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Information Infrastructure(s)
This book marks an important contribution to the fascinating debate on the role that information infrastructures and boundary objects play in contemporary life, bringing to the fore the concern of how cooperation across different groups is enabled, but also constrained, by the material and immaterial objects connecting them. As such, the book itself is situated at the crossroads of various paths and genealogies, all focusing on the problem of the intersection between different levels of scale throughout devices, networks, and society. Information infrastructures allow, facilitate, mediate, saturate and influence people’s material and immaterial surroundings. They are often shaped and inter...
A Joyfully Serious Man
"Robert Bellah (1927-2013) was a hugely-influential twentieth-century American social scientist. During an intellectual career that spanned six decades, his work became central in many fields: the sociology of Japanese religion, the relationships between sociology and the humanities, the relationship between American religion and politics, the cultures of modern individualism, and evolution and society. His seminal 1967 essay "Civil Religion in America" created a huge debate across disciplines which continues to this day; his co-authored book Habits of the Heart (1985) was a bestseller (it sold close to 500,000 copies) and became the object of sustained public discussion about the temptation...
Environment, Social Justice, and the Media in the Age of the Anthropocene
Environment, Social Justice, and the Media in the Age of Anthropocene addresses three imminent challenges to human society in the age of the Anthropocene. The first challenge involves the survival of the species; the second the breakdown of social justice; and the third the inability of the media to provide global audiences with an adequate orientation about these issues. The notion of the Anthropocene as a geological age shaped by human intervention implies a new understanding of the human context that influences the physical and biological sciences. Human existence continues to be affected by the physical and biological reality from which it evolved but, in turn, it affects that reality as well. This work addresses this paradox by bringing together the contributions of researchers from very different disciplines in conversation about the complex relationships between the physical/biological world and the human world to offer different perspectives and solutions in establishing social and environmental justice in the age of the Anthropocene.
Science, Technology and Society
Science, Technology and Society: An Introduction provides students with an accessible overview of the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). The discipline breaks down traditional conceptions of knowledge as universal, neutral and ahistorical, and takes a more critical approach to science and technology as social embedded phenomena. This comprehensive textbook makes use of unique examples and case studies to illustrate theoretical debates and concepts. In addition, the reader acquires a unique vision of contemporary issues (such as the power of algorithms, the mystification of fake news, the role of experts within the decision-making process, for example). Each chapter incorporates pedagogically rich features, including interactive discussion points to be used individually or in class as prompts for debate.
Surrounded by Water
This work provides insights into the physical and human geography of Sardinia, the second largest Mediterranean island, with its complex, varied, changing and often hidden features. The title, “Surrounded by Water”, recalls the identity of a land whose coastlines and surrounding seas have symbolically represented social, economic, political, cultural bridges or walls, meeting or colliding places, over its long and difficult history. Landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes are presented and analysed, together with other aspects, through a descriptive focus and original contributions provided by some local experts, in order to offer scholars and students across the globe a complex and multi-d...
Middle Tech
Why software isn’t perfect, as seen through the stories of software developers at a run-of-the-mill tech company Contrary to much of the popular discourse, not all technology is seamless and awesome; some of it is simply “good enough.” In Middle Tech, Paula Bialski offers an ethnographic study of software developers at a non-flashy, non-start-up corporate tech company. Their stories reveal why software isn’t perfect and how developers communicate, care, and compromise to make software work—or at least work until the next update. Exploring the culture of good enoughness at a technology firm she calls “MiddleTech,” Bialski shows how doing good-enough work is a collectively negoti...
Data Paradoxes
Why healthcare cannot—and should not—become data-driven, despite the many promises of intensified data sourcing. In contemporary healthcare, everybody seems to want more data, of higher quality, on more people, and to use this data for a wider range of purposes. In theory, such pervasive data collection should lead to a healthcare system in which data can quickly, efficiently, and unambiguously be interpreted and provide better care for patients, more efficient administration, enhanced options for research, and accelerated economic growth. In practice, however, data are difficult to interpret and the many purposes often undermine one another. In this book, anthropologist and STS scholar ...
digitalSTS
New perspectives on digital scholarship that speak to today's computational realities Scholars across the humanities, social sciences, and information sciences are grappling with how best to study virtual environments, use computational tools in their research, and engage audiences with their results. Classic work in science and technology studies (STS) has played a central role in how these fields analyze digital technologies, but many of its key examples do not speak to today’s computational realities. This groundbreaking collection brings together a world-class group of contributors to refresh the canon for contemporary digital scholarship. In twenty-five pioneering and incisive essays,...
Red, Black, and Objective
Drawing on the empirical findings generated by researchers in science studies, and adopting Kropotkin's concept of anarchism as one of the social sciences, Red, Black, and Objective expounds and develops an anarchist account of science as a social construction and social institution. Restivo's account is at once normative, analytical, organizational, and policy oriented, in particular with respect to education. With attention to the social practices and discourse of science, this book engages with the works of Feyerabend and Nietzsche, as well as philosophers and historians of objectivity to ground an anarchistic sociology of science. Marx and Durkheim figure prominently in this account as p...
