Science is culture

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Terry Shinn and Richard Whitley

This annual publication brings together articles centred around particular themes in the Sociology of the Sciences as a means of contributing to the development of a comparative, cross disciplinary understanding of the sciences. By publishing research articles from a number of perspectives and approaches on a specific topic, the Yearbook provides an opportunity for the integration of different disciplinary strategies and their interrelated development.

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Mario Giampietro and Kozo Mayumi

"Faced with the twin threats of peak oil and climate change, many governments have turned for an answer to the apparent panacea of biofuels. Yet, increasingly, the progressive implementation of this solution demonstrates that the promise of biofuels as a replacement to fossil fuels is in fact a mirage that, if followed, risks leaving us short of power, short of food and doing as much damage to the climate as ever - let alone the consequent impact on biodiversity due to additional loss of habitat for agricultural production and on rural development due to the additional stress on traditional farming systems. Worse still, these risks are being ignored. In this definitive exposé, Mario Giampietro and Kozo Mayumi present a theoretical framework and exhaustive evidence for the case against large scale biofuel production from agricultural crops. This book will be vital, sobering reading for anyone concerned with energy or agricultural policy, or bioenergy as a complex system."--Publisher's description.

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Savannah Shange

"Savannah Shange's PROGRESSIVE DYSTOPIA is an activist ethnography of Robeson Justice Academy, a progressive Black and Brown school in San Francisco, which despite its commitments to social justice ends up replicating anti-Blackness. Black students are more likely to be punished, and progressive 'wins' at the school can come at a cost to Black San Francisco residents. Shange worked at the school for seven years. Moving through different registers-- Black English, neighborhood dialects, academic prose, and ethnography-- the book attends to the tensions between coalition, anti-blackness, and the state, theorizing events at the school in the context of the long afterlives of slavery"--

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Douglas R. Weiner

Models of Nature studies the early and turbulent years of the Soviet conservation movement from the October Revolution to the mid-1930s - Lenin's rule to the rise of Stalin. This new edition includes an afterword by the author that reflects upon the study's impact and discusses advances in the field since the book was first published.