New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

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New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Interviews with Scholars of Science, Technology, and Society about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

  1. 6 HR AGO

    Ulises Ali Mejias and Nick Couldry, "Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    In the present day, Big Tech is extracting resources from us, transferring and centralizing resources from people to companies. These companies are grabbing our most basic natural resources--our data--exploiting our labor and connections, and repackaging our information to control our views, track our movements, record our conversations, and discriminate against us. These companies tell us this is for our own good, to build innovation and develop new technology. But in fact, every time we unthinkingly click "Accept" on a set of Terms and Conditions, we allow our most personal information to be kept indefinitely, repackaged by companies to control and exploit us for their own profit.  In Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back (The University of Chicago Press, 2024), Ulises Mejias and Nick Couldry explain why postindustrial capitalism cannot be understood without colonialism, and why race is a critical factor in who benefits from data colonialism, just as it was for historic colonialism. In this searing, cutting-edge guide, Mejias and Couldry explore the concept of data colonialism, revealing how history can help us understand the emerging future--and how we can fight back. Mention in this episode: Tierra Comun (English Version) Ulises A. Mejias is professor of communication studies at the State University of New York at Oswego. Nick Couldry is professor of media, communications, and social theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. 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

    1h 3m

  2. 6 HR AGO

    Lindsay Weinberg, "Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

    In Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), Lindsay Weinberg evaluates how this latest era of tech solutions and systems in our schools impacts students' abilities to access opportunities and exercise autonomy on their campuses. Using historical and textual analysis of administrative discourses, university policies, conference proceedings, grant solicitations, news reports, tech industry marketing materials, and product demonstrations, Weinberg argues that these more recent transformations are best understood as part of a longer history of universities supporting the development of technologies that reproduce racial and economic injustice on their campuses and in their communities. Mentioned in this episode is this piece that Dr. Weinberg wrote in Inside Higher Ed:  Lindsay Weinberg is a clinical assistant professor and the Director of the Tech Justice Lab in the John Martinson Honors College at Purdue University. Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. 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

    48 min

  3. 6 HR AGO

    Julien Mailland, "The Game That Never Ends: How Lawyers Shape the Videogame Industry" (MIT Press, 2024)

    A guide to the fascinating legal history of the videogame industry, written for nonlawyers.  Why did a judge recall FIFA 15, a nonviolent soccer game, from French shelves in 2014? Why was Vodka Drunkenski, a character in Nintendo-Japan’s Punch-Out!, renamed Soda Popinski in the US and then in Western Europe, where the pun made no sense? Why was a Dutch-American company barred by US courts from distributing a clone of Pac-Man?  Julien Mailland answers all these questions and more in The Game That Never Ends: How Lawyers Shape the Videogame Industry (MIT Press, 2024), an inside look at the legal history that undergirds our favorite videogames. Drawing on a series of case studies as vignettes of the human comedy, Mailland sheds light on why and how the role of lawyers is key for understanding the videogame industry. Each chapter in The Game That Never Ends is a mini-puzzle that pieces together how an important legal issue arose, was resolved, and impacted the industry and the experience of gamers in real time. These chapters are interspersed with shorter chapters called “The Lawyer’s Corner,” opportunities to dive deeper into individual cases. Lightly footnoted, these interludes connect the previous chapters together by providing a conceptual meta-analysis. Offering a comprehensive overview of the global legal history of videogames, The Game That Never Ends will leave readers with a nuanced, in-depth, and more global understanding of the videogame industry. Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design at the IU International University for Applied Science, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist. 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

    41 min

  4. 1 DAY AGO

    Chelsea Berry, "Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

    By the time of the opening of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century, Europeans and Atlantic Africans had developed significantly different cultural idioms for and understandings of poison. Europeans considered poison a gendered “weapon of the weak” while Africans viewed it as an abuse by the powerful. Though distinct, both idioms centered on fraught power relationships. When translated to the slave societies of the Americas, these understandings sometimes clashed in conflicting interpretations of alleged poisoning events. In Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), Dr. Chelsea Berry illuminates the competing understandings of poison and power in the Atlantic World. Poison was connected to central concerns of life: to the well-being in this world for oneself and one’s relatives; to the morality and use of power; and to the fraught relationships that bound people together. The social and relational nature of ideas about poison meant that the power struggles that emerged in poison cases, while unfolding in the extreme context of slavery, were not solely between enslavers and the enslaved—they also involved social conflict within enslaved communities. Poisoned Relations examines more than five hundred investigations and trials in four colonial contexts—British Virginia, French Martinique, Portuguese Bahia, and the Dutch Guianas—bringing a groundbreaking application of historical linguistics to bear on the study of the African diaspora in the Americas. Illuminating competing understandings of poison and power in this way, Dr. Berry opens new avenues of evidence through which to navigate the violence of colonial archival silences. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. 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

