Books in the Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge series

There is a vast gulf between the public face of diplomacy and the opinions and actions that take place behind embassy doors. In At Home with the Diplomats, Iver B. Neumann offers unprecedented access to the inner workings of a foreign ministry.

A fascinating account of journalists struggling to maintain their expertise and authority, even as they find their principles and skills profoundly challenged by ever more complex and fast-moving streams of information.

Governing Habits is an ethnography of extraordinary sensitivity and awareness that shows how therapeutic practice and expertise is expressed in the highly specific, yet rapidly transforming milieu of hospitals, clinics, and rehabilitation centers in post-Soviet Russia.

Sweeping in scope and conceptually ambitious, this book tells a story of infrastructure and of global flows of money, goods, and people.

Ilana Gershon investigates how and when the categories "cultural" and "acultural" become relevant for Samoans as they encounter cultural differences in churches, ritual exchanges, welfare offices, and community-based organizations.

This book examines the special relationship between politics and design in Sweden, revealing in particular the cultural meanings this relationship holds for Swedish...

Rudnyckyj's book challenges widespread assumptions about contemporary Islam by showing how moderate Muslims in Southeast Asia are reinterpreting Islam not to reject modernity but to create business practices conducive to globalization.

Crane reveals how Africa went from being a continent largely excluded from advancements in HIV medicine to an area of central concern and knowledge production within the increasingly popular field of global health science.

Since the early 1990s hundreds of thousands of Tamil villagers in southern India have participated in literacy lessons, science demonstrations, and other events designed to transform them into active citizens with access to state power. These efforts to spread enlightenment among the oppressed are part of a movement known as the Arivoli Iyakkam...

Theresa MacPhail examines our collective fascination with and fear of viruses through the lens of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic.

The Technocratic Antarctic is an ethnographic account of the scientists and policymakers who work on Antarctica. In a place with no indigenous people, Antarctic scientists and policymakers use expertise as their primary model of governance. Scientific research and policymaking are practices that inform each other, and the Antarctic environment-with its striking beauty, dramatic human and animal lives, and specter of global climate change-not only informs science and policy but also lends Antarctic environmentalism a particularly technocratic patina.Jessica O'Reilly conducted most of her research for this book in New Zealand, home of the "e;Antarctic Gateway"e; city of Christchurch, and on an expedition to Windless Bight, Antarctica, with the New Zealand Antarctic Program. O'Reilly also follows the journeys Antarctic scientists and policymakers take to temporarily "e;Antarctic"e; places such as science conferences, policy workshops, and the international Antarctic Treaty meetings in Scotland, Australia, and India. Competing claims of nationalism, scientific disciplines, field experiences, and personal relationships among Antarctic environmental managers disrupt the idea of a utopian epistemic community. O'Reilly focuses on what emerges in Antarctica among the complicated and hybrid forms of science, sociality, politics, and national membership found there. The Technocratic Antarctic unfolds the historical, political, and moral contexts that shape experiences of and decisions about the Antarctic environment.

In the 2000s, Laos was treated as a model country for the efficacy of privatized, "sustainable" hydropower projects as viable options for World Bank-led development. By viewing hydropower as a process...