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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

61:23

Anna Reser and Leila McNeill, "Forces of Nature: The...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2021/07/16

From the ancient world to the present women have been critical to the progress of science, yet their importance is overlooked, their stories lost, distorted, or actively suppressed. Forces of Nature sets the record straight and charts the fascinating history of women's discoveries in science. In the ancient and medieval world, women served as royal physicians and nurses, taught mathematics, studied the stars, and practiced midwifery. As natural philosophers, physicists, anatomists, and botanists,

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53:10

Adam Crymble, "Technology and the Historian:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2021/07/15

The digital age has touched and changed pretty much everything, even altering how historical research is practiced. In his new book Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2021), Adam Crymble makes a meta-historical account of how digital and technological advances have impacted historical research, collection management, education, and communication. Our discussion highlights the balance required when creating digital standards and research

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84:08

Yurou Zhong, "Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2021/07/15

In 1928 linguist Yuen Ren Chao had reason to celebrate. The Nationalist government had just recognized his system for writing Chinese, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, so he gleefully wrote (using the system) in his diary: "G.R. yii yu jeou yueh 26 ry gong buh le. Hooray!!!" (G.R. was officially announced on September 26. Hooray!!!). He was not the only one excited about the prospect of scraping Chinese characters either. In the global context of phonocentric dominance both the Nationalists and the Communists waged

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78:19

Angus Fletcher, "Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2021/07/14

Literature is a technology like any other. And the writers we revere--from Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, and others--each made a unique technical breakthrough that can be viewed as both a narrative and neuroscientific advancement. Literature's great invention was to address problems we could not solve: not how to start a fire or build a boat, but how to live and love; how to maintain courage in the face of death; how to account for the fact that we exist at all. Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful

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43:33

Lindy McDougall, "The Perfect Vagina: Cosmetic...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2021/07/14

Today on New Books in Gender Studies Jana Byars talks with Lindy McDougall, of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia about her new book, The Perfect Vagina: Cosmetic Surgery in the Twenty-First Century, out this year, 2021, with Indiana University Press. In The Perfect Vagina, Lindy McDougall provides an ethnographic account of women who choose FGCS in Australia and the physicians who perform these procedures, both in Australia and globally, while also examining the environment in which surgeons

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56:57

Nicoletta Batini, "The Economics of Sustainable Food:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2021/07/13

In The Economics of Sustainable Food: Smart Policies for Health and the Planet (Island Press, 2021), Dr. Nicoletta Batini, and co-authors, unpack the true cost of food production. While the Green Revolution served a purpose, Dr. Batini makes the case that the industrial food complex continues to cause tremendous global economic losses in terms of malnutrition, diseases, and environmental degradation. To ensure we do not exceed the 1.5oC target, the book offers the Great Food Transformation (GFT) as

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121:07

Nima Arkani-Hamed, “The Power of Principles: Physics...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2021/07/13

The Power of Principles: Physics Revealed is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Nima Arkani-Hamed, faculty member at the renowned Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Prof. Arkani-Hamed is one of today’s leading particle physicists. This extensive Ideas Roadshow conversation explores how we discover the laws of nature, the “scientific method”, the relation between theory and experiment and how we can push our understanding well beyond where experiments can

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80:57

Thomas D. Mullaney et al., "Your Computer Is on Fire"...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2021/07/09

This book sounds an alarm: after decades of being lulled into complacency by narratives of technological utopianism and neutrality, people are waking up to the large-scale consequences of Silicon Valley–led technophilia. This book trains a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases in our technological systems, showing how they are not just minor bugs to be patched, but part and parcel of ideas that assume technology can fix—and control—society. The essays in Your Computer Is on

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73:42

Alyssa Ney, "The World in the Wave Function: A...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2021/07/09

Quantum mechanics is full of weird findings – for example, that systems widely separated can somehow still be correlated, and that a system may be in two different possible states at the same time. Entanglement and superposition, among other phenomena, have prompted debate since the inception of QM about how, exactly, we should understand what it tells us about reality. In The World in the Wave Function (Oxford UP, 2021), Alyssa Ney defends wave function realism, the claim that the basic

