The University of Chicago Press Podcast

Shobita Parthasarathy, “Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

In Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe [https://aax-us-east.amazon-adsystem.com/x/c/QuR3B-Lk7_vkgB-WAyli1QMAAAFnNdUxCAEAAAFKAbA3Vt8/https://www.amazon.com/dp/022643785X/ref=as_at?creativeASIN=022643785X&linkCode=w61&imprToken=Ob76Xo0tHbtFQ9srr3wBNA&slotNum=0&tag=newbooinhis-20] (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Shobita Parthasarathy [http://shobitap.org] takes us through a thirty year history of the legal debates around patents. This is an understudied area of STS that Parthasarathy carefully navigates in order to understand how knowledge production interacts with law. The reader learns the differences in values, law and objects between US and European patent politics. This comparison brings into focus the role that law, biotechnology corporations, scientists, activists, and more play in deciding what knowledge deserves legal protection. Patent Politics is a fascinating read that will continue to be relevant for many years to come. Chad J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and political activism around science and the arts. You can follow him on Twitter @chadjvalasek [https://twitter.com/chadjvalasek]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices]

Yulia Frumer, “Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan” (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Yulia Frumer [https://hopkinsmedicalhumanities.org/2018/07/05/yulia-frumer/]’s new book follows roughly three hundred years of transformations in how time was conceptualized, measured, and materialized in Japan. Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan [https://aax-us-east.amazon-adsystem.com/x/c/Qg2kqhOzChshsw_tR41o3PoAAAFmcsndHwEAAAFKAUP0Q2c/https://www.amazon.com/dp/022651644X/ref=as_at?creativeASIN=022651644X&linkCode=w61&imprToken=gojuzxvoPC68INc5JCT2zA&slotNum=0&tag=newbooinhis-20](University of Chicago Press, 2018) charts a “profound shift in attitude toward foreign technology” between the 16th century (when European devices arrived in Japan) and reforms to the traditional temporal system in 1873. While it provides an exceptionally rich and focused case study grounded in careful research with Japanese documents and material objects, Frumer’s book also offers a critical analysis of what it is that we’re doing when we study the relationship between societies and technologies that has potentially far-reaching consequences well beyond the history of Japan. Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here [https://carlanappi.com/]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices]

G. Mitman, M. Armiero and R. S. Emmett (eds.), “Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene” (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene [https://aax-us-east.amazon-adsystem.com/x/c/QgNLLc8yaj94VZUG4HApIcMAAAFlckqrZAEAAAFKAWqATEU/https://www.amazon.com/dp/022650879X/ref=as_at?creativeASIN=022650879X&linkCode=w61&imprToken=sKQsjaUhJEvhG9heRT1i3w&slotNum=0&tag=newbooinhis-20] (University of Chicago Press, 2018) curates fifteen objects that might serve as evidence of a future past. From a jar of sand to a painting of a goanna, the contributions to this edited collection invite curiosity, care and wonder in their meditations on these objects of the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. Gregg Mitman [https://gmitman.com/] is the Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History, Medical History, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Marco Armiero [https://www.kth.se/profile/armiero] is the Director of the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Robert S. Emmett [http://twitter.com/rsemmett] is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Roanoke College Environmental Studies program. Ruth A. Morgan is a Senior Research Fellow in the History Program at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices]

Courtney Fullilove, “The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture [http://aax-us-east.amazon-adsystem.com/x/c/Ql58o79_TCJi6RUii1CwCdgAAAFkyUv7qwEAAAFKAcVr0zA/http://www.amazon.com/dp/022645486X/ref=as_at?creativeASIN=022645486X&linkCode=w61&imprToken=hyRMvANygTVdPBiejXnitA&slotNum=0&tag=newbooinhis-20] (University of Chicago Press, 2017) examines the social and political history of how agricultural knowledge was created in the 19th century. Over the course of the 19th century, rural America transformed into the familiar arrangement of large scale, mechanized mono-cropping for distant markets. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Midwest, where the prairie, plowed into “Amber Waves of Grain,” came to signify all the promises of settler colonialism. The Profit of the Earth explains the creation of this arrangement by excavating the ways that farmers, settlers, and, bureaucrats learned about the earth and its possibilities as they sought a living, a profit, tax income, or national progress. In this way, Fullilove demonstrates that the advent of the American style of agriculture grew out of the co-optation and reworking of local forms of rural knowledge. Courtney Fullilove [http://cfullilove.faculty.wesleyan.edu] is an Associate Professor of History and affiliated faculty in the Science in Society Program and the College of the Environment at Wesleyan University. Lance C. Thurner is a doctoral candidate in History at Rutgers University, where he has recently defended his dissertation on race, medicine, and scientific exploration in 18th-century Mexico. Enter the code “NBN10” and get 10% off this book [https://www.universitypressbooks.com/book/9780226454863] and any book at University Press Books, Berkeley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices]

Sabina Leonelli, “Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study” (U Chicago Press, 2016)

Commentators have been forecasting the eclipse of hypothesis-driven science and the rise of a new ‘data-driven’ science for some time now. Harkening back to the aspirations of Enlightenment empiricists, who sought to establish for the collection of sense data what astronomers had done for the movements of heavenly bodies, they appeal to a general consensus that the acceleration of data collection through computing technologies requires a parallel shift toward computational thinking. This raises the question, however, of how computational practices have changed over the last few decades. Sabina Leonelli [https://socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk/sociology/staff/leonelli/]’s Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study [http://aax-us-east.amazon-adsystem.com/x/c/Qv2imoh6Y1Ffpb3dqcnY1bgAAAFkvm2UJQEAAAFKASkIuaM/http://www.amazon.com/dp/022641647X/ref=as_at?creativeASIN=022641647X&linkCode=w61&imprToken=LbmctKWSnOTYLhq2xCnmIA&slotNum=0&tag=newbooinhis-20] (U of Chicago Press, 2016) is the first book-length treatment of how large-scale data collection impacts the work of the life sciences. The book offers a historically and socially informed epistemology of data, situating its production, consumption, and regulation within laboratory practices. In fact, while much work in the history and sociology of biotechnology has attended to the kind of scalar changes associated with visible endeavors like the Human Genome Project, Leonelli’s account bucks this trend by looking at how plant biologists have made use of new tools and adopted different norms of sharing. The political economy of data she describes is biopolitical in a more pervasive sense, and the book offers support for the Open Science movement while subjecting it to keen philosophical scrutiny. Mikey McGovern [https://history.princeton.edu/people/michael-mcgovern] is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He works on computing, quantification, communication, and governance in modern America.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices]