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The Great Quake Debate

The Crusader, the Skeptic, and the Rise of Modern Seismology

By Susan Hough

In the first half of the twentieth century, when seismology was still in in its infancy, renowned geologist Bailey Willis faced off with fellow high-profile scientist Robert T. Hill in a debate with life-or-death consequences...

Holy Science

The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism

By Banu Subramaniam

Behind the euphoric narrative of India as an emerging world power lies a complex and evolving relationship between science and religion. Evoking the rich mythology of comingled worlds where humans, animals, and gods transform each...

Molecular Feminisms

Biology, Becomings, and Life in the Lab

By Deboleena Roy

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/j163-3c90

“Should feminists clone?” “What do neurons think about?” “How can we learn from bacterial writing?” These and other provocative questions have long preoccupied neuroscientist, molecular biologist, and intrepid feminist theorist Deboleena Roy,...

Woke Gaming

Digital Challenges to Oppression and Social Injustice

By Kishonna L. Gray, David J. Leonard

From #Gamergate to the 2016 election, to the daily experiences of marginalized perspectives, gaming is entangled with mainstream cultures of systematic exploitation and oppression. Whether visible in the persistent color line that shapes the production,...

Gender before Birth

Sex Selection in a Transnational Context

By Rajani Bhatia

In the mid-1990s, the international community pronounced prenatal sex selection via abortion an “act of violence against women” and “unethical.” At the same time, new developments in reproductive technology in the United States led to...

Queer Feminist Science Studies

A Reader

By Cyd Cipolla, Kristina Gupta, David A. Rubin, Angela Willey

Queer Feminist Science Studies takes a transnational, trans-species, and intersectional approach to this cutting-edge area of inquiry between women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and science and technology studies (STS). The essays here “queer”—or denaturalize and...

High

Drugs, Desire, and a Nation of Users

By Ingrid Walker

Whether drinking Red Bull, relieving chronic pain with oxycodone, or experimenting with Ecstasy, Americans participate in a culture of self-medication, using psychoactive substances to enhance or manage our moods. A “drug-free America” seems to be...

Reinventing Hoodia

Peoples, Plants, and Patents in South Africa

By Laura A. Foster

Native to the Kalahari Desert, Hoodia gordonii is a succulent plant known by generations of Indigenous San peoples to have a variety of uses: to reduce hunger, increase energy, and ease breastfeeding. In the global...

Network Sovereignty

Building the Internet across Indian Country

By Marisa Elena Duarte

In 2012, the United Nations General Assembly determined that affordable Internet access is a human right, critical to citizen participation in democratic governments. Given the significance of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to social and...

Risky Bodies & Techno-Intimacy

Reflections on Sexuality, Media, Science, Finance

By Geeta Patel

Risky Bodies and Techno-Intimacy traverses disparate and uncommon routes to explore how people grapple with the radical uncertainties of their lives. In this edgy, evocative journey through myriad interleaved engagements—including the political economies of cinema;...

Tracing Autism

Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and the Affective Labor of Neuroscience

By Des Fitzgerald

In Tracing Autism, Des Fitzgerald offers an up-close account of the search for a neurological explanation of autism. As autism has gained cultural prominence with more diagnoses and more controversy, its biological causes remain elusive.

Through...

Making Climate Change History

Documents from Global Warming's Past

By Joshua P. Howe, Paul S. Sutter

This collection pulls together key documents from the scientific and political history of climate change, including congressional testimony, scientific papers, newspaper editorials, court cases, and international declarations. Far more than just a compendium of source...

The Pulse of Modernism

Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siècle Europe

By Robert Michael Brain

Robert Brain traces the origins of artistic modernism to specific technologies of perception developed in late-nineteenth-century laboratories. Brain argues that the thriving fin-de-siècle field of “physiological aesthetics,” which sought physiological explanations for the capacity to...

The Orphan Tsunami of 1700

Japanese Clues to a Parent Earthquake in North America

By Brian F. Atwater, Satoko Musumi-Rokkaku, Kenji Satake, Yoshinobu Tsuji, Kazue Ueda, and David K. Yamaguchi

A puzzling tsunami entered Japanese history in January 1700. Samurai, merchants, and villagers wrote of minor flooding and damage. Some noted having felt no earthquake; they wondered what had set off the waves but had...

Behind the Curve

Science and the Politics of Global Warming

By Joshua P. Howe. Foreword by William Cronon

In 1958, Charles David Keeling began measuring the concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. His project kicked off a half century of research that has expanded...

The Clinic and Elsewhere

Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy

By Todd Meyers

Despite increasingly nuanced understandings of the neurobiology of addiction and a greater appreciation of the social and economic conditions that allow drug dependency to persist, there remain many unknowns regarding the individual experience of substance...

The Emergence of Genetic Rationality

Space, Time, and Information in American Biological Science, 1870-1920

By Phillip Thurtle

The emergence of genetic science has profoundly shaped how we think about biology. Indeed, it is difficult now to consider nearly any facet of human experience without first considering the gene. But this mode of...

The Essence of Chaos

By Edward N. Lorenz

Chaos surrounds us. Seemingly random events -- the flapping of a flag, a storm-driven wave striking the shore, a pinball’s path -- often appear to have no order, no rational pattern. Explicating the theory of...

Life as Surplus

Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era

By Melinda Edna Cooper

Focusing on the period between the 1970s and the present, Life as Surplus is a pointed and important study of the relationship between politics, economics, science, and cultural values in the United States today. Melinda...

HIV Interventions

Biomedicine and the Traffic between Information and Flesh

By Marsha Rosengarten

Winner of the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize

HIV has changed in the presence of recent biomedical technologies. In particular, the development of anti-retroviral therapies (ARVs) for the treatment of HIV was a significant...