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64:25

Warren Mansell, "The Interdisciplinary Handbook of...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2021/07/08

Regular listeners to this podcast will be well aware of my strong conviction that the Perceptual Control Theory initially formulated by William T. Powers entails many significant contributions to the domains of systems and cybernetics despite the fact that, for the last several decades, its applications have been further developed in a largely “adjacent” academic community. It is in the ongoing spirit of a much-needed rapprochement between these fields, that previous guest, Warren Mansell, returns

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59:07

Kristin Poling, "Germany's Urban Frontiers: Nature...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2021/07/08

In an era of transatlantic migration, Germans were fascinated by the myth of the frontier. Yet, for many, they were most likely to encounter frontier landscapes of new settlement and the taming of nature not in far-flung landscapes abroad, but on the edges of Germany's many growing cities. Germany's Urban Frontiers: Nature and History on the Edge of the Nineteenth-Century City (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) is the first book to examine how nineteenth-century notions of progress, community,

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70:39

Stefan Vogler, "Sorting Sexualities: Expertise and...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2021/07/07

In Sorting Sexualities: Expertise and the Politics of Legal Classification (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Stefan Vogler deftly unpacks the politics of the techno-legal classification of sexuality in the United States. His study focuses specifically on state classification practices around LGBTQ people seeking asylum in the United States and sexual offenders being evaluated for carceral placement--two situations where state actors must determine individuals' sexualities. Though these legal

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80:03

Arunabh Ghosh, "Making It Count: Statistics and...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2021/07/07

The first historical study of the development of statistics in Mao-era China, Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China (Princeton University Press, 2020) explores how Chinese statisticians attempted to know their new nation through numbers. Exploring the different kinds of statistics available and adopted by the PRC, Arunabh Ghosh details how Chinese statisticians moved away from Soviet-inspired exhaustive enumeration, learned about the then-new technology

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60:06

Martin Summers, "Madness in the City of Magnificent...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2021/07/07

From the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, Saint Elizabeths Hospital was one of the United States' most important institutions for the care and treatment of the mentally ill. Founded in 1855 to treat insane soldiers and sailors as well as civilian residents in the nation's capital, the institution became one of the country's preeminent research and teaching psychiatric hospitals. From the beginning of its operation, Saint Elizabeths admitted black patients, making it one of the few

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40:37

Catalina M. de Onís, "Energy Islands: Metaphors of...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2021/07/07

Energy Islands: Metaphors of Power, Extractivism, and Justice in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2021) provides an urgent and nuanced portrait of collective action that resists racial capitalism, colonialism, and climate disruption. Weaving together historical and ethnographic research, this story challenges the master narratives of Puerto Rico as a tourist destination and site of "natural" disasters to demonstrate how fossil fuel economies are inextricably entwined with colonial

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54:24

Nathan R. Johnson, "Architects of Memory: Information...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2021/07/06

We are now living in the richest age of public memory. From museums and memorials to the vast digital infrastructure of the internet, access to the past is only a click away. Even so, the methods and technologies created by scientists, espionage agencies, and information management coders and programmers have drastically delimited the ways that communities across the globe remember and forget our wealth of retrievable knowledge. In Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked

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83:01

Sandeep Mertia, "Lives of Data: Essays on...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2021/07/05

Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India (Institute of Networked Cultures, 2020) maps the historical and emergent dynamics of big data, computing, and society in India. Data infrastructures are now more global than ever before. In much of the world, new sociotechnical possibilities of big data and artificial intelligence are unfolding under the long shadows cast by infra/structural inequalities, colonialism, modernization, and national sovereignty. This book offers critical vantage

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56:21

Jenny Price, "Stop Saving the Planet!: An...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2021/07/05

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

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48:27

Luiz Valerio de Paula Trindade, "No Laughing Matter:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2021/07/02

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

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57:27

Joseph Gfroerer, "War Stories from the Drug Survey:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2021/07/02

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

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2,488 results

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