    44 min

  5. 2 DAYS AGO

    Nina Edwards, "Weeds" (Reaktion, 2024)

    To most of us, weeds can seem nothing more than intruders in gardens, farms and city streets. But the idea of the weed is a slippery one, constantly changing according to different needs, fashions and contexts. In a well-ordered field of corn, a scarlet poppy is a bright red intruder, but in other parts of the world it is an important cultural symbol, a potent and lucrative pharmaceutical source, or simply a beautiful ornament. Fat hen, which today we consider a pest, was in Neolithic times a staple crop, its seeds an important source of nutrition. Weeds (Reaktion, 2024) by Nina Edwards sketches the history of the fashions and attitudes that have shaped our fields and gardens, showing that what we keep out of them is just as fascinating as what we put in. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. 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

    29 min

  6. 2 DAYS AGO

    Luci Pangrazio and Neil Selwyn, "Critical Data Literacies: Rethinking Data and Everyday Life" (MIT Press, 2023)

    Data has become a defining issue of current times. Our everyday lives are shaped by the data that is produced about us (and by us) through digital technologies. In Critical Data Literacies: Rethinking Data and Everyday Life (MIT Press, 2023), Luci Pangrazio and Neil Selwyn introduce readers to the central concepts, ideas, and arguments required to make sense of life in the data age. Bringing together cutting-edge thinking and discussion from across education, sociology, psychology, and media and communication studies, Critical Data Literacies develops a powerful argument for collectively rethinking the role that data plays in our everyday lives and re-establishing agency, free will, and the democratic public sphere. In the episode, Luci Pangazio discusses how the tradition of critical literacies can offer a powerful foundation to address the big concerns of the data age, such as issues of data justice and privacy, algorithmic bias, dataveillance, and disinformation. We challenge the idea that datafication is an inevitable and inescapable condition. This interview was conducted by Shreya Urvashi, a doctoral researcher of sociology and education based in Toronto, Canada. 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

    40 min

  7. 5 DAYS AGO

    Voices Part 3: Dork-O-Phonics

    Jonathan Sterne is one of the most influential scholars working on sound and listening. His 2003 book, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, had a formative influence on the then-nascent field of sound studies. His 2012 book, MP3: The Meaning of a Format, was both a fascinating cultural history and a deep meditation on the purpose of compression technology in capitalism. Today, Sterne talks to Phantom Power about his new book, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke UP 2022). Specifically, he tells the story of the “Dork-o-phone,” a vocal amplifier he wears to give talks or communicate in loud spaces. Jonathan explains why he wears the Dork-o-phone, what it’s taught him about voice, technology, and disability, and how his experience informs Diminished Faculties’ “phenomenology of impairment.” This is the third and final part of our series, Voices. Although you don’t need to listen to the other episodes first to enjoy this one, here are the links to part one and part two. All of this episode’s sound art and music are performed by Jonathan Sterne and/or groups he appears in: Cancerscapes: Recordings made during Sterne’s thyroid cancer treatment Volte: An instrumental post rock band The Buddha Curtain: solo electronic music Jonathan Sterne is Professor and James McGill Chair in Culture and Technology at McGill University. He does research in sound studies; media theory and historiography; science and technology studies; new media; disability studies; music; and cultural studies. You can read Jonathan Sterne’s cancer diaries at https://www.cancerscapes.ca. 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

    43 min

  8. 6 DAYS AGO

    Margaret Ziolkowski, "Mega-Dams in World Literature: Literary Responses to Twentieth-Century Dam Building" (U of Wyoming Press, 2024)

    Margaret Ziolkowski’s Mega-Dams in World Literature: Literary Responses to Twentieth-Century Dam Building (University of Wyoming Press, 2022) reveals the varied effects of large dams on people and their environments as expressed in literary works, focusing on the shifting attitudes toward large dams that emerged over the course of the twentieth century. Ziolkowski covers the enthusiasm for large-dam construction that took place during the mid-twentieth-century heyday of mega-dams, the increasing number of people displaced by dams, the troubling environmental effects they incur, and the types of destruction and protest to which they may be subject.  Using North American, Native American, Russian, Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese novels and poems, Ziolkowski explores the supposed progress that these structures bring. The book asks how the human urge to exploit and control waterways has affected our relationships to nature and the environment and argues that the high modernism of the twentieth century, along with its preoccupation with development, casts the hydroelectric dam as a central symbol of domination over nature and the power of the nation state. Beyond examining the exultation of large dams as symbols of progress, Mega-Dams in World Literature takes a broad international and cultural approach that humanizes and personalizes the major issues associated with large dams through nuanced analyses, paying particular attention to issues engendered by high modernism and settler colonialism. In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy interviews Margaret Ziolkowski about the symbolism of mega-dams, the environmental and social consequences of dam building, as well as the role of literature in critiquing those consequences. Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature 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

    36 min
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Interviews with Scholars of Science, Technology, and Society about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

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