Author Meets Bloggers

Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 - - - Part 2 with Jody Roberts and Michelle Murphy--discussing her book Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty--follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here. - - - WF: So we've got the women on the inside organizing and collecting their own data. But how did this fit within the language and practices of the outside "experts" dealing with these cases? MM: I also wanted to insist that what the "experts" were doing around SBS (and the politics of low-level chemical exposures more generally) was also crafted out of gendered…
Part 1 (below) | 2 | 3 | 4 - - - Note: This author-meets-blogger set was produced by guest blogger Jody Roberts, whose prior contributions can be found here, here, and here. On behalf of The World's Fair, Roberts recently cornered historian and STS scholar Michelle Murphy to talk about her award-winning book Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers (Duke University Press, 2006). Odds are you're reading this edition of author-meets-blogger while sitting at your desk in your office. Odds are that office is a virtual…
Pt 1 | Pt 2 - - - Part 2 with Graham Burnett, author of Trying Leviathan, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here. WF: What would you have biologists today take from this book? I ask because you are at some pains in Trying Leviathan to argue for the contingencies of taxonomic systems, which appear always to be in flux, and seem generally to reflect a host of larger cultural preoccupations. DGB: I don't think of my book as having special "lessons" for biologists. Indeed, I rather incline away from thinking of my books as having "lessons" for…
Part 1 | Part 2 - - -The World's Fair is pleased to offer the following discussion about a most unique and forceful book, Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature (Princeton University Press, 2007), with its author D. Graham Burnett. He is associate professor of history at Princeton University. Professor Burnett is the author of three previous books, Masters of All They Surveyed (Chicago University Press, 2000), A Trial by Jury (Knopf, 2001), and Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest (American Philosophical…
Pt 1 | Pt 2 | Pt 3 | Pt 4- - - Part 4 with Kelly Joyce, author of Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here. WF: Is your story of MRI one that is common to medical technologies? Common to the commodification (in an economic sense) or routinization (in the sense of technical practice) of machines in daily medical practice? Common to a story about the consequences of health care practice in the 21st century? Anything? KJ: The integration of MRI into medical practice is a story that shares issues of…
Pt 1 | Pt 2 | Pt 3 | Pt 4- - - Part 3 with Kelly Joyce, author of Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here. WF: Let me risk a more blatantly social sciency question. Did you ever become part of the clinical work in your role as the social scientist? I don't mean intentionally, but by virtue of your presence and your kind of knowledge. I think this is a question about "going native" and if that was bad or if it happened. KJ: Yes, I was clearly present, and at times I became part of the clinical…
Pt 1 | Pt 2 | Pt 3 | Pt 4- - - Part 2 with Kelly Joyce, author of Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here. WF: You also discuss the importance of the users of technologies in the development and identity of those technologies (like MRI), right? KJ: Right. In studies of science and technology, scholars can and do study how users of a technology actively contribute to its design, creatively negotiate design limitations (e.g., how old people put tennis balls on a walker's legs to create traction), or…
Pt 1 | Pt 2 | Pt 3 | Pt 4- - -The World's Fair is pleased to offer the discussion below about a fascinating new book, Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency, with its author Kelly Joyce. Joyce is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the College of William and Mary. Professor Joyce has a degree in anthropology, a doctorate in Sociology, a resume that includes a few years of teaching at Harvard, and a kind demeanor. She is also the co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Death and the Human Experience (Sage, 2006). Magnetic Appeal will be published in June by Cornell…
Part 1 | Part 2- - - Part 2 with Jan Golinski, author of British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here. WF: This was the most interesting part of the book to me, and I have to risk being too general or generic here, but here it goes: it seems the terms of debate about what caused weather patterns in the 18th century map on closely to what we argue about today. I can go a few ways with this by way of clarification, but let me try this one first: In the Enlightenment, the contrast was between 'weather as…
Part 1 | Part 2 - - - The World's Fair is proud to discuss British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2007) with its author, Jan Golinski of the University of New Hampshire. Golinski is a Professor of History and Humanities, the Chair of the Department of History at UNH, and a leader in the field of the history of science. Golinski's work has become influential and well-respected in the history of science and science studies in the past decade-and-a-half, likely because of a rare match between graceful writing style and rigorous theoretical grounding.…
