Mattering Update

Many things have happened in recent months. In this update, we gather some of these together.

Books 2016


As you probably already know, in July 2016 our first four books were published. Many thanks to those of you who acted as authors, editors, reviewers, and early readers! In case you haven’t seen the final products yet, you can access them online on this site at or buy the paper version either on Amazon or – even better – through us. If you need some copies for yourselves, let us know how many you’d like to order by email, and we’ll give you further instructions. It would also be extremely helpful if you could instruct your libraries and librarians to order copies. Also, we’d be grateful if you could advertise the books in your academic circles and suggest possible outlets for book reviews. (So far, four reviews have appeared in Science & Technology Studies, and we’ve been in touch with the book review editors of Science as Culture, the Journal of Cultural Economy, and Science, Technology & Human Values.

The book launch event in London, co-sponsored by the Institute for Social Futures in Lancaster, the Centre for Invention and Social Process, Goldsmiths, and the Centre for Mobilities Research, Lancaster, and the Press’s debut at the EASST/4S meeting in Barcelona were heartwarming experiences. Thanks to Tahani Nadim for her thoughtful reflections on the London launch. We have received lots of helpful comments, encouragement, and quite a few book proposals. Since we can’t possibly publish them all, during the selection process we’ve been trying to keep a balance between edited collections and monographs, and focus on empirical works that open up their own objects and categories of inquiry. Currently we have six books in the pipeline, and expect three full proposals to arrive in the next couple of months. In case you’re curious about these works, let us know and we’d be happy to tell you more.

Our team is growing, in late 2016 we were joined by Diana Kisakye our first and only editorial assistant which is great. Diana is helping us, amongst many other things with putting together our first marketing campaign for our books that will start shortly. This will involve promoting specific sections/arguments of each of the books on social media, using content largely provided by the authors. This makes full use of the fact that our books are available to download for free and read online and also is in keeping with our ethos of keeping authors in the community that we increasingly find ourselves involved in building. One very exciting new feature that we are about to release and introduce in more detail is the possibility to link to particular paragraphs of Mattering Press’ online books. Thanks to our developer Edward Akerboom at infostreams.net. It will look something like this.

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Julien McHardy represented Mattering Press in an Engaging Science, Technology and Society thematic collection that brings together first-person reflections on the politics of academic performance metrics. The collection contains contributions from Ulrike Felt, Alan Irwin, Ruth Müller, Katie Vann, and Paul Wouters. Many thanks to Max Fochler and Sarah de Rijke for their careful editing and for having us and to Daniel Lee Kleinman, Maureen McNeil, and Dame Marilyn Strathern for their comments and reflections.

From the very beginning, we’ve been thinking of Mattering Press as an experiment in knowledge making and distribution. As the first four books show, the experiment is unfolding, but we’d like to keep exploring the possibilities. We’d love to hear from you about interesting topics, new developments in STS, and important political issues in academic publishing. One of our plans for the not-so-distant future is to bring you together for a Mattering Press event. Until this happens, please feel free to share your thoughts with us and/or with the rest of the Advisory Board via email.

Many thanks to all our readers for their continued support. 

The Mattering Press team

Diana, Michaela, Natalie, Uli, Ed, Endre, Joe and Julien