This month is filled with a wide range of topics including music, education, video games, computational neuroscience, and many more. Here are the new academic books published in September by the MIT Press.
By Marcus Kaiser
An up-to-date overview of the field of connectomics, introducing concepts and mechanisms underlying brain network change at different stages.
“From the wiring diagram of the worm nervous system through to the game-changing potential of big data and AI, the author clearly lays out basic principles and thoughtfully guides the reader through cutting-edge discoveries and future applications of the exploding science of brain connectomics.”—Heidi Johansen-Berg, University of Oxford; author of Diffusion MRI
By Ursula Klein
The relationship of the current technosciences and the older engineering sciences, examined through the history of the “useful” sciences in Prussia.
“Technoscience in History imaginatively explores the role of useful sciences in Prussia’s knowledge economy. It recasts several canonical historical narratives: of industrialization, state expertise, and even Berlin University’s founding. It adds incredible historical depth to Bruno Latour’s Science in Action.” —Kathryn Olesko, Associate Professor, George Washington University
By Michael Truscello
How “drowned town” literature, road movies, energy landscape photography, and “death train” narratives represent the brutality of industrial infrastructures.
“Infrastructural Brutalism is a provocative and radical contribution to contemporary infrastructure studies. Truscello’s work here is erudite, inventive, and politically charged. My scholar’s brain is buzzing, and my activist’s heart is pumping.”—Darin Barney, Grierson Chair in Communication Studies, McGill University; author of The Network Society
Edited by Miller Puckette and Kerry L. Hagan
A collection that goes beyond the canon to analyze influential yet under-examined works of electronic music.
Researching Internet Governance
Edited by Laura DeNardis, Derrick Cogburn, Nanette S. Levinson and Francesca Musiani
A multidisciplinary book that takes internet governance research as a research subject in its own right, discussing methods and conceptual approaches.
OPEN ACCESS AVAILABLE
The Manifesto for Teaching Online
By Siân Bayne, Peter Evans, Rory Ewins, Jeremy Knox, James Lamb, Hamish Macleod, Clara O’Shea, Jen Ross, Philippa Sheail and Christine Sinclair
An update to a provocative manifesto intended to serve as a platform for debate and as a resource and inspiration for those teaching in online environments.
By Yusuke Kubota and Robert D. Levine
A novel logic-based framework for representing the syntax–semantics interface of natural language, applicable to a range of phenomena.
OPEN ACCESS AVAILABLE
A comprehensive overview of the semantics and syntax of indexical shift that develops a constrained typology of the phenomenon across languages.
By Kate Pahl and Jennifer Rowsell
An approach to literacy that understands it as lived and experienced in the everyday across varied spaces and populations.
“Living Literacies stretches readers to rethink how they conceptualize literacies and the potentials of literacies. The authors use active verbs to thread the chapters together—literacies as seeing, disrupting, hoping, knowing, creating, and making. This writerly move positions literacies not only as nouns but also verbs, active and alive in our daily relationships with and in the world.”—Candace R. Kuby, Associate Professor and Department Chair of Learning, Teaching, and Curriculum, University of Missouri; co-author of Go Be A Writer!
By Paul Morrow
The first general theory of the influence of norms—moral, legal and social—on genocide and mass atrocity.
“An extraordinary work, original and compelling in the analysis of mass killing: its causal origins and means together with the prospects of intervention and prevention. Morrow brings together philosophy, social theory, and legal history in a conceptual and, more unusually, practical confrontation with a terrible but recurrent feature of human conduct.”
Peer Pedagogies on Digital Platforms
How a popular entertainment genre on YouTube—Let’s Play videos created by Minecraft players—offers opportunities for children to learn from their peers.
“Michael Dezuanni’s in-depth analysis of the players and hosts of YouTube Minecraft channels illustrates that playing isn’t just about learning the game but also about learning to participate within massive online communities.”—Yasmin B. Kafai, Lori and Michael Milken President’s Distinguished Professor, University of Pennsylvania
By Timothy Moss
An examination of Berlin’s turbulent history through the lens of its water and energy infrastructures.
“This extraordinary book sets new standards for the study of urban infrastructure. With his meticulous combination of archival sources with insights derived from urban history, science and technology studies, and many other fields, Tim Moss has produced an exemplary addition to the literature on Berlin, and on modernity more generally.” —Matthew Gandy, Professor of Geography, University of Cambridge