Matthew Weinstein Libros

"What is the cultural politics of science, health, and disease in the U.S.? Bodies Out of Control explores this question through a series of case studies. From its in-depth examination of the discussions of sickle-cell anemia, schistosomiasis, and cancer in middle school and high school textbooks to its analysis of the news coverage of the anthrax attacks of 2001, the book reveals the entanglements of science, colonialism, nationalism, and identity. The book also explores how the meaning of science itself is worked through in public discourses, offering alternatively medical salvation, confusion, and a vision of a world without pleasure. Finally, to explore what agency and a critical practice of engaging science in classrooms and elsewhere might look like, the book turns to the writings of politicized human research subjects, which demonstrate a spectrum of possibilities for more democratic engagements with science. As a whole, the book emphasizes the importance of engaging texts critically in science education and the ways that the cultural politics of science works through images of human and institutional bodies in and out of control."--Publisher's description.

How do goals of education and entertainment conflict in popularizations of science? In schools? Robot World explores these questions through a case study of a hands-on science museum/theme park in a tourist center in the upper Midwestern United States. Mixing ethnography, autobiography, and science fiction, this book examines science's public cultures. In unraveling this dual interest of education and entertainment, it looks at how the association of wonder and science works ideologically. It explores how the technologies in the museum become props in specific racial and gender identity formations, and it examines the experiences of the body in the hands-on museum as the ultimate science lesson.