Imagine eating a burger grown in a laboratory, a strawberry picked by a robot, or a pastry created with a 3-D printer. You would never taste the difference, but these technologies might just save your health and the planet’s. Today, landmark advances in computing, engineering, and medicine are driving solutions to the biggest problems created by industrialized food.

Tech to Table introduces readers to twenty-five of the most creative entrepreneurs advancing these solutions. They come from various places and professions, identities and backgrounds. But they share an outsider’s perspective and an idealistic, sometimes aggressive, ambition to rethink the food system.

Reinvention is desperately needed. Under Big Ag, pollution, climate change, animal cruelty, hunger, and obesity have festered, and despite decades of effort, organic farming accounts for less than one percent of US croplands. Entrepreneurs represent a new path, one where disruptive technology helps people and the environment. These innovations include supplements to lower the methane in cattle belches, drones that monitor irrigation levels in crops, urban warehouses that grow produce year-round, and more.

The pace and breadth of change is astonishing, as investors pump billions of dollars into ag-innovation. Startups are attracting capital and building markets, with the potential to upend conventional agribusiness’s stranglehold on the food system. Not every invention will prosper long-term, but each marks a fundamental change in our approach to feeding a growing population—sustainably.

A revolution in how we grow and eat food is brewing. Munson’s deftly crafted profiles offer a fascinating preview of the coming future of food.
 
 

Delusions of electronic persecution have been a preeminent symptom of psychosis for over two hundred years. In The Technical Delusion Jeffrey Sconce traces the history and continuing proliferation of this phenomenon from its origins in Enlightenment anatomy to our era of global interconnectivity. While psychiatrists have typically dismissed such delusions of electronic control as arbitrary or as mere reflections of modern life, Sconce demonstrates a more complex and interdependent history of electronics, power, and insanity. Drawing on a wide array of psychological case studies, literature, court cases, and popular media, Sconce analyzes the material and social processes that have shaped historical delusions of electronic contamination, implantation, telepathy, surveillance, and immersion. From the age of telegraphy to contemporary digitality, the media emerged within such delusions to become the privileged site for imagining the merger of electronic and political power, serving as a paranoid conduit between the body and the body politic. Looking to the future, Sconce argues that this symptom will become increasingly difficult to isolate, especially as remote and often secretive powers work to further integrate bodies, electronics, and information.  

Evaluates a technological approach to social change which seeks to cure society's ills by dealing with its symptoms, rather than root causes. It examines four such technological shortcuts in terms of their relevance to specific social problems: methadone in controlling heroin addiction; antabuse in treating alcoholism; the breath analyzer in highway safety; and gun control in reducing crime. The authors seek solutions which do not require large amounts of new resources or planning, and will accelerate the pace of social change. They indicate that technological handling of such problems may be the answer.

Across the globe, migration has been met with intensifying modes of criminalization and securitization, and claims for political asylum are increasingly met with suspicion. Asylum seekers have become the focus of global debates surrounding humanitarian obligations, on the one hand, and concerns surrounding national security and border control, on the other. In Technologies of Suspicion and the Ethics of Obligation in Political Asylum, contributors provide fine-tuned analyses of political asylum systems and the adjudication of asylum claims across a range of sociocultural and geopolitical contexts.

The contributors to this timely volume, drawing on a variety of theoretical perspectives, offer critical insights into the processes by which tensions between humanitarianism and security are negotiated at the local level, often with negative consequences for asylum seekers. By investigating how a politics of suspicion within asylum systems is enacted in everyday practices and interactions, the authors illustrate how asylum seekers are often produced as suspicious subjects by the very systems to which they appeal for protection.

Contributors: Ilil Benjamin, Carol Bohmer, Nadia El-Shaarawi, Bridget M. Haas, John Beard Haviland, Marco Jacquemet, Benjamin N. Lawrance, Rachel Lewis, Sara McKinnon, Amy Shuman, Charles Watters

Because of its strong agrarian roots, the South has typically been viewed as a region not favorably disposed to innovation and technology. Yet innovation was never absent from industrialization in this part of the United States. From the early nineteenth century onward, southerners were as eager as other Americans to embrace technology as a path to modernity.

