Mattering Press
This page shows the latest publications (in descending order of publication date) from Mattering Press.
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Last updated: 2023-04-30 00:00:13
May 2022
Democratic Situations
Author: Andrzej W. Nowak
Author: Laurie Waller
Author: David Moats
Author: Anne Kathrine Vadgaard
Author: Véra Ehrenstein
Author: Linda Soneryd
Author: Göran Sundqvist
Author: Helen Pallett
Author: Jason Chilvers
Author: Lotte Krabbenborg
Author: Rachel Douglas-Jones
Author: Alexei Tsinovoi
Editor: Andreas Birkbak
Editor: Irina Papazu
Manchester, UK: Mattering Press, 2022
https://doi.org/10.28938/9781912729302
Democratic Situations places the making and doing of democratic politics at the centre of relational research. The book turns the well-known sites of contemporary Euro-American democracy – elections, bureaucracies, public debates and citizen participation – into fluctuating democratic situations where supposedly untouchable democratic ideals are contested and warped in practice. The empirical cases demonstrate that democracy cannot be reduced to theoretical schemes of conflict, institutions or deliberation. Instead, they offer an urgently needed renewal of our understanding of democratic politics at a time when conventional ideas increasingly fail to capture current events such as Brexit, Trump and Covid19.
April 2022
Concealing for Freedom: The Making of Encryption, Secure Messaging and Digital Liberties
Author: Francesca Musiani
Author: Ksenia Ermoshina
Foreword by: Laura DeNardis
Manchester, UK: Mattering Press, 2022
https://doi.org/10.28938/9781912729227
Concealing for Freedom: The Making of Encryption, Secure Messaging and Digital Liberties sets out to explore one of the core battlegrounds of Internet governance: the encryption of online communications. Current debates around encryption have fundamental implications for our individual liberties and collective presence on the Internet. Encryption of communications at scale and in increasingly usable ways has become a matter of public concern, especially since Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations. A new cryptographic imaginary is taking hold, which sees encryption as a necessary precondition for the formation of networked publics. At the same time, there have been major evolutions and accelerations in the field of secure communications, prompted in part by the cryptography community’s renewed efforts to create next-generation secure messaging protocols and applications. The book explores developers’ actions and their interactions with other stakeholders, for instance users, security trainers, standardising bodies, and funding organizations. It also examines their interactions with the technical artifacts they develop, in which a core common objective is to create tools that “conceal for freedom” even as how this objective is met differs according to technical architectures, the user publics being targeted and the tools’ underlying values and business models.
November 2021
Engineering the Climate: Science, Politics and Visions of Control
Author: Julia Schubert
Manchester, UK: Mattering Press, 2021
https://doi.org/10.28938/9781912729265
Notions of the impending climate crisis have pushed a set of highly contested techno-scientific measures onto policy agendas around the world. Suggestions to deliberately alter, to engineer, the Earth’s climate have gained political currency in recent years not as a positive vision of techno-scientific innovation, but as a daunting measure of last resort. The controversial status of various so-called climate engineering proposals raises a simple, yet pressing question: How has it has come to this? And, more specifically, how did such contested measures earn their place on policy agendas, despite enormous scientific complexities and fierce political contestation?
October 2021
With Microbes
Author: Charlotte Brives
Author: Salla Sariola
Author: Matthäus Rest
Author: Denis Chartier
Author: Veera Kinnunen
Author: Johanna Nurmi
Author: Katriina Huttunen
Author: Elina Oinas
Author: Marine Legrand
Author: Germain Meulemans
Author: Jose A. Cañada
Author: Nicolas Fortané
Author: Mark Erickson
Author: Catherine Will
Author: A.C. Davidson
Author: Emma Ransom-Jones
Author: Andrea Butcher
Manchester, UK: Mattering Press, 2021
https://doi.org/10.28938/9781912729180
Without microbes, no other forms of life would be possible. But what does it mean to be with microbes? With Microbes sets microbes and the multiple ways they exist around, in and on humans at center stage. In this book, 24 social scientists and artists attune to microbes and describe their complicated relationships with humans and other beings. The book shows the multiplicity of these relationships and their dynamism, through detailed ethnographies of the relationships between humans, animals, plants, and microbes. Ethnographic explorations with fermented foods, waste, faecal matter, immunity, antimicrobial resistance, phages, as well as indigenous and scientific understandings of microbes challenge ideas of them being simple entities: not just pathogenic foes, old friends or good fermentation minions, but so much more. By describing these complex, dynamic, and ever-changing entanglements between humans and microbes, the chapters raise crucial points about how microbes are ‘known’ and how social scientists can study microbes with ethnographic methods, more often than not in the absence of microscopes, models, and computations. Following these various entanglements, the book tells how these relations transform both humans and microbes in the process.
