The first four books will be…

We are proud and excited to be able to reveal the first four Mattering Press books, which will be published in April 2016. They are:

Books 2016


On Curiosity: The Art of Market Seduction

Franck Cochoy

What draws us towards a shop window display? What drives us to grab an offer, or to peruse the pages of an enticing magazine? These are just some of the questions that this major work explores. A detailed exploration of how precisely the force of curiosity pushes and pulls us towards a range of encounters in markets, the book is translation of De la curiosité, published by Armand Colin in 2011, and now to be available in English for the first time.

See here for more info, including a sample chapter.

Modes of Knowing: Resources from the Baroque

Edited by John Law and Evelyn Ruppert

How might we think differently? This book edited by John Law and Evelyn Ruppert is an attempt to respond to this question. Its contributors – leading scholars in anthropology and sociology of science – 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, or against one important Western alternative — that of the baroque.

See here for more info, including a sample chapter.

Practising Comparison: Logics, Relations, Collaborations

Edited by Joe Deville, Michael Guggenheim and Zuzana Hrdličková

A new collection that analyses how exactly comparison — as a particular type of social scientific practice — is done, while assessing some of its opportunities and limitations. It features case studies of comparative practices that range from colonial architecture, to hacking communities, to ranking practices in hospitals and academia, while also examining the practical challenges of achieving comparison. This might include the need to collaborate in teams or to stretch comparisons across time and space.

See here for more info, including a sample chapter.

Imagining Classrooms: Stories of children, teaching and ethnography

Vicki Macknight

In this new book by Vicki Macknight, we enter Australian classrooms, bustling with nine and ten year old children. Each classroom is a part of a different type of school: a Steiner school, an exclusive private school, a middle-class government school, a diverse catholic school, and a school for intellectually disabled ‘special’ children. How does imagination happen in each of these very different places?

See here for more info, including a sample chapter.