This volume features seven essays that range widely across the region and its history, from the antebellum era to the present, to assess the role of innovations presumed lacking by most historians. Offering a challenging interpretation of industrialization in the South, these writings show that the benefits of innovations had to be carefully weighed against the costs to both industry and society.

The essays consider a wide range of innovative technologies. Some examine specific industries in subregions: steamboats in the lower Mississippi valley, textile manufacturing in Georgia and Arkansas, coal mining in Virginia, and sugar planting and processing in Louisiana. Others consider the role of technology in South Carolina textile mills around the turn of the twentieth century, the electrification of the Tennessee valley, and telemedicine in contemporary Arizona—marking the expansion of the region into the southwestern Sunbelt.

Together, these articles show that southerners set significant limitations on what technological innovations they were willing to adopt, particularly in a milieu where slaveholding agriculture had shaped the allocation of resources. They also reveal how scarcity of capital and continued reliance on agriculture influenced that allocation into the twentieth century, relieved eventually by federal spending during the Depression and its aftermath that sparked the Sunbelt South’s economic boom.

Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization clearly demonstrates that the South’s embrace of technological innovation in the modern era doesn’t mark a radical change from the past but rather signals that such pursuits were always part of the region’s economy. It deflates the myth of southern agrarianism while expanding the scope of antebellum American industrialization beyond the Northeast and offers new insights into the relationship of southern economic history to the region’s society and politics.

In the last ten years, television has reinvented itself in numerous ways. The demise of the U.S. three-network system, the rise of multi-channel cable and global satellite delivery, changes in regulation policies and ownership rules, technological innovations in screen design, and the development of digital systems like TiVo have combined to transform the practice we call watching tv. If tv refers to the technologies, program forms, government policies, and practices of looking associated with the medium in its classic public service and three-network age, it appears that we are now entering a new phase of television. Exploring these changes, the essays in this collection consider the future of television in the United States and Europe and the scholarship and activism focused on it.

With historical, critical, and speculative essays by some of the leading television and media scholars, Television after TV examines both commercial and public service traditions and evaluates their dual (and some say merging) fates in our global, digital culture of convergence. The essays explore a broad range of topics, including contemporary programming and advertising strategies, the use of television and the Internet among diasporic and minority populations, the innovations of new technologies like TiVo, the rise of program forms from reality tv to lifestyle programs, television’s changing role in public places and at home, the Internet’s use as a means of social activism, and television’s role in education and the arts. In dialogue with previous media theorists and historians, the contributors collectively rethink the goals of media scholarship, pointing toward new ways of accounting for television’s past, present, and future.

Contributors. William Boddy, Charlotte Brunsdon, John T. Caldwell, Michael Curtin, Julie D’Acci, Anna Everett, Jostein Gripsrud, John Hartley, Anna McCarthy, David Morley, Jan Olsson, Priscilla Peña Ovalle, Lisa Parks, Jeffrey Sconce, Lynn Spigel, William Uricchio

In Television as Digital Media, scholars from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States combine television studies with new media studies to analyze digital TV as part of digital culture. Taking into account technologies, industries, economies, aesthetics, and various production, user, and audience practices, the contributors develop a new critical paradigm for thinking about television, and the future of television studies, in the digital era. The collection brings together established and emerging scholars, producing an intergenerational dialogue that will be useful for anyone seeking to understand the relationship between television and digital media.

Introducing the collection, James Bennett explains how television as digital media is a non-site-specific, hybrid cultural and technological form that spreads across platforms such as mobile phones, games consoles, iPods, and online video services, including YouTube, Hulu and the BBC’s iPlayer. Television as digital media threatens to upset assumptions about television as a mass medium that has helped define the social collective experience, the organization of everyday life, and forms of sociality. As often as we are promised the convenience of the television experience “anytime, anywhere,” we are invited to participate in communities, share television moments, and watch events live. The essays in this collection demonstrate the historical, production, aesthetic, and audience changes and continuities that underpin the emerging meaning of television as digital media.