August 2021
Sensing In/Security: Sensors as Transnational Security Infrastructures
Author: Fenwick McKelvey
Author: Rachel Douglas-Jones
Author: Jan-Hendrik Passoth
Author: Chris Wood
Author: Katja Mayer
Author: El Iblis Shah
Author: Mascha Gugganig
Author: Ciara Bracken-Roche
Author: Annalisa Pelizza
Author: Wouter Van Rossem
Author: A.R.E. Taylor
Author: Julia Velkova
Author: Godert-Jan van Manen
Author: Martin Tironi
Author: Matías Valderrama
Author: Ilia Antenucci
Author: Francis Lee
Author: Erik Aarden
Author: Jutta Weber
Author: Evan Light
Editor: Nina Klimburg-Witjes
Editor: Nikolaus Poechhacker
Editor: Geoffrey C. Bowker
Foreword by: Lucy Suchman
Manchester, UK: Mattering Press, 2021
https://doi.org/10.28938/9781912729111
Sensing In/Security: Sensors as Transnational Security Infrastructures investigates how sensors and sensing practices enact regimes of security and insecurity. It extends long-standing concerns with infrastructuring to emergent modes of surveillance and control by exploring how digitally networked sensors shape securitisation practices. Contributions in this volume examine how sensing devices gain political and epistemic relevance in various forms of in/security, from border control, regulation, and epidemiological tracking, to aerial surveillance and hacking. Instead of focusing on specific sensory devices and their consequences, this volume explores the complex and sometimes invisible political, cultural and ethical processes of infrastructuring in/security.
May 2021
Energy Worlds: In Experiment
Author: Dominic Boyer
Author: Mónica Amador-Jiménez
Author: Noortje Marres
Author: Cymene Howe
Author: Jamie Cross
Author: Simone Almond Abram
Author: Ann-Sofie Kall
Author: Rebecca Ford
Author: Lea Schick
Author: Endre Dányi
Author: Michaela Spencer
Author: Hannah Knox
Author: Andrea Ballestero
Author: Stefan Helmreich
Author: Damian O’Doherty
Editor: Laura Watts
Editor: Brit Ross Winthereik
Editor: James Maguire
Illustrator: Neil Ford
Contributions by: Rob Jones
Manchester, UK: Mattering Press, 2021
https://doi.org/10.28938/9781912729098
Energy Worlds in Experiment is an experiment in writing about energy and an exploration of energy infrastructures as experiments. Twenty authors have written collaborative chapters that examine energy politics and practices, from electricity cables and energy monitors to swamps and estuaries.
August 2020
Boxes: A Field Guide
Author: Mathias Grote
Author: Lucy Razzall
Author: Bonnie Mak
Author: Julia Pollack
Author: Jameson Kismet Bell
Author: Emily Brownell
Author: Ulrich Mechler
Author: Tahani Nadim
Author: Stephanie Bowry
Author: Beatrix Darmstädter
Author: Martina Siebert
Author: Stewart Allen
Author: Styliana Galiniki
Author: Eleftheria Akrivopoulou
Author: Artemis Yagou
Author: Nils Güttler
Author: Tanja Hammel
Author: Alexandra Widmer
Author: Deanna Day
Author: Eric J. Engstrom
Author: Victoria Lee
Author: Dagmar Schäfer
Author: Pit Arens
Author: Sarah Blacker
Author: Shih-Pei Chen
Author: Yi-Ping Cheng
Author: Mats Fridlund
Author: Christine von Oertzen
Author: Etienne Benson
Author: Johanna Gonçalves Martín
Author: Mirka Palioura
Author: Spyridoula Pyrpyli
Author: Myrto Vouleli
Author: Don Duprez
Author: Hanako Endo
Author: Jan Eric Olsén
Editor: Maria Rentetzi
Editor: Martina Schlünder
Editor: Susanne Bauer
Manchester: Mattering Press, 2020
https://doi.org/10.28938/9781912729012
A book full of boxes. A box in itself. An unboxing. This book explores boxes in their broadest sense and size. It invites us to step into the field, unravel how and why things are contained and how it might be otherwise. By turning the focus of Science and Technology Studies (STS) to boxing practices, this collation of essays examines boxes as world-making devices.