Last week (or thereabouts), I had a chat with Rosie Redfield, an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia. She had come over to visit because I noticed that every member of her lab (predominantly postdocs) had their own blog, and I was curious to see what was up with that. Anyway, it turns out that Rosie makes it a requirement for her lab members to maintain a blog. This was primarily to act as an appendum lab book, and a place to reflect on the experiments carried out recently. Chatting with her, she was quite excited by the prospect of such a thing becoming common…
Part 1 | 2 | 3- - - Part III with Aaron Sachs, author of The Humboldt Current, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here. - - - WF: Okay, let me go back to modern environmentalism, which I only sort of brought up earlier. What does your book lead us to do with or in it? AS: This is a delicate issue, as some people have read my book as a polemic against mainstream environmentalism, and that's not what I intended. A critique, yes--not a polemic. I don't simply want to dump the insights of the 20th century or discredit thinkers like Aldo Leopold and…
Part 1 | 2 (below) | 3 - - - Part II with Aaron Sachs, author of The Humboldt Current, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here. --- WF: I'll ask the manuscript reviewer's question: why do we need to know about Humboldt's 19th-century exploits? AS: Because, again, Humboldt helps us to see both history and the present through a different--and, I hope--more hopeful lens. For me, anyway, he provides a reminder that no historical trajectory is inevitable. That's potentially a spur to both thought and action. As the historian Carl Becker said, it's part…
Part 1 (below) | 2 | 3 - - - The World's Fair sits down with Aaron Sachs, author of The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (Viking Press, 2006), Assistant Professor of History and American Studies at Cornell University, and environmental journalist. The book is, like its subjects, adventurous. Sachs's voice and style are unique and his ambition is inspiring. The Humboldt Current has been widely reviewed and lauded. One of those reviews, illustrating the point, noted that "Sachs has an incredible talent for choosing gripping accounts…
Part 1 | 2 | 3--- Part III, our final installment with Shobita Parthasarathy, author of Building Genetic Medicine, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here. --- WF: I cut you off at the end of the last Part. Here, I'll let you continue with the connection between women's health movements and the rise of BRCA testing. SP: When BRCA testing came on the horizon, US and British advocates behaved somewhat differently. In the US, NBCC and other advocacy groups were (and continue to be) skeptical about the technology. They felt that the technology was still…
Part 1 | 2 | 3 --- "Dendrogram showing 18 tumors from BRCA1 mutation carriers (black branches) and two tumors from BRCA2 mutation carriers (yellow branches)" (source). Part II with Shobita Parthasarathy, author of Building Genetic Medicine, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here. --- WF: You've developed this intriguing approach, looking at technologies as architectures. Can you explain that a bit? SP: I argue that technologies have specific architectures, which include their components and how they are fitted together. What appears to be the same…
Part 1 | 2 | 3 --- The World's Fair sits down with Shobita Parthasarathy, author of Building Genetic Medicine: Breast Cancer, Technology, and the Comparative Politics of Health Care (MIT Press, 2007), Assistant Professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and Co-Director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at the University of Michigan. Shobita Parthasarathy's research focuses on the comparative politics of science and technology in the United States and abroad, with a focus on issues related to genetics and biotechnology. She is particularly interested in…
Part 1 | 2 | 3 --- Part III, our final installment with Lizzie Grossman, author of High Tech Trash, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here. WF: Speaking of China, Environmental Science and Technology has been reporting a lot lately about the effects the dismantling of electronics has on workers and local populations. This is especially so because of exposure to flame retardants in the gadgets. Is this information actually new? What do you see coming out of these new studies? Will any of this change the business of electronics recycling in China? EG…
Part 1 | 2 | 3 --- Part II with Lizzie Grossman, author of High Tech Trash, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here. WF: At least once a month, someone's invoking Thomas Friedman to say new information technologies have made the world 'flat' and national borders meaningless. That perspective has always seemed naïve and superficial. (As a friend of mine points out, just because five people in a town have internet access doesn't mean the world is suddenly flat.) At best, I'd say the world is lumpy. Does your story about electronics manufacturing,…
Part 1 | 2 | 3 --- World's Fair note: This new author-meets-blogger series of posts was written by guest blogger and new father Jody Roberts, author of previous posts on endocrine disruption and organic farming research. On behalf of The World's Fair, Roberts recently sat down with Elizabeth (Lizzie) Grossman, independent journalist, to talk about her book High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxins, and Human Health. High Tech Trash has been well reviewed and well received. All the while, as we were making reference to it in a post on "What We Waste," Grossman was contributing to…