Contributors. James Bennett, William Boddy, Jean Burgess, John Caldwell, Daniel Chamberlain, Max Dawson, Jason Jacobs, Karen Lury, Roberta Pearson, Jeanette Steemers, Niki Strange, Julian Thomas, Graeme Turner

Contemporary American media is awash with reality programs, faux documentaries, and user generated content. When did this fixation on real or feigned nonfictionality begin? Tomboys, Pretty Boys, and Outspoken Women argues that its origins can be found in the early 1970s, when American media discovered the entertainment value of documentaries, news programming, and other nonfiction forms. Edward D. Miller challenges preconceptions of the ’60s and ’70s through close readings of key events and important figures in the early 1970s: John Dean’s performance in front of the Senate during the Watergate Hearings; Billie Jean King popularizing tennis by taking on Bobby Riggs in a prime-time match; David Bowie experiencing “outer space” in his tours across America; An American Family and their gay son facing the public’s consternation; and Alison Steele, a female DJ who invited listeners to fly with her at night. Miller explores the early 1970s as a turning point in American culture, with nonfiction media of the time creating new possibilities for expressions of gender and sexuality, and argues that we are living in its aftermath.

In addition to readers attracted to media studies, this book will be of great interest to those involved in LGBT studies, feminism, and queer studies as well as students of contemporary media culture. The aim of the book is to demystify current media trends by providing an analysis of the recent past. Tomboys, Pretty Boys, and Outspoken Women is written for a large audience that extends beyond academia and embraces readers who have an interest in American pop culture and, in particular, the '70s.

WINNER OF FC2’S CATHERINE DOCTOROW INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE
 
Stories haunted by the remains of the industrial Midwest, the opioid epidemic, and the technology of war
 
Located somewhere in the rust belt in the early twenty-first century, residents of the town of Whispering Dolls dream of a fabled and illusory past, even as new technologies reshape their world into something different and deeply strange. Dolls walk down the streets, cradling their empty heads and letting the wind turn them into flutes. A politician heads to Washington, DC, and leaves a toxic underground plume in his wake. A woman eats car parts instead of confronting the children who have forgotten her. A young woman falls in love with the robot who took her job at the candy factory.
 
In The Town of Whispering Dolls, it is usually the grandmothers and the children who grieve. Feeling invisible, in the story “Here,” a woman who has buried her children looks up at the sky where commercial and military jets fly overhead and tries to express her rage to the rich and powerful: “Keep flying above us in your planes. From one coast to the other, keep right on flying over us! We test your bombs and your beloved warriors. Here. Right here. Look down.”

 

Tungsten is a rare ferrous metal whose ability to form molecular compounds with other elements has made it one of the essential elements in steelmaking, electronics, and various military technologies. This is the first comprehensive study of the use of tungsten and its role in modern technology, politics, and international trade. The book combines a detailed general overview of tungsten’s uses in science and technology with a history of tungsten mining in the U.S. and elsewhere; international competition for tungsten supplies, especially between the two world wars of the twentieth century; and the complex national and international politics involved in supporting and protecting the U.S. tungsten supply and tungsten-mining industry. Tungsten in Peace and War, 1918–1946 is a significant addition to the history of technology and a revelation of the complex role that tungsten and other critical metals play in national and international politics and in the world economy.

Contemporary war is as much a quest for decisive technological, organizational, and doctrinal superiority before the fighting starts as it is an effort to destroy enemy militaries during battle. Armed forces that are not actively fighting are instead actively reengineering themselves for success in the next fight and imagining what that next fight may look like. Twenty-First Century Military Innovation outlines the most theoretically important themes in contemporary warfare, especially as these appear in distinctive innovations that signal changes in states’ warfighting capacities and their political goals.

Marcus Schulzke examines eight case studies that illustrate the overall direction of military innovation and important underlying themes. He devotes three chapters to new weapons technologies (drones, cyberweapons, and nonlethal weapons), two chapters to changes in the composition of state military forces (private military contractors and special operations forces), and three chapters to strategic and tactical changes (targeted killing, population-centric counterinsurgency, and degradation). Each case study includes an accessible introduction to the topic area, an overview of the ongoing scholarly debates surrounding that topic, and the most important theoretical implications. An engaging overview of the themes that emerge with military innovation, this book will also attract readers interested in particular topic areas.