Forthcoming: Boxes – A Field Guide

Mattering Press is proud to announce the forthcoming publication of a major new text, Boxes: A Field Guide, edited by Susanne Bauer, Martina Schlünder, and Maria Rentetzi. This book invites readers into a new field: box studies. It explores the ‘wildlife’ of box practices, in the process aiming to challenge our senses and orderings of the world.

The field guide unfolds over almost 40 chapters, including many that experiment with text and image, in the process making space for experimentation with — and contestation of — academic formats.

A key contribution is to consider how world-making comes about through box practices, developing a generative critique of universalized epistemologies and showing how box practices are replete with ontological politics.

The full book will be published later this year. As a foretaste of what is to come, we are pleased to make the proofs of five chapters available to readers, as well as the full table of contents.

Boxes: A Field Guide Table of Contents [Proofs]

Emily Brownell Better Shelter [Proofs]

Alexandra Widmer Boxes, Infrastructure and the Materiality of Moral Relations: Aid and Respect after Cyclone Pam [Proofs]

Mats Fridlund Keep Calm and Carry One: The Civilian Gas Mask Case and its Containment of British Emotions [Proofs]

Christine von Oertzen Prussian Census Box: Moving and Freezing Data [Proofs]

Etienne S. Benson The Mirror Trap [Proofs]

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.

    An Anthropology of Common Ground

    Awkward Encounters in Heritage Work

    Nathalia Brichet

    Paying attention to details and ‘small stories’ as that which make worlds (heritage projects as well as ethnography), the book proposes a kind of postcolonial scholarship. Rather than uncovering or building up one story about the Danish-Ghanaian past, the work insists on providing ‘inconclusive’ analyses, collaboratively generated in the course of the project work and…Read more

    Ghost-Managed Medicine

    Big Pharma's Invisible Hands

    by Sergio Sismondo

    Ghost-Managed Medicine by Sergio Sismondo explores a spectral side of medical knowledge, based in pharmaceutical industry tactics and practices. Hidden from the public view, the many invisible hands of the pharmaceutical industry and its agents channel streams of drug information and knowledge from contract research organizations (that extract data from experimental bodies) to publication planners…Read more

    Inventing the Social

    Edited by Noortje Marres, Michael Guggenheim, Alex Wilkie

    Inventing the Social, edited by Noortje Marres, Michael Guggenheim and Alex Wilkie, showcases recent efforts to develop new ways of knowing society that combine social research with creative practice. With contributions from leading figures in sociology, architecture, geography, design, anthropology, and digital media, the book provides practical and conceptual pointers on how to move beyond…Read more

    The Ethnographic Case

    Edited by Emily Yates-Doerr and Christine Labuski

    The Ethnographic Case is an experimental, online, Open Access book, that invites readers to interact with it in a process of post-publication peer review. The book challenges a widespread academic inclination to treat concepts as immutable mobiles. The contributions to this volume develop “ethnographic casing” as a technique of attending to heterogeneities in systems of thought. Medical cases. Legal cases. Briefcases. Detective cases. Some cases featured are violent, others compassionate; some set stereotypes in motion, others break them

    Energy Babble

    Authored by Andy Boucher, Bill Gaver, Tobie Kerridge, Mike Michael, Liliana Ovalle, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, and Alex Wilkie

    This is the story of a set of computational devices called Energy Babbles. The product of a collaboration between designers and STS researchers, Energy Babbles are like automated talk radios obsessed with energy. Synthesised voices, punctuated by occasional jingles, recount energy policy announcements, remarks about energy conservation made on social media, information about current energy…Read more

    Modes of Knowing

    Resources from the Baroque

    Edited by John Law, Evelyn Ruppert

    How might we think differently? This book is an attempt to respond to this question. Its contributors are all interested in non-standard modes of knowing. They are all more or less uneasy with the restrictions or the agendas implied by academic modes of knowing, and they have chosen to do this by working with, through,…Read more

    Imagining Classrooms

    Stories of Children, Teaching, and Ethnography

    Vicki Macknight

    In this book we go to five Australian classrooms, bustling with nine- and ten-year-old children. In each classroom, imaginations are being done, not just in minds, but with bodies too, using materials and words, laughter and ideas. Each classroom is part of a different type of school: a Waldorf/Steiner school, an exclusive private school, a…Read more

    On Curiosity

    The Art of Market Seduction

    Frank Cochoy

    What draws us towards a shop window display? What drives us to grab a special offer, to enter the privileged circle of premium newspaper subscribers, to peruse the pages of an enticing magazine? Without doubt, it is curiosity — that essential force of everyday action which invites us to break from our habits and to…Read more

    Practising Comparison

    Logics Relations Collaborations

    Edited by Joe Deville, Michael Guggenheim, Zuzana Hrdličková

    This book compares things, objects, concepts, and ideas. It is also about the practical acts of doing comparison. Comparison is not something that exists in the world, but a particular kind of activity. Agents of various kinds compare by placing things next to one another, by using software programs and other tools, and by simply…Read more