Science Studies

Approaching Animals: Multispecies Ethnography and the Biocultural Hope of Entanglement

By Jordan Sheridan

Eben Kirksey, ed. The Multispecies Salon. Duke University Press, 2014. 306 pp.

Between 2008 and 2010 the art show called the Multispecies Salon traveled through San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York City. Whether individual pieces involve human/goat milk cheese, raw donkey soap, dandelions raised on human blood infected with Hepatitis C, or life-sized sculptures of transgenetic companion animals, each challenge preconceived notions of species division.
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Anthropocene Diplomacy, or How to Negotiate Ecologization

By Heather Davis

Bruno Latour. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Trans. Catherine Porter. Harvard University Press, 2013. 489 pp.

In the wake of the terrifying fifth assessment report (AR5) issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Bruno Latour’s latest book, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, makes a rather odd request: he asks his readers to stop, slow down, and reconsider the values of modernity.
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Global Warming: Between History and Ontology

By Emanuele Leonardi

Timothy Morton. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.  x + 203 pp.

In the numerous debates concerning the multifarious threats posed by global warming, it is frequent to be exposed to arguments about the inability of human thought to grasp the enormity of such threats, their incalculability, their unprecedented magnitude.
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Figuring Those Who Have Already Been Dead: Destructive Plasticity and the Form of Absence

By Richard Iveson

Catherine Malabou. The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage. Trans. Steven Miller. Fordham University Press, 2012. 268pp.

For nearly twenty years, French philosopher Catherine Malabou has been exploring the unpredictable terrain of metamorphosis, through which she has evolved the important concept of plasticity (plasticité) understood as the hermeneutic motor scheme of our “new age.” By this, she means that plasticity is a singular scheme or motive that opens the door to the current epoch by enabling the interpretation of phenomena and major events as they arise.
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Enlightenment Interrupted

By Alison Shonkwiler

Marie-Hélène Huet, The Culture of Disaster. University of Chicago Press, 2012. 256 pp.

“Our culture thinks through disasters” (2), writes Marie-Helene Huet in The Culture of Disaster. Building an argument that catastrophes have shaped the imagination of modernity, Huet’s book examines new modes of conceptualizing disaster and human power in the late 18th century and 19th centuries.
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Reassembling Democracy in the Parliament of Things

By Jaime Yard

Bruce Braun and Sarah J. Whatmore, eds. Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy and Public Life. University of Minnesota Press, 2010.  328 pp.

The ambitious task of this volume, edited by geographers Bruce Braun and Sarah Whatmore, is to bring science and technology studies and political theory into more direct dialogue with each other in order to compose a “more fully materialist theory of politics” (x).
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