Books published by Mattering Press

A book full of boxes. A box in itself. This book explores boxes in their broadest sense and size. It invites us to step into the field, unravel how and why things are contained and how it might be otherwise. By turning the focus of Science and Technology Studies to boxing practices, this collation of essays examines boxes as world-making devices.

Paying attention to details and 'small stories' as that which make worlds (heritage projects as well as ethnography), the book proposes a kind of postcolonial scholarship. Rather than uncovering or building up one story about the Danish-Ghanaian past, the work insists on providing 'inconclusive' analyses, collaboratively generated in the course of the project work and in the process of writing ethnographically about it. The ambition is to nurture fieldwork as an opportunity for creating a common ground, on which to think about what heritage and ethnography could be. Common ground, then, is not only an ideal of the joint heritage project, but an expression of an anthropological ambition. In consequence, the book is an account of a particular ethnographic research project - the 'methods story' being about how post-colonial relations might be noticed and supported and about how empirical research is done as relations between what is going on in the field and the way that the ethnographer chooses to tell the story of the field in the text.The book is structured around four different approaches, following a 'crafting the field' chapter (in lieu of a 'context' chapter). Each provides a qualification of heritage and ethnography - as components of positively and collaboratively generating what these phenomena even are.

What draws us towards a shop window display? What drives us to grab a special offer, to enter the privileged circle of premium newspaper subscribers, to peruse the pages of an enticing magazine? Without doubt, it is curiosity - that essential force of everyday action which invites us to break from our habits and to become transported beyond our very selves. Curiosity (whether healthy or unhealthy) is one of the favourite tricks of market seduction. Capturing a public - attracting the attention of a reader, seducing a customer, meeting the expectations of a user, persuading a voter ... - often requires the construction of a set of technical devices that can play upon people's inner motivations. Cochoy invites us to take a sociological trip into these cabinets of curiosity, accompanied throughout by Bluebeard, a fairy tale that is both a model of the genre and a pure curiosity machine. At once a work of history and economic anthropology, the book meticulously analyses the devices designed by markets to arouse, excite, and sustain curiosity: a window display, practices of 'teasing', packaging, bus shelters, mobile internet technologies, to name but a few. In the Bettencourt and Strauss-Kahn affairs and the Wikileaks controversy, Cochoy also uncovers the work of investigative journalism and its attention-grabbing 'scoops', revealing the secrets of the revealers of secrets. Available in English for the first time, this major work will arouse readers' curiosity over the course of its unusual and colourful journey. By the end, now better informed and more cautious, they will be able to identify the traps of which they are the target. So long as curiosity is kept at bay, at least!

In this book we go to five Australian classrooms, bustling with nine- and ten-year-old children. In each classroom, imaginations are being done, not just in minds, but also with bodies, using materials and words, laughter and ideas. Each classroom is part of a different type of school: a Waldorf/Steiner school, an exclusive private school, a middle-class government school, a diverse Catholic school, and a school for intellectually disabled 'special' children. And at these five schools, we see imagination being done - to represent, to transform, to empathise, to work with others, and to think. The book's characters are children and teachers, with teachers working through the school day to give children the skills they will need to think, to think with and about others, and to be creative. What we notice are habits of imagining being instilled. These range from getting children to close their eyes and imagine accurate representations, through to getting them to imagine how others feel, to getting children to make new connections between thoughts and feelings. We wonder about the implications of these habits for good knowing and good doing. At the same time, the book shines a critical lens onto the imaginative practices of ethnographers and participant-observers, to help us think about how we define, how we class, and how we analyse our data. Ethnographers, too, have habits of imagining, representing, empathising, and connecting, and noticing these habits can help us do them better. How are academic practices both material and imaginative? How might we make sure our work is both as accurate and as ethical as possible? Macknight argues that imagination is not just something hidden in minds - it is something we do. This, then, is a book about how to do imagination better for thinking, for making, and for living together.

This book compares things, objects, concepts, and ideas. It is also about the practical acts of doing comparison. Comparison is not something that exists in the world, but a particular kind of activity. Agents of various kinds compare by placing things next to one another, by using software programs and other tools, and by simply looking in certain ways. Comparing like this is an everyday practice. But in the social sciences, comparing often becomes more burdensome, more complex, and more questions are asked of it. How, then, do social scientists compare? What role do funders, their tools, and databases play in social scientific comparisons? Which sorts of objects do they choose to compare and how do they decide which comparisons are meaningful? Doing comparison in the social sciences, it emerges, is a practice weighed down by a history in which comparison was seen as problematic. As it plays out in the present, this history encounters a range of other agents also involved in doing comparison who may challenge the comparisons of social scientists themselves. This book introduces these questions through a varied range of reports, auto-ethnographies, and theoretical interventions that compare and analyse these different and often intersecting comparisons. Its goal is to begin a move away from the critique of comparison and towards a better comparative practice, guided not by abstract principles, but a deeper understanding of the challenges of practising comparison.

This is the story of a set of computational devices called Energy Babbles. The product of a collaboration between designers and STS researchers, Energy Babbles are like automated talk radios obsessed with energy. Synthesised voices, punctuated by occasional jingles, recount energy policy announcements, remarks about energy conservation made on social media, information about current energy demand and production, and comments entered by other Babble users. Developed for members of UK community groups working to promote sustainable energy practices, the Energy Babbles were designed to reflect the complex situations they navigate, to provide information and encourage communication, and to help shed light on their engagements with energy policy and practice. This book tells the story of the Babbles from a mix of design and STS perspectives, suggesting how design may benefit from the perspectives of STS, and how STS may take an interventionist, design-led approach to the study of emerging technological issues.