Dear all, This publication may be of interest to list readers, especially the two chapters by Anita Chan and Morgan Ames on the XO laptop created by the One Laptop per Child program. The book has been structured so that each chapter stands alone and can be used for teaching. More information about the book is available at: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/beyond-imported-magic. Apologies for cross postings. Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology and Society in Latin America Edited by Eden Medina, Ivan da Costa Marques, and Christina Holmes Foreword by Marcos Cueto MIT Press, 2014, 396 pp. ISBN: 9780262526203 (paperback) Also available in hardback and Kindle Amazon URL: http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Magic-Science-Technology-Society/dp/0262526204/... The essays in this volume study the creation, adaptation, and use of science and technology in Latin America. They challenge the view that scientific ideas and technology travel unchanged from the global North to the global South -- the view of technology as "imported magic." They describe not only alternate pathways for innovation, invention, and discovery but also how ideas and technologies circulate in Latin American contexts and transnationally. The contributors’ explorations of these issues, and their examination of specific Latin American experiences with science and technology, offer a broader, more nuanced understanding of how science, technology, politics, and power interact in the past and present. The essays in this book use methods from history and the social sciences to investigate forms of local creation and use of technologies; the circulation of ideas, people, and artifacts in local and global networks; and hybrid technologies and forms of knowledge production. They address such topics as the work of female forensic geneticists in Colombia; the pioneering Argentinean use of fingerprinting technology in the late nineteenth century; the design, use, and meaning of the XO Laptops created and distributed by the One Laptop per Child Program; and the development of nuclear energy in Argentina, Mexico, and Chile. Contributors: Pedro Ignacio Alonso, Morgan G. Ames, Javiera Barandiarán, João Biehl, Anita Say Chan, Amy Cox Hall, Henrique Cukierman, Ana Delgado, Rafael Dias, Adriana Díaz del Castillo H., Mariano Fressoli, Jonathan Hagood, Christina Holmes, Matthieu Hubert, Noela Invernizzi, Michael Lemon, Ivan da Costa Marques, Gisela Mateos, Eden Medina, María Fernanda Olarte Sierra, Hugo Palmarola, Tania Pérez-Bustos, Julia Rodriguez, Israel Rodríguez-Giralt, Edna Suárez Díaz, Hernán Thomas, Manuel Tironi, Dominique Vinck Table of Contents 1 Introduction: Beyond Imported Magic// Eden Medina, Ivan da Costa Marques, and Christina Holmes SECTION I: Latin American Perspectives on Science, Technology, and Society 2 Who Invented Brazil? // Henrique Cukierman 3 Innovation and Inclusive Development in the South: A Critical Perspective // Mariano Fressoli, Rafael Dias, and Hernán Thomas 4 Working with Care: Experiences of Invisible Women Scientists Practicing Forensic Genetics in Colombia // Tania Pérez-Bustos, María Fernanda Olarte Sierra, and Adriana Díaz del Castillo H. 5 Ontological Politics and Latin American Local Knowledges // Ivan da Costa Marques 6 Technology in an Expanded Field: A Review of History of Technology Scholarship on Latin America in Select English-Language Journals // Michael Lemon and Eden Medina SECTION II: Local and Global Networks of Innovation 7 South Atlantic Crossings: Fingerprints, Science, and the State In Turn of the Twentieth Century Argentina // Julia Rodriguez 8 Tropical Assemblage: The Soviet Large Panel in Cuba // Hugo Palmarola and Pedro Alonso 9 Balancing Design: OLPC Engineers and ICT Translations at the Periphery // Anita Chan 10 Translating Magic: The Charisma of OLPC's XO Laptop in Paraguay // Morgan G. Ames 11 Nanoscience and Nanotechnology: How has an Emerging Area on the Scientific Agenda of the Core Countries been Adopted and Transformed in Latin America? // Noela Invernizzi, Matthieu Hubert, and Dominique Vinck 12 Latin America as Laboratory: The Camera and the Yale Peruvian Expeditions // Amy Cox Hall SECTION III: Science, Technology and Latin American Politics 13 Bottling Atomic Energy: Technology, Politics, and the State in Peronist Argentina // Jonathan Hagood 14 Peaceful Atoms in Mexico // Gisela Mateos and Edna Suárez Díaz 15 Neoliberalism as Political Technology: Expertise, Energy and Democracy in Chile // Manuel Tironi and Javiera Barandiarán 16 Creole Interferences: A Conflict on Biodiversity and Ownership in the South of Brazil // Ana Delgado and Israel Rodriguez-Giralt 17 The Juridical Hospital: Patient-Citizen-Consumers Claiming the Right to Health in Brazilian Courts // João Biehl Endorsements: At one level the term 'beyond imported magic' situates this collection as a contribution to the critique of the traditional North-South diffusionist stories of science and technology, but at another level the essays take the reader beyond the 'imported magic' of Northern theories of STS. By connecting us with the reflexive and critical voices of Latin American STS scholarship, this book is a great introduction to contemporary modes of rethinking STS from Latin American perspectives." -David J. Hess, Sociology, Vanderbilt University This astonishing collection provides for both science and technology studies and postcolonial students and scholars valuable new pathways for thinking and illuminatingly different conceptual approaches. These authors usher in a much-needed expansive era for historians, philosophers, sociologists, political theorists, and ethnographers of science as well as for readers in other fields. I can't wait to teach it. -Sandra Harding, Distinguished Professor, Departments of Education and Gender Studies, University of California, Los Angeles; Distinguished Affiliate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University; and author of Sciences from Below In this enchanting book, leading scholars conjure up surprising and gripping new configurations of science and technology in Latin America. These essays reveal brilliantly how local and regional histories haunt so-called global scientific projects. Beyond Imported Magic brings Latin America into contemporary conversations about what makes technoscience appear so worldly and cosmopolitan, even as it is experienced as situated and place-bound in practice. This book will cast a spell on anyone who wants to understand the multiple ways in which we try, and often fail, to be both modern and global. -Warwick Anderson, University of Sydney, author of The Collectors of Lost Souls This exciting and thought-provoking volume shows how analyzing Latin America through an STS lens allows us to peer more closely at known histories and uncover new and in some cases existing but understudied connections. Once we divest ourselves of outdated adjectives such as 'peripheral' to explain the role of Latin America in science we invariably begin to see the region as a center with a long history of scientific production and with the many complexities that this entails. By placing Latin America into longer narratives of (redefined or reemphasized) scientific research, the authors crucially demonstrate science as ever-present and not a relatively new, imported phenomena of the nineteenth/twentieth centuries. -Gabriela Soto Laveaga, author of Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill