New book: Concealing for Freedom

Concealing for Freedom: The Making of Encryption, Secure Messaging, and Digital Liberties, by Ksenia Ermoshina and Francesca Musiani, is now available to buy as a hard copy and to download as an Open Access text.

The book could not be more timely. In key sections it uses interviews with – amongst others – Russian opposition journalists and activists, as well as with Ukrainian digital security trainers, to unveil the politics of technologies of encryption.

More broadly, the book shows that the encryption of online communication is a matter not just of Internet governance but global politics. It focuses on the experience of encryption in a wide variety of contemporary secure messaging protocols and tools, and looks at the implications of these endeavors for the “making of” digital liberties on the Internet.

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Our full catalogue is shown below.

    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

    Boxes: A Field Guide

    Edited by Susanne Bauer, Martina Schlünder, Maria Rentetzi

    A book full of boxes. A box in itself. An unboxing. This book explores boxes in their broadest sense and size. It invites us to step into the field, unravel how and why things are contained and how it might be otherwise. By turning the focus of Science and Technology Studies (STS) to boxing practices,…Read more