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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

73:33

Kate McDonald on Asian Mobility History as Labor History

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2024/07/29

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Kate McDonald, Associate Professor of History at University of California, Santa Barbara, about her fascinating research on the history of mobility in Asia and how it looks different when we approach it as a history of work and labor. The pair traverse McDonald’s career from her current project, The Rickshaw and the Railroad: Human-Powered Transport in the Age of the Machine, to her first book, Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial

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53:07

Bishnupriya Ghosh, "The Virus Touch: Theorizing...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2024/07/26

Welcome to the Global Media & Communication podcast series. This podcast is a multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and

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74:05

Tim Sweijs and Jeffrey H. Michaels, "Beyond Ukraine:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2024/07/26

War in the 21st century will remain a chameleon that takes on different forms and guises. Beyond Ukraine: Debating the Future of War (Oxford University Press, 2024) edited by Tim Sweijs and Jeffrey H. Michaels offers the first comprehensive update and revision of ideas about the future of war since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. It argues that the war has fundamentally shifted our perspective on the nature and character of future war, but also cautions against marginalising many other parallel

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75:33

Quantifying the American Mind: George Gallup, and the...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2024/07/24

Early pollsters thought they had the psychological tools to quantify American mind, thereby enabling a truly democratic polity that would be governed by a rational public opinion. Today, we malign the misinformed public and dismiss the deluge of frivolous polls. How did the rational public become the phantom public? We tell the story of George Gallup, his critics, and also examine alternatives to political polling. This is episode three of Cited Podcast’s returning season, the Rationality Wars. This

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62:29

Kirsten Moore-Sheeley, "Nothing But Nets: A Biography...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2024/07/24

Distributed to millions of people annually across Africa and the global south, insecticide-treated bed nets have become a cornerstone of malaria control and twenty-first-century global health initiatives. Despite their seemingly obvious public health utility, however, these chemically infused nets and their rise to prominence were anything but inevitable.In Nothing But Nets: A Biography of Global Health Science and Its Objects (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), Dr. Kirsten Moore-Sheeley

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70:57

Anton Howes, "Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2024/07/22

Over the past 300 years, The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce has tried to improve British life in every way imaginable. It has sought to influence education, commerce, music, art, architecture, communications, food, and every other corner of society. Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation (Princeton University Press, 2020), written by the historian of innovation and the RSA’s resident historian Anton Howes, is the fascinating story of

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42:29

David Badre, "On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2024/07/21

On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done (Princeton UP, 2020) is a look at the extraordinary ways the brain turns thoughts into actions—and how this shapes our everyday lives. Why is it hard to text and drive at the same time? How do you resist eating that extra piece of cake? Why does staring at a tax form feel mentally exhausting? Why can your child expertly fix the computer and yet still forget to put on a coat? From making a cup of coffee to buying a house to changing the world around them,

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25:08

Sören Schoppmeier, "Playing American: Open-World...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2024/07/19

Videogames have always depicted representations of American culture, but how exactly they feed back into this culture is less obvious. Advocating an action-based understanding of both videogames and culture, this book delineates how aspects of American culture are reproduced transnationally through popular open-world videogames. Playing American: Open-World Videogames and the Reproduction of American Culture (De Gruyter, 2023) proposes an analytic focus on open-world videogames' "ambient

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39:43

Özge Çelikaslan, "Archiving the Commons: Looking...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2024/07/19

“Stories of archives are always stories of phantoms, of the death or disappearance or erasure of something, the preservation of what remains, and its possible reappearance—feared by some, desired by others,” writes Thomas Keenan. Archiving the Commons: Looking Through the Lens of bak.ma (DPR Barcelona, June 2024) is about those stories and much more. Özge Çelikaslan uses bak.ma, a digital media archive born out of the social movements in Turkey, to guide us through a journey in which archives become

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75:41

Thomas Zeller, "Consuming Landscapes: What We See...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2024/07/17

What we see through our windshields reflects ideas about our national identity, consumerism, and infrastructure.For better or worse, windshields have become a major frame for viewing the nonhuman world. The view from the road is one of the main ways in which we experience our environments. These vistas are the result of deliberate historical forces, and humans have shaped them as they simultaneously sought to be transformed by them. In Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It