July 2018
An Anthropology of Common Ground: Awkward Encounters in Heritage Work
Author: Nathalia Brichet
Manchester: Mattering Press, 2018
https://doi.org/10.28938/9780995527799
Paying attention to details and ‘small stories’ as that which make worlds (heritage projects as well as ethnography), the book proposes a kind of postcolonial scholarship. Rather than uncovering or building up one story about the Danish-Ghanaian past, the work insists on providing ‘inconclusive’ analyses, collaboratively generated in the course of the project work and in the process of writing ethnographically about it. The ambition is to nurture fieldwork as an opportunity for creating a common ground, on which to think about what heritage and ethnography could be. Common ground, then, is not only an ideal of the joint heritage project, but an expression of an anthropological ambition. In consequence, the book is an account of a particular ethnographic research project – the ‘methods story’ being about how post-colonial relations might be noticed and supported and about how empirical research is done as relations between what is going on in the field and the way that the ethnographer chooses to tell the story of the field in the text.
Ghost-Managed Medicine: Big Pharma’s Invisible Hands
Author: Sergio Sismondo
Manchester, UK: Mattering Press, 2018
Inventing the Social
Author: Noortje Marres
Author: Michael Guggenheim
Author: Alex Wilkie
Author: Nerea Calvillo
Author: Bernd Kräftner
Author: Judith Kröll
Author: Christian Nold
Author: Mike Michael
Author: Andrés Jaque
Author: Nigel Clark
Author: Fabian Muniesa
Author: Martin Savransky
Author: Marsha Rosengarten
Author: Carolin Gerlitz
Author: Christopher Kelty
Author: Lucy Kimbell
Manchester, UK: Mattering Press, 2018
https://doi.org/10.28938/9780995527768
Inventing the Social, edited by Noortje Marres, Michael Guggenheim and Alex Wilkie, showcases recent efforts to develop new ways of knowing society that combine social research with creative practice. With contributions from leading figures in sociology, architecture, geography, design, anthropology, and digital media, the book provides practical and conceptual pointers on how to move beyond the customary distinctions between knowledge and art, and on how to connect the doing, researching and making of social life in potentially new ways.
Presenting concrete projects with a creative approach to researching social life as well as reflections on the wider contexts from which these projects emerge, this collection shows how collaboration across social science, digital media and the arts opens up timely alternatives to narrow, instrumentalist proposals that seek to engineer behaviour and to design community from scratch. To invent the social is to recognise that social life is always already creative in itself and to take this as a starting point for developing different ways of combining representation and intervention in social life.
July 2016
Imagining Classrooms: Stories of children, teaching, and ethnography
Author: Vicki Macknight
Manchester, UK: Mattering Press, 2016
Modes of Knowing: Resources from the Baroque
Author: Annemarie Mol
Author: Brit Ross Winthereik
Author: Hugh Raffles
Author: Mario Blaser
Author: Antoine Hennion
Author: Adrian Mackenzie
Author: Mattijs van de Port
Author: Helen Verran
Editor: Evelyn Ruppert
Editor: John Law
Manchester, UK: Mattering Press, 2016
https://doi.org/10.28938/9780993144981
How might we think differently? This book is an attempt to respond to this question. Its contributors are all interested in non-standard modes of knowing. They are all more or less uneasy with the restrictions or the agendas implied by academic modes of knowing, and they have chosen to do this by working with, through, or against one important Western alternative — that of the baroque.