Alternative Pathways and Activist Scientists: Recommended Reading

Benjamin Cohen at The World's Fair has an excellent post up that should interest many readers of this blog. It is an interview with David Hess, author of Alternative Pathways in Science and Industry: Activism, Innovation, and the Environment in an Era of Globalization. Here's the intro, to tempt you to go read the whole post:

David Hess is a longtime leader in the field of STS. Like few scholars, this claim holds true by reference to academic leadership, mentoring, research, and community involvement. His past books, Science and Technology in a Multicultural World (Columbia University Press, 1995) and Science Studies: An Advanced Introduction (New York University Press, 1997), to name but two, reveal his deep-set analyses of science and technology in various social settings and his appeal to a range of scholars working to provide more thorough research on similar topics. In keeping with this, his newest book, Alternative Pathways in Science and Industry, at once brings together research in social movements and social movement theory with STS and offers a possible blueprint for future research about science, technology, and society. The back cover says it "explores the interaction of grassroots environmental action and mainstream industry and offers a conceptual framework for understanding it." But that's sort of a dense summary, so we decided to talk more about it.