Science, Technology and Society
What Is Cybersecurity For?
Cybersecurity is one of the key practical and political challenges of our time. This book explains the complexities of global information systems, the challenges of providing security to users, societies, states and the international system, and the multitude of competing players and ambitions in this arena.
Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy
Amazon and the Power of Organization
Drawing on interviews with Amazon workers and original empirical data, this book explores how different working conditions estrange and alienate workers, and how, despite these, workers find ways to organize and express their agency. This is an important analysis of work on the digital shop floor for the scholars of platform economy.
Expertise in Crisis
The Ideological Contours of Public Scientific Controversies
As the crisis of expertise continues to be a global issue, this book shows that it is not a ‘scientific’ controversy, but an ideological dispute with believers on both sides. If the advocates of consensus science acknowledge the uncertainties of even the best science, it is possible to open a pathway towards communication between world views.
Disrupted Urbanism
Situated Smart Initiatives in African Cities
The ‘smart city’ is often promoted as a technology-driven solution to complex urban issues. Drawing on original research conducted in urban African settings, this book provides a much-needed alternative view, exploring how ‘home-grown’ digital disruption, driven and initiated by local actors, upending the mainstream corporate narrative.
The Tensions of Algorithmic Thinking
Automation, Intelligence and the Politics of Knowing
In this pioneering book, David Beer redefines emergent algorithmic technologies as the new systems of knowing. He examines the acute tensions they create and how they are changing what is known and what is knowable.
Robots and Immigrants
Who Is Stealing Jobs?
This book scrutinises the narratives created around stealing jobs, opening new debates on the role of automation and migration policies. The authors reveal how the advances in AI and demands for constant flow of immigrant workers eradicate political and working rights, propagating fears over job theft and ownership.
Moral Gravity
Staying Together at the End of the World
This radical book unsettles how we think about taking responsibility for environmental catastrophe.
Going beyond both hopelessness and false hope as responses to climate change, Hill envisions a society that does not centre human beings at its core and calls for sustaining a coexistence of animals, plants and minerals bound by one planet.
Resisting AI
An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere, yet it causes damage to society in ways that can’t be fixed. Calling for the restructuring of AI, Dan McQuillan sets out an anti-fascist approach that replaces exclusions with caring and outlines new mechanisms that support collective freedom.
Gender Inequalities in Tech-driven Research and Innovation
Living the Contradiction
ePDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This volume centres on the lived experience of women working in tech-driven research and innovation areas in the Nordic countries.
Women in Supramolecular Chemistry
Collectively Crafting the Rhythms of Our Work and Lives in STEM
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Drawing on research carried out by the Women in Supramolecular Chemistry network, this book sets out the extent to which women working in STEM face inequality and discrimination. It offers a path forward to inclusivity and diversity.
Being Human During COVID-19
This transdisciplinary collection engages with key issues of social exclusion, inequality, power and knowledge in the context of COVID-19 for a more equitable and inclusive human future.
Experiments in Automating Immigration Systems
Identifying a pattern of risky experimentation with automated systems in the Home Office, this book outlines precautionary measures that are essential to ensure that society benefits from government automation without exposing individuals to unacceptable risks.