An abolitionist approach to STS and the history of the life sciences: this is the model that Cristina Mejia Visperas offers in her book, Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory (NYU 2022). By now, scientists’ experiments on captive men at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison are well known, thanks to the brave and important testimony of for ... Show More
Today
Jeffrey R. Di Leo et al. eds., "Theory as World Literature" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
What does it mean for theory to be considered as a species of not just literature but world literature? Theory as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2025), edited by Jeffrey De Leo, offers a wide range of accounts of how the “worlding” of literature both problematizes the national cat ... Show More
32m 21s
Yesterday
Don Thomas Deere, "The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space" (Duke UP, 2026)
In The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space (Duke University Press, 2026), Don Thomas Deere retraces the colonial origins of spatial organization in the Americas and the Caribbean and its lasting impact on modern structures of knowledge, power, race, gender as well ... Show More
46m 2s
Jun 10
Natalia Rogach Alexander, "Growing People: The Enduring Legacy of John Dewey" (Columbia UP, 2025)
John Dewey is among history’s most celebrated thinkers on democracy and education, yet he has often been underappreciated and misunderstood as a philosopher. This book paints a fresh portrait of Dewey as not only a reformer of schooling but also a profound theorist of human devel ... Show More
51m 37s
Nov 2023
The unexpected outcomes of artist-scientist collaborations
Artist and illustrator Lucy Smith helps botanists to identify new species. Usually they request a set of drawings, she says, with a detailed set of requirements.But Smith, who joined London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, more than 20 years ago, says: “We also feed back to the scie ... Show More
23m 48s
May 2023
Eva Haifa Giraud, "What Comes After Entanglement?: Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion" (Duke UP, 2019)
By foregrounding the ways that human existence is bound together with the lives of other entities, contemporary cultural theorists have sought to move beyond an anthropocentric worldview. Yet as Eva Haifa Giraud contends in What Comes After Entanglement?: Activism, Anthropocentri ... Show More
38m 22s
Jan 2017
Anthony Lioi, “Nerd Ecology: Defending the Earth with Unpopular Culture” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016)
In Nerd Ecology: Defending the Earth with Unpopular Culture (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Anthony Lioi examines literature, film, television, and comics through an ecocritical study of nerd culture. Lioi explores Star Trek, The Hunger Games, The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Buffy th ... Show More
1h 7m
Feb 2022
Merging supermassive black holes, and communicating science in the age of social media
On this week’s show: What we can learn from two supermassive black holes that appear to be on a collision course with each other, and the brave new online world in which social media dominates and gatekeeps public access to scientific information First up, Staff Writer Daniel Cle ... Show More
29m 51s
Jan 2022
A scientist's case for "woo-woo"
Sean Illing talks with David Hamilton, a scientist and former research chemist turned author, about his new book Why Woo-Woo Works, in which he offers a scientifically-grounded defense of alternative practices like meditation, crystals, and the law of attraction. They discuss the ... Show More
58m 34s