, 2024), John Alekna traces the history of news in twentieth century China to demonstrate how large structural changes in technology and

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53:43

James Boyle Draws the Line Between Humans and AI

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/04/05

It’s the UConn Popcast, and we spoke with Duke Law Professor James Boyle about his new book The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood (MIT Press, 2024). We spoke with Boyle about how our legal and moral understandings of personhood are being challenged by advances in AI. We discussed the role of the law, popular culture, tests of sentience, and our capacity for empathy in shaping this urgent debate.James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School and founder of the Center

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47:02

Anna Farro Henderson, "Core Samples: A Climate...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/04/03

Climate scientist and policy expert Anna Farro Henderson embarks on a remarkable narrative journey in Core Samples: A Climate Scientist's Experiments in Politics and Motherhood (U Minnesota Press, 2025), exploring how science is done, discussed, legislated, and imagined. Through stories both raucous and poignant--of far-flung expeditions, finding artistic inspiration in research, and traversing the systemic barriers women and mothers face in science and politics--she brings readers into the daily

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27:23

Marc Owen Jones, "Digital Authoritarianism in the...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/04/02

In the latest episode of Unlocking Academia, host Raja Aderdor sits down with Marc Owen Jones, associate professor at Northwestern University in Qatar, to explore the complex world of digital deception in the Middle East, as outlined in his book Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Deception, Disinformation and Social Media (Hurst/Oxford UP, 2021). Marc draws on years of experience growing up in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, as well as living and working in Sudan, Syria, Germany, and the UK. His

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40:47

Rhys Machold, "Fabricating Homeland Security: Police...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/04/01

Homeland security is rarely just a matter of the homeland; it involves the circulation and multiplication of policing practices across borders. Though the term "homeland security" is closely associated with the United States, Israel is credited with first developing this all-encompassing approach to domestic surveillance and territorial control. Today, it is a central node in the sprawling global homeland security industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars. And in the wake of the 2008 Mumbai

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67:07

Making Radio History

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/31

Elena Razlogova is an Associate Professor of History at Concordia University. She is the author of The Listener’s Voice: Early Radio and the American Public (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) and co-editor of “Radical Histories in Digital Culture” issue of the Radical History Review (2013). She has published articles in American Quarterly, Radical History Review, Russian Review, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Radio Journal, Cultural Studies, Social Media Society, and more. Elena’s

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44:31

Peder Anker, "For The Love of Bombs: The Trail of...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/30

The truism that history is written by its winners reflects the literature about how the bomb came about, with apologetic books most often written by U.S. scholars. The physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the nuke’s ‘father’, is repeatedly centre stage, as in the case of the recent film about him. These are elitist stories that more often than not ignore the suffering and violence of the bomb to laypeople in general, and to marginalised groups in particular.Starting with the gruesome mining of uranium by

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60:21

The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/29

For many, technology offers hope for the future―that promise of shared human flourishing and liberation that always seems to elude our species. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies spark this hope in a particular way. They promise a future in which human limits and frailties are finally overcome―not by us, but by our machines. Yet rather than open new futures, today's powerful AI technologies reproduce the past. Forged from oceans of our data into immensely powerful but flawed mirrors, they

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35:41

Jeremy Black, "A History of Britain's Transport" (Pen...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/28

An accessible book to draw on popular interest in transport history, routes, vehicles and experiences. Transport history is social and industrial national history. Passengers and freight will be covered including all types of transport from walking and packhorses, that predominated for much of national history, both of which tend to be underrated, to changes brought by improvements to road transport from the Romans to medieval bridgebuilders and eighteenth-century turnpikes, and, in parallel, river,

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57:44

Matt Mahmoudi, "Migrants in the Digital Periphery:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/27

As the fortification of Europe's borders and its hostile immigration terrain has taken shape, so too have the biometric and digital surveillance industries. And when US Immigration Customs Enforcement aggressively reinforced its program of raids, detention, and family separation, it was powered by Silicon Valley corporations. In cities of refuge, where communities on the move once lived in anonymity and proximity to familial and diaspora networks, the possibility for escape is diminishing. As

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25:18

Chris Skinner, "Intelligent Money: When Money Thinks...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/26

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

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65:45

Sex and Love with Robots and Chatbots

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/26

It’s the UConn Popcast, and can you fall in love with ChatGPT? Can, and should, you have sex with a robot? We asked Professor Kate Devlin, a leading researcher on intimate relations between humans and artificial intelligences, to help us navigate the new landscape of sex and love with robots. Kate is a Professor of AI & Society in the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. She’s the author of the excellent book Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots (Bloomsbury, 2018), which examines

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77:10

Anita Say Chan, "Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/25

Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (University of California Press, 2025) illuminates the throughline between the nineteenth century's anti-immigration and eugenics movements and our sprawling systems of techno-surveillance and algorithmic discrimination. With this book, Anita Say Chan offers a historical, globally multisited analysis of the relations of dispossession, misrecognition, and segregation expanded by dominant knowledge institutions in the Age of

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51:34

The Audiobook's Century-Long Overnight Success

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/24

Today we present the first episode of a miniseries on audiobooks by getting into the history and theory of the medium. Audiobooks are having a moment—and it only took them over a century to get here. Dr. Matthew Rubery, a Harvard PhD and Professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London, pioneered the study of the audiobook, its history, and its affordances. Among his other works, Dr. Rubery is the author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book (2016, Harvard University Press). He’s

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2,293 results

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