New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Lana Swartz, Associate Professor of Media Studies and Shannon Mid-Career at the University of Virginia, where she runs the Digital Cultures and Economies Lab. Swartz is a creative and wide-ranging thinker and researcher. The pair focuses on Swartz's book, New Money: How Payment Became social media, and talks about her recent work on youth money cultures and on the rich business and media dimensions of contemporary nail artists and salons.
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Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia
(Cornell University Press, 2026) uncovers colonial South Asia's
critical role in the development of forensic science. Around 1900, the
government of British India created a web of institutions for the
scientific detection of crime. Driven by anxieties about "native
mendacity," newly minted forensic analysts focused on uncovering faked
evidence planted by South Asians. These experts, joining toxicologists
known as "chemical examiners," were supposed to extract objective,
scientific truth in the service of British justice. But in trying to
counteract the presumed tendency of colonized peoples to lie, the system
enabled widespread misconduct by state experts, increasing the risk of
wrongful convictions of South Asian defendants. Through scrupulously
documented legal cases, Mitra Sharafi reveals that colonial dynamics put
special pressure on the relationship between truth and justice.
Examining falsity on both sides of the law through the use of testing to
(mis)identify poisons, blood, and spermatozoa, as well as debates over
adversarialism and inquisitorialism in the colonial courtroom, Fear of
the False explores advances in forensic science and shortcuts in
criminal procedure against the backdrop of colonial mistrust. Thanks
to generous funding from the University of Wisconsin Law School, the
ebook editions of this book are available as open access volumes through
the Cornell Open initiative.

Mitra Sharafi
is a legal historian whose research focuses on South Asia. She is the
Evjue-Bascom Professor of Law at University of Wisconsin-Madison and
currently serves as the president of the American Society for Legal
History. She has been the host of the South Asian Legal History Resources website since 2010.

Saumya Dadoo is a PhD candidate at Columbia University's Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS).
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Host Licia Cianetti talks to Venezuelan democracy activist and co-founder of the World Liberty Congress Leopoldo López. As part of PPP’s ongoing collaboration with the Journal of Democracy they discuss Leopoldo’s recent article on Democracy in an Age of Networked Control. They discuss the technological challenges that democracy activists worldwide face today, and how some activists are rethinking their use of technology to elude the infrastructure of control and create new infrastructures for freedom.

Guest:

Leopoldo López is a Venezuelan democracy activist and the cofounder of the World Liberty Congress, which is a global network that connects democracy advocates and leaders from across the world. From 2014 to 2020 he was imprisoned for leading peaceful protests and civil resistance against the regime of Nicolás Maduro. Currently he is a Fellow at the Wilson Center.

Presenter:

Licia Cianetti is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and Founding Deputy Director of CEDAR. She is the Principal Investigator of an upcoming research project on “Resisting Inter-Scalar Authoritarian Networks and Coalitions” (funded by the EU under Horizon Europe grant no. 101286676).

Transcript here

The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom.
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Despite decades of inflammatory rhetoric, the real risk of video games lies not in their violent imagery but in the ethical and political sensibilities they normalize. Video games reward speed, efficiency, control, and meritocratic mastery, training players to align with a technolibertarian worldview - one that celebrates individual will, technological power, and skepticism toward collective forms of governance. Rather than asking whether games produce violent individuals, we might more productively ask how they contribute to a commitment to radical capitalism and a belief in highly individualistic worldviews. In this unsettling work David Waddington traces the philosophical roots of technolibertarianism, founded on faith in technological progress and personal freedom. He identifies a darker turn in this thinking, animated by the ideals of Ayn Rand and her archetype of the "tech hero of capitalism." Many games, Waddington argues, invite players to inhabit this archetype, treating mastery, control, and relentless striving as moral virtues. While educational research often praises games for motivating students and fostering problem-solving, Waddington asks a deeper question: What kinds of people do games help us become? Drawing on Martin Heidegger and other thinkers, he explores whether gameplay expands human possibility or narrows it by habituating players to efficient yet restrictive systems. The Hidden Curriculum of Video Games (McGill-Queen's UP, 2026) critiques mainstream game design and educational technology, offering hopeful alternatives and examining reflective games that resist dominant gameplay logics. Written with clarity, passion, and philosophical depth, this thought-provoking work opens new horizons on technology, education, and the moral imagination of play.

Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the HNU University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, Germany, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal TITEL kulturmagazin for the game section, and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter Game Studies Watchlist.
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Aviationland: Heathrow and the Making of an Airport Landscape (Paul Mellon Centre, 2026) by Professor Mark Crinson is the first critical study to examine how a major international airport takes shape on the ground, and what that means for the landscape around it. Focused on Heathrow airport, it traces how the area has been formed and reformed by overlapping systems of architecture, infrastructure and enclosure, from the common land of Hounslow Heath in the eighteenth century to the global transport hub of the present day. 

The book explores the different forces that have shaped the airport’s environment: the remaking of landforms, the design of terminal buildings, and the surrounding sprawl of hotels, schools, factories, and business parks. At the same time, it shows how the Heathrow area has been moulded by wider shifts in energy, mobility, and the economy, and how the airport has in turn left a lasting mark on its surroundings, both materially and ecologically.

Drawing on previously unpublished material, Aviationland includes close studies of key sites, as well as figures who shaped how we see the airport today, including Richard Rogers, Patrick Abercrombie, and J. G. Ballard. Bringing together architectural, landscape, and infrastructural histories that are seldom read in tandem, this volume makes the case for Heathrow as a distinctively modern landscape. The result is a nuanced account of how local places become entangled within global systems, and what happens when they do.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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