[Air-L] Book Announcement: Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology and Society in Latin America

[Eden Medina]

Dear all,

This publication may be of interest to list readers, especially the two
chapters by Anita Chan and Morgan Ames on the XO laptop created by the One
Laptop per Child program. The book has been structured so that each chapter
stands alone and can be used for teaching. More information about the book
is available at: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/beyond-imported-magic. Apologies
for cross postings.

Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology and Society in Latin
America

Edited by Eden Medina, Ivan da Costa Marques, and Christina Holmes
Foreword by Marcos Cueto

MIT Press, 2014, 396 pp.
ISBN: 9780262526203 (paperback)
Also available in hardback and Kindle

Amazon URL:
http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Magic-Science-Technology-Society/dp/0262526204/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409104674&sr=8-1&keywords=beyond+imported+magic

The essays in this volume study the creation, adaptation, and use of
science and technology in Latin America. They challenge the view that
scientific ideas and technology travel unchanged from the global North to
the global South -- the view of technology as "imported magic." They
describe not only alternate pathways for innovation, invention, and
discovery but also how ideas and technologies circulate in Latin American
contexts and transnationally. The contributors’ explorations of these
issues, and their examination of specific Latin American experiences with
science and technology, offer a broader, more nuanced understanding of how
science, technology, politics, and power interact in the past and present.
The essays in this book use methods from history and the social sciences to
investigate forms of local creation and use of technologies; the
circulation of ideas, people, and artifacts in local and global networks;
and hybrid technologies and forms of knowledge production. They address
such topics as the work of female forensic geneticists in Colombia; the
pioneering Argentinean use of fingerprinting technology in the late
nineteenth century; the design, use, and meaning of the XO Laptops created
and distributed by the One Laptop per Child Program; and the development of
nuclear energy in Argentina, Mexico, and Chile.

Contributors:
Pedro Ignacio Alonso, Morgan G. Ames, Javiera Barandiarán, João Biehl,
Anita Say Chan, Amy Cox Hall, Henrique Cukierman, Ana Delgado, Rafael Dias,
Adriana Díaz del Castillo H., Mariano Fressoli, Jonathan Hagood, Christina
Holmes, Matthieu Hubert, Noela Invernizzi, Michael Lemon, Ivan da Costa
Marques, Gisela Mateos, Eden Medina, María Fernanda Olarte Sierra, Hugo
Palmarola, Tania Pérez-Bustos, Julia Rodriguez, Israel Rodríguez-Giralt,
Edna Suárez Díaz, Hernán Thomas, Manuel Tironi, Dominique Vinck

Table of Contents

1     Introduction: Beyond Imported Magic// Eden Medina, Ivan da Costa
Marques, and Christina Holmes

SECTION I: Latin American Perspectives on Science, Technology, and Society

2     Who Invented Brazil? // Henrique Cukierman

3     Innovation and Inclusive Development in the South: A Critical
Perspective // Mariano Fressoli, Rafael Dias, and Hernán Thomas

4     Working with Care: Experiences of Invisible Women Scientists
Practicing Forensic Genetics in Colombia // Tania Pérez-Bustos, María
Fernanda Olarte Sierra, and Adriana Díaz del Castillo H.

5     Ontological Politics and Latin American Local Knowledges // Ivan da
Costa Marques

6     Technology in an Expanded Field: A Review of History of Technology
Scholarship on Latin America in Select English-Language Journals // Michael
Lemon and Eden Medina

SECTION II:  Local and Global Networks of Innovation

7     South Atlantic Crossings: Fingerprints, Science, and the State In
Turn of the Twentieth Century Argentina // Julia Rodriguez

8     Tropical Assemblage: The Soviet Large Panel in Cuba // Hugo Palmarola
and Pedro Alonso

9     Balancing Design: OLPC Engineers and ICT Translations at the
Periphery // Anita Chan

10    Translating Magic: The Charisma of OLPC's XO Laptop in Paraguay //
Morgan G. Ames

11    Nanoscience and Nanotechnology: How has an Emerging Area on the
Scientific Agenda of the Core Countries been Adopted and Transformed in
Latin America? // Noela Invernizzi, Matthieu Hubert, and Dominique Vinck

12    Latin America as Laboratory: The Camera and the Yale Peruvian
Expeditions // Amy Cox Hall

SECTION III: Science, Technology and Latin American Politics

13     Bottling Atomic Energy: Technology, Politics, and the State in
Peronist Argentina // Jonathan Hagood

14     Peaceful Atoms in Mexico // Gisela Mateos and Edna Suárez Díaz

15     Neoliberalism as Political Technology: Expertise, Energy and
Democracy in Chile // Manuel Tironi and Javiera Barandiarán

16     Creole Interferences: A Conflict on Biodiversity and Ownership in
the South of Brazil // Ana Delgado and Israel Rodriguez-Giralt

17     The Juridical Hospital: Patient-Citizen-Consumers Claiming the Right
to Health in Brazilian Courts // João Biehl

Endorsements:

At one level the term 'beyond imported magic' situates this collection as a
contribution to the critique of the traditional North-South diffusionist
stories of science and technology, but at another level the essays take the
reader beyond the 'imported magic' of Northern theories of STS. By
connecting us with the reflexive and critical voices of Latin American STS
scholarship, this book is a great introduction to contemporary modes of
rethinking STS from Latin American perspectives."

-David J. Hess, Sociology, Vanderbilt University

This astonishing collection provides for both science and technology
studies and postcolonial students and scholars valuable new pathways for
thinking and illuminatingly different conceptual approaches. These authors
usher in a much-needed expansive era for historians, philosophers,
sociologists, political theorists, and ethnographers of science as well as
for readers in other fields. I can't wait to teach it.

-Sandra Harding, Distinguished Professor, Departments of Education and
Gender Studies, University of California, Los Angeles; Distinguished
Affiliate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University;
and author of Sciences from Below

In this enchanting book, leading scholars conjure up surprising and
gripping new configurations of science and technology in Latin America.
These essays reveal brilliantly how local and regional histories haunt
so-called global scientific projects. Beyond Imported Magic brings Latin
America into contemporary conversations about what makes technoscience
appear so worldly and cosmopolitan, even as it is experienced as situated
and place-bound in practice. This book will cast a spell on anyone who
wants to understand the multiple ways in which we try, and often fail, to
be both modern and global.

-Warwick Anderson, University of Sydney, author of The Collectors of Lost
Souls

This exciting and thought-provoking volume shows how analyzing Latin
America through an STS lens allows us to peer more closely at known
histories and uncover new and in some cases existing but understudied
connections. Once we divest ourselves of outdated adjectives such as
'peripheral' to explain the role of Latin America in science we invariably
begin to see the region as a center with a long history of scientific
production and with the many complexities that this entails. By placing
Latin America into longer narratives of (redefined or reemphasized)
scientific research, the authors crucially demonstrate science as
ever-present and not a relatively new, imported phenomena of the
nineteenth/twentieth centuries.

-Gabriela Soto Laveaga, author of Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants,
National Projects, and the Making of the Pill