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49:12

Jill A. Fisher, "Adverse Events: Race, Inequality,...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2024/07/15

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

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71:31

Paula Bialski on Middletech, Software Work, and the...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2024/07/15

Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel talks with Paula Bialski, an Associate Professor for Digital Sociology at the University of St. Gallen in St. Gallen, Switzerland, about her recent book, Middle Tech: Software Work and the Culture of Good Enough (Princeton UP, 2024). The pair talk about the art of ethnographic study of software work, and how, maybe, our world could do with a healthy dose of good enough-ness. They also scheme about some potential collaborations here on Peoples & Things, which you

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41:02

Carl Öhman, "The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2024/07/14

A short, thought-provoking book about what happens to our online identities after we die.These days, so much of our lives takes place online—but what about our afterlives? Thanks to the digital trails that we leave behind, our identities can now be reconstructed after our death. In fact, AI technology is already enabling us to “interact” with the departed. Sooner than we think, the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook. In this thought-provoking book, Carl Öhman explores the increasingly

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60:34

AI and Music: The Future is Here (featuring "There I...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2024/07/13

It’s the UConn Popcast, and recently UConn’s Center for the Study of Popular Music hosted a panel discussion on Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Music. The panel featured Dr. Mitchell Green, Professor of Philosophy, University of Connecticut; Dustin Ballard, a musician and creator of the social media channel “There I Ruined It”; and Dr. Aaron Dial, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Humanities and Technoscience Lab at Purdue University. The conversation addressed AI music creation,

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57:34

Tea Krulos, "American Madness: The Story of the...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2024/07/12

The mainstream news media struggles to understand the power of social media. In contrast, conspiracy advocates, malicious political movements, and even foreign governments have long understood how to harness the power of fear and the fear of power into lucrative outlets for outrage and money. But what happens when the messengers of “inside knowledge” go too far?Author Tea Krulos tells the story of one man, Richard McCaslin, whose fractured thinking made him the ideal consumer of even the most

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66:36

Shannon Vallor, "The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2024/07/10

There's a lot of talk these days about the existential risk that artificial intelligence poses to humanity -- that somehow the AIs will rise up and destroy us or become our overlords. In The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (Oxford UP), Shannon Vallor argues that the actual, and very alarming, existential risk of AI that we face right now is quite different. Because some AI technologies, such as ChatGPT or other large language models, can closely mimic the

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39:27

Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert, "The Secret Life of...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2024/07/10

What is data, and why does it matter for us to care about the data traces we leave behind? What are the implications for our lives of how this data is used by other people in other times and places? In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, authors Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert introduce their new book and talk about how we can rethink our relationship with data and stay informed to make better decisions in the face of technological uncertainty.In their latest book, The Secret Life of Data: Navigating

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34:07

Monika Krause, "Model Cases: On Canonical Research...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2024/07/10

In Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. Monika Krause asks about the concrete material research objects behind shared conversations about classes of objects, periods, and regions in the social sciences and humanities. It is well known that biologists focus on particular organisms, such as mice, fruit flies, or particular viruses when they study general questions about life, development, and disease. Dr. Krause shows that scholars in the social

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46:28

David Alff, "The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2024/07/09

Traversed by thousands of trains and millions of riders, the Northeast Corridor might be America’s most famous railway, but its influence goes far beyond the right-of-way. Dr. David Alff welcomes readers aboard to see how nineteenth-century train tracks did more than connect Boston to Washington, DC. They transformed hundreds of miles of Atlantic shoreline into a political capital, a global financial hub, and home to fifty million people. The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History,

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78:03

David J. Hand, "Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2024/07/08

There is no shortage of books on the growing impact of data collection and analysis on our societies, our cultures, and our everyday lives. David Hand's new book Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters (Princeton University Press, 2020) is unique in this genre for its focus on those data that aren't collected or don't get analyzed. More than an introduction to missingness and how to account for it, this book proposes that the whole of data analysis can benefit from a "dark data" perspective—that

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2,344 results

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