New forthcoming book: The Ethnographic Case 2nd edition

We are really excited to be able to announce the forthcoming publication of a new, second edition of The Ethnographic Case, a collection of pieces edited by Emily Yates-Doerr & Christine Labuski.

The book will be published this November.

The second edition is a follow up to the experimental first edition, which was published as a digital book, with all its pieces open to post publication comment and review. The new second edition will be published both as a hard copy to buy and as an Open Access book to download for free.

The contributions to the book develop “ethnographic casing” as a technique of attending to heterogeneities in systems of thought. Medical cases. Legal cases. Museum showcases. Detective cases. Some cases featured are violent, others compassionate; some set stereotypes in motion, others break them down.

Connected more by difference than similarity, the “cases” in the volume make a case for the virtue of relational science. This is a science that is not beholden to master narratives, but which embraces the double-work of caring for detail, while caring for the practices through which one learns to care. In 26 gripping and provocative installations, the volume showcases research from numerous influential feminist and decolonial scholars.

Where anthropology has long sought to identify patterns in culture, the Ethnographic Case makes space for inquiry focused on particularities and advocates for an intellectual politics where that which seemingly doesn’t fit is still allowed to matter.

Mattering Press is a UK registered charity led by STS scholars who give their time to the press for free. Donations and purchases of hard copies of our books help fund our work.

Our full catalogue is shown below.

    The Ethnographic Case (2nd Edition)

    Edited by Emily Yates-Doerr and Christine Labuski

    The 1st Edition of The Ethnographic Case, published in 2017, was an experiment in post-publication peer review, with the book published online and open to comments from readers. In this new 2nd edition, to be published later this year, the editors and authors have updated the text, both in response to these comments and taking…Read more

    Democratic Situations

    Edited by Andreas Birkbak and Irina Papazu

    Democratic Situations challenges researchers and students in Science & Technology Studies and related fields to treat democracy as an empirical phenomenon. This means leaving behind off-the-shelf theoretical notions of democracy that may have travelled into STS unexamined. The alternative strategy pursued in this volume is to pay as much analytical attention to the study of democratic politics…Read more

    Concealing for Freedom

    The Making of Encryption, Secure Messaging and Digital Liberties

    Ksenia Ermoshina and Francesca Musiani (Foreword by Laura DeNardis)

    Concealing for Freedom: The Making of Encryption, Secure Messaging and Digital Liberties sets out to explore one of the core battlegrounds of Internet governance: the encryption of online communications. Current debates around encryption have fundamental implications for our individual liberties and collective presence on the Internet. Encryption of communications at scale and in increasingly usable…Read more

    Engineering the Climate

    Science, Politics, and Visions of Control

    Julia Schubert

    This book unpacks the turbulent trajectory of one of the most contested techno-political projects of our time: the idea to deliberately alter, to engineer, the earth’s climate to counteract global warming. As the text follows the emergence of this controversial project from the turn of the twentieth century to the teens of the new millennium, we learn how historically specific versions of what we now refer to as climate engineering have continuously linked scientific to political agendas. By disentangling the various threads of scientific inquiry and policymaking that have brought us to the present point, the book challenges us to fundamentally rethink our understanding of the relationship between science and politics.

    With Microbes

    Edited by Charlotte Brives, Matthäus Rest and Salla Sariola

    With Microbes front cover

    Without microbes, no other forms of life would be possible. But what does it mean to be with microbes? In this book, 24 contributors attune to microbes and describe their multiple relationships with humans and others. Ethnographic explorations with fermented foods, waste, faecal matter, immunity, antimicrobial resistance, phages, as well as indigenous and scientific understandings of microbes challenge ideas of them being simple entities: not just pathogenic foes, old friends or good fermentation minions, but much more. Following various entanglements, the book tells how these relations transform both humans and microbes in the process.

    Environmental Alterities

    Edited by Cristóbal Bonelli and Antonia Walford

    In the context of accelerating environmental crises and exhausted intellectual paradigms, this book asks what comes after ‘after nature’. Instead of demanding new models and approaches, it invites its readers to look to the endpoints and failures of what is already known, in order to generate alternative forms of ethical engagement with worlds both on this planet, and beyond it. Drawing together scholarship from across science and technology studies, philosophy, and anthropology and bringing it into conversation with rich ethnographic and empirical material, the book asks how we might potentialise the contradictions and oppositions of critical social scientific thinking in order to develop a mode of paradoxical engagement that is in constant movement between knowledge and its edges, practices and their limits, and which allows us to relate to that which is excessive to relations and relationality.

    Sensing In/Security

    Sensors as Transnational Security Infrastructures

    Edited by Nina Klimburg-Witjes, Nikolaus Poechhacker & Geoffrey C. Bowker

    Overview Sensing In/Security: Sensors as Transnational Security Infrastructures investigates how sensors and sensing practices enact regimes of security and insecurity. It extends long-standing concerns with infrastructuring to emergent modes of surveillance and control by exploring how digitally networked sensors shape securitisation practices. Contributions in this volume examine how sensing devices gain political and epistemic relevance in…Read more

    Energy Worlds in Experiment

    Edited by James Maguire, Laura Watts & Brit Ross Winthereik

    Energy Worlds in Experiment is an experiment in writing about energy and an exploration of energy infrastructures as experiments. Twenty authors have written collaborative chapters that examine energy politics and practices, from electricity cables and energy monitors to swamps and estuaries.  Each chapter proposes a unique format to tell energy worlds differently and to stimulate…Read more

    Five Theses on Energy Polities

    A pre-print chapter from the forthcoming volume 'Energy Worlds in Experiment'

    by Brit Ross Winthereik, Stefan Helmreich, Damian O’Doherty, Mónica Amador-Jiménez and Noortje Marres. Edited by James Maguire, Laura Watts and Brit Ross Winthereik

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    • Publication date: 2021-01-25

    ‘Five Theses on Energy Polities’ is a pre-print chapter from the forthcoming volume ‘Energy Worlds in Experiment’ edited by James Maguire, Laura Watts and Brit Ross Winthereik. The full volume will be published in a print and free online version in Spring 2021. Please send us an email (info@matteringpress.org) if you are interested in reviewing the…Read more

    Sensing In/Security (pre-print)

    Sensors as transnational security infrastructures

    Edited by Nina Klimburg-Witjes, Nikolaus Poechhacker, Geoffrey C. Bowker

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    PRE-PRINT EDITION This rich and extensive collection of studies examines sensors and sensing at the intersections of Critical Security Studies and Science and Technology Studies. Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University Sensing In/Security is a book project that investigates how sensors and sensing practices enact regimes of security and insecurity. It extends long standing concerns with infrastructuring…Read more