New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

An accessible book to draw on popular interest in transport history, routes, vehicles and experiences. Transport history is social and industrial national history. Passengers and freight will be covered including all types of transport from walking and packhorses, that predominated for much of national history, both of which tend to be underrated, to changes brought by improvements to road transport from the Romans to medieval bridgebuilders and eighteenth-century turnpikes, and, in parallel, river, coastal and canal travel, again from the Romans to the eighteenth century. The story moves to the age of rail, motoring and lastly air. All forms overlap. as well as being sequential. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

As the fortification of Europe's borders and its hostile immigration terrain has taken shape, so too have the biometric and digital surveillance industries. And when US Immigration Customs Enforcement aggressively reinforced its program of raids, detention, and family separation, it was powered by Silicon Valley corporations. In cities of refuge, where communities on the move once lived in anonymity and proximity to familial and diaspora networks, the possibility for escape is diminishing.As cities rely increasingly on tech companies to develop digital urban infrastructures for accessing information, identification, services, and socioeconomic life at large, they also invite the border to encroach further on migrant communities, networks, and bodies. In Migrants in the Digital Periphery: New Urban Frontiers of Control (U California Press, 2025), Matt Mahmoudi unveils how the unsettling convergence of Silicon Valley logics, austere and xenophobic migration management practices, and racial capitalism has allowed tech companies to close in on the final frontiers of fugitivity—and suggests how we might counteract their machines through our own refusal.This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool whose research focuses on human mobilities. She is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

It’s the UConn Popcast, and can you fall in love with ChatGPT? Can, and should, you have sex with a robot? We asked Professor Kate Devlin, a leading researcher on intimate relations between humans and artificial intelligences, to help us navigate the new landscape of sex and love with robots.Kate is a Professor of AI & Society in the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. She’s the author of the excellent book Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots (Bloomsbury, 2018), which examines the ethical and social implications of technology and intimacy.We had a rich conversation with Professor Devlin about the future of intimacy, the reality of the sex robot, the gender politics of depictions of AI in science fiction, and a lot more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (University of California Press, 2025) illuminates the throughline between the nineteenth century's anti-immigration and eugenics movements and our sprawling systems of techno-surveillance and algorithmic discrimination. With this book, Anita Say Chan offers a historical, globally multisited analysis of the relations of dispossession, misrecognition, and segregation expanded by dominant knowledge institutions in the Age of Big Data.While technological advancement has a tendency to feel inevitable, it always has a history, including efforts to chart a path for alternative futures and the important parallel story of defiant refusal and liberatory activism. Chan explores how more than a century ago, feminist, immigrant, and other minoritized actors refused dominant institutional research norms and worked to develop alternative data practices whose methods and traditions continue to reverberate through global justice-based data initiatives today. Looking to the past to shape our future, this book charts a path for an alternative historical consciousness grounded in the pursuit of global justice.Anita Say Chan is a feminist and decolonial scholar of Science and Technology Studies and Associate Professor of Information Sciences and Media Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Today we present the first episode of a miniseries on audiobooks by getting into the history and theory of the medium. Audiobooks are having a moment—and it only took them over a century to get here. Dr. Matthew Rubery, a Harvard PhD and Professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London, pioneered the study of the audiobook, its history, and its affordances. Among his other works, Dr. Rubery is the author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book (2016, Harvard University Press). He’s also the editor of Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies (2011, Routledge). Matt’s latest book is titled Reader’s Block: A History of Reading Differences (2022, Stanford University Press). In this fascinating conversation, we discuss the long history of recorded literature; the weird shame around audiobook reading and its cultural roots; the interplay between disability, neurodivergence, and alternate forms of reading; and what an audiobook criticism might look like. And for our patrons, we’ll have our What’s Good segment at the end of the show, where Matt will tell us something good to read, something good to listen to. Something good to do. You can become a patron of the show at patreon.com/phantompower.Today’s show was edited by Mack Hagood. Transcription by Katelyn Phan. Music by Graeme Gibson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with retired professor, consultant, Discovery Institute fellow, and a winner of the NTT DoCoMo Mobile Science Award, Jeffrey Lee Funk, about his recent book Unicorns, Hype, and Bubbles: A Guide to Spotting, Avoiding, and Exploiting Investment Bubbles in Tech (Harriman House, 2024). The book provides readers with fundamental tools for exploring technology markets and spotting financial bubbles, which have been recurring at a high rate in recent decades. In addition to talking through the basic perspectives the book provides, Vinsel and Funk also talk through examples of recent technology bubbles, including the likely current bubble centered on generative AI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Monsters are central to how we think about the human condition. Join award-winning historian of science in Humans: A Monstrous History (University of California Press, 2025) by Dr. Surekha Davies as she reveals how people have defined the human in relation to everything from apes to zombies, and how they invented race, gender, and nations along the way. With rich, evocative storytelling that braids together ancient gods and generative AI, Frankenstein's monster and E.T., Humans: A Monstrous History shows how monster-making is about control: it defines who gets to count as normal.In an age when corporations increasingly see people as obstacles to profits, this book traces the long, volatile history of monster-making and charts a better path for the future. The result is a profound, effervescent, empowering retelling of the history of the world for anyone who wants to reverse rising inequality and polarization. This is not a history of monsters, but a history through monsters.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Richard Buttny, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. With a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, his research interests include environmental communication, discourse analysis, and intercultural communication. Richard's latest book, Unfracked: The Struggle to Ban Fracking in New York, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in October 2024. About the book: Since fracking emerged as a way of extracting natural gas, through intense deep drilling and the use of millions of gallons of water and chemicals to fracture shale, it has been controversial. It is perceived in different ways by different people--by some as an opportunity for increased resources and possibly jobs and other income; by others as a public health and environmental threat; and for many, an unknown. Richard Buttny, a scholar who works on rhetoric and discursive practices, read a story in his local paper in New York about hydrofracking coming to his area and had to research what it was, and what it could mean for his community. Soon he joined neighbors in fighting to have the practice banned state-wide. At the same time, he turned his scholarly eye to the messaging from both sides of the fight, using first-person accounts, interviews, and media coverage.The activists fighting fracking won. New York is now the only state in the US with sizable deposits of natural gas that has banned hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Unfracked explains the competing rhetoric and discourses on fracking among New York-based advocates, experts, the grassroots, and political officials. Buttny examines how these positions evolved over time and how eventually the state arrived at a decision to ban this extractive technology. His accessible approach provides both a historical recounting of the key events of this seven-year conflict, along with four in-depth case studies: a grassroots citizen group, a public hearing with medical physicians, a key intergovernmental hearing, and a formal debate among experts. The result is a look at a very recent, important historical moment and a useful examination of environmental activist and fossil fuel advocate rhetoric around an issue that continues to cause debate nationwide.From my own experience reading it, I wholeheartedly agree that it is a must-read for any scholar in the field and also anyone interested in this issue. Please enjoy getting to learn more about Richard and his work in this interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Dr. Harry Gill, a renowned psychiatrist with a PhD in neuroscience, joins the discussion on how excessive screen time can negatively impact young adults' mental health and social skills. He emphasizes the importance of face-to-face interactions during critical developmental phases, warning against the dangers of pseudo intimacy formed through screens. Dr. Gill and host Dr. Karyne Messina share alarming studies linking high social media usage to increased anxiety and depression, urging listeners to cherish real-life connections for a healthier mind.