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67 books match the query 'Technology Studies' and 3 start with l

cover of Labs of Our Own: Feminist Tinkerings with Science

Labs of Our Own

Feminist Tinkerings with Science

Sig / Sara Giordano

Rutgers University Press, 2025

From climate change to COVID-19 to reproductive justice, there has been deep political polarization around science. Labs of Our Own provides a unique entry point into these twenty-first-century science wars by focusing on our affective relationships to science. The book delves into various sites where scientists, teachers, artists, and activists claim to create more democratic access to science—from DIY biology community labs to feminist classrooms to activist science practitioners. The reader will find that these claims for and attempts at democratic sciences not only impact what counts as science and who counts as a scientist but reconfigure who is included in the proper public. Instead of arguing for a knee-jerk defense of science against right-wing attacks, Labs of Our Own builds the case for a feminist, antiracist, decolonial, queer science tinkering practice that intentionally, politically, and ethically acts to produce new challenges to the definition and boundaries of the human.
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cover of Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism

Language Machines

Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism

Leif Weatherby

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

How generative AI systems capture a core function of language

Looking at the emergence of generative AI, Language Machines presents a new theory of meaning in language and computation, arguing that humanistic scholarship misconstrues how large language models (LLMs) function. Seeing LLMs as a convergence of computation and language, Leif Weatherby contends that AI does not simulate cognition, as widely believed, but rather creates culture. This evolution in language, he finds, is one that we are ill-prepared to evaluate, as what he terms “remainder humanism” counterproductively divides the human from the machine without drawing on established theories of representation that include both.

 

To determine the consequences of using AI for language generation, Weatherby reads linguistic theory in conjunction with the algorithmic architecture of LLMs. He finds that generative AI captures the ways in which language is at first complex, cultural, and poetic, and only later referential, functional, and cognitive. This process is the semiotic hinge on which an emergent AI culture depends. Weatherby calls for a “general poetics” of computational cultural forms under the formal conditions of the algorithmic reproducibility of language.

 

Locating the output of LLMs on a spectrum from poetry to ideology, Language Machines concludes that literary theory must be the backbone of a new rhetorical training for our linguistic-computational culture.

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cover of Livestreaming: An Aesthetics and Ethics of Technical Encounter

Livestreaming

An Aesthetics and Ethics of Technical Encounter

EL Putnam

University of Minnesota Press, 2024

An inquiry into how livestreaming can help us meaningfully connect

Livestreaming is ubiquitous in our Covid-19-inflected era. In this book, EL Putnam takes up the implications of this technology, arguing that livestreamed internet broadcasts perform aesthetic and ethical encounters that invite distinctive means of relating to others. Treating humans and technologies as inherently relational, Putnam considers how livestreaming constitutes new patterns of being together that are complex, ambivalent, and transformative. Understood in such a way, we see how livestreaming exceeds quantifying and calculating metrics, challenges emphasis on content generation, and introduces an entirely new—and dynamic—means of social engagement.

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