Newly published: "Quantum Engagements" [30.01.2012]

Today, nanoscience and emerging technologies weave even more tightly into the social fabric. Grasping the question of engagement from the bottom-up, this volume considers our love affair with molecular technologies at the quantum level. It opens outward from minimal and local interactions with the molecular sciences and expands across the dimensions of history, public discourse, ecology and political economy. Refracting the social complexities of our high-tech world, the essays in this book participate in the project of articulating new modes of techno-scientific governance.

This volume contains a selection of the papers presented at the second Annual Conference of the Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies (S.NET) that took place in Darmstadt, September 29th to October 2nd, 2010. The first section of the book deals with the narration around nanotechnology, with its promises, rememberings, remedies and reframings. The second part is dedicated to the analysis of the concept of engagement as such in its distinctive valuations and its different forms of implementation. In the third part, dangerous relationships between technologies and the social world are disentagled, in particular in the form of negotiations, provocations and conceptual transformation in different governance regimes. Bringing together contributions and perspectives from experts in the social sciences, the humanities, and the natural sciences, this book offers an interdisciplinary attempt to disentangle the social embeddedness of new and emerging technologies as well as a depiction of the importance of different forms of engagement.
(Title information of publisher)

Bibliographic data:
Zülsdorf, T. B.; Coenen, Chr.; Ferrari, A.; Fiedeler, U.; Milburn, C.; Wienroth, M. (Hrsg.)
Quantum Engagements: Social reflections of nanoscience and emerging technologies. Heidelberg: AKA GmbH 2011. ISBN 978-3-89838-659-3, 257 p.
more about the book (german)