Published On: Aug 21 2026
This book examines and critiques Steve Fuller’s social epistemology on his study of four ways to understand the nature of post-truth: way one’s understanding is an epistemic crisis in which emotion has taken over and facts are irrelevant; way two’s understanding is a legitimation crisis of cognitive authority of science on the legitimation and delegitimation of knowledge claims; way three’s understanding is the Internet and social media have led to the democratization of knowledge; way four’s understanding is the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the chan...
Published On: Aug 21 2026
Against the background of great expectations associated with the application of big data and artificial intelligence in medicine, various voices have claimed that individuals have a moral obligation to make their data and tissue available for research. This book critically examines this claim by drawing on four case studies of medical data and tissue collections: the Framingham Heart Study in the United States; the Singapore Tissue Network; the Million Death Study in India; and the European network of sample and data collections BBMRI-ERIC.
Published On: Jul 30 2026
This book explores the relationship between reading science in fiction and engaging with science, showing how reading speculative fiction can make sense of technoscientific societies and the futures they generate. Focusing on embodied readers and empirical approaches to fiction reading, the authors examine contemporary social, cultural, biographical and political contexts in which science fictions come to matter.
Published On: Jul 30 2026
Each year, Australia faces increasingly unprecedented wildfires, marked both by their scale and by the intense public disagreements about their political, cultural, and ecological causes. How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent, written by Timothy Neale, is a critical and ethnographic exploration of wildfire management in Australia and the technoscientific systems of control that shape its current and future possibilities.
Published On: Jun 30 2026
In 100% Utilization, Andrew Lison explores the consequences of pushing computing power to its limits for a culture seemingly reliant on automation as much as human labor. In accounting for this contradiction, Lison offers a corrective to theories of digital mediation emphasizing its symbolic and representational capabilities. He connects the looming end of Moore’s law to trends in semiconductor manufacturing, custom hardware, and parallelized software techniques, including AI.
Published On: Jun 30 2026
From genome sequencing to large sky surveys, digital technologies produce massive datasets that promise unprecedented scientific insights. But data, for being good to use and reuse, need people—scientists, technicians, and administrators—as embodied, evaluative, social humans. In this book, Götz Hoeppe draws on an ethnography of astronomical research to examine the media and practices that scientists and technicians use to instruct graduate students, make diagrams for data calibration and discovery, organize collaborative work, negotiate the ethics of open access, encode their...
Published On: May 29 2026
Smart as a City provides a rich ethnographic investigation into how smartness is received and negotiated in a midsize US city. Burcu Baykurt follows the work of civic entrepreneurs, local residents, and city officials in Kansas City, Missouri, where Google tested a citywide gigabit service and the local government launched a series of smart city pilot projects in transportation, public housing, and municipal services. Baykurt redefines smartness as a collective effort to spotlight a city’s enduring local problems and align solutions with the often buggy, partially developed systems offer...
Published On: Apr 25 2026
In Machineries of Similarity and Difference, David Ribes theorizes interoperability, or how to make different things work together. For the last 30 years, standardization has been the dominant social scientific motif for understanding coordination and collaboration across time and space. But across those years much has changed, in part through computational and other technical advances, in part through a new orientation to the value of similarity and difference. Interoperation is an ascendent social form.
Published On: Apr 25 2026
Biodiversity loss now ranks alongside climate change as a threat to human survival. The United Nation’s secretary general has declared that “humanity is waging a war on nature.” According to some observers, humans are failing to do enough to avoid an extinction crisis. In Conservation by the People, Taylor Dotson challenges the catastrophic story that often gets told about the world’s ecosystems, uncovering the complex scientific, political, and cultural reasons why people disagree about conservation.
Published On: Mar 31 2026
Do our tools for knowing about the world actually obscure important knowledge? Anne Beaulieu's 'Revealing Relations" uncovers how knowledge infrastructures—including satellite tracking, climate models, machine learning and citizen science apps—shape our understanding of contemporary crises. Rooted in logics of resource assessment, these systems often reinforce extractive thinking, even when intended to protect.