We are living through times of incredible social and political unrest, confronted by the rise of fascism, genocidal wars, the looming spectre of nuclear attack, climate catastrophes, the near-certainty of a new pandemic, and tech failures that do nothing but enrich the very, very few. Promising future gains and revolutions has become the main advertising…Read more

Homo Textor examines how weaving as a technical mode of existence constitutes conceptual challenges to Homo faber and the way the Moderns (as described by Latour) talk about technology. Contradiction a hylomorphic schema where an actor gives form to matter, the characteristic weaving mode is histomorphic – referring to a generative process where intelligible forms…Read more

Across eleven varied and lively chapters, Technoscientific Globalisation from Below provides fresh perspectives on how global asymmetries in wealth and resources stimulate technological innovation across the Global South. Readers with an interest in STS, globalisation and development studies will be inspired by these essays that demonstrate how the imaginative reappropriation of technologies to suit local…Read more

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, the editors and authors have updated the text, both in response to these comments and taking into account changing contexts in the…Read more

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 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

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.

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.

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.

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 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’ 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

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

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

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 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 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

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

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

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

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

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