Annual report (to April 2024)

We are pleased to be able to release our annual report and accounts for the financial year that ended in April 2024. This details the work of the press during the period. We expect to release our next annual report by the end of June 2025.

Annual report: April 6th 2023 – April 5th 2024

Mattering Press books wins the 2024 Freeman Award

We had an absolutely fantastic time in Amsterdam at the EASST/4S conference, hosted at VU Amsterdam. We will provide a fuller update later, but wanted to add a note to congratulate Democratic Situations which we were very pleased to see pick up the 2024 Freeman Award!

Many congratulations to the book’s editors, Andreas Birkbak and Irina Papazu, as well as all the contributing authors.

Three people stand on a stage, with an projected image behind them with the front cover of Democratic Situations highlighted, and the title "Chris Freeman Award 2024"

Mattering Press is a UK registered charity led by STS scholars who give their time to the press for free. Donations and purchases of hard copies of our books help fund our work.

Our full catalogue is shown below.

    Coming soon! Predictions (Volume 1/3)

    From speculative ethnography to apocalyptic testimony

    Edited by Mél Hogan, Stefan Laser and Edward Ongweso Jr. Chapter authors: Blair Attard-Frost, Casper Bruun Jensen, Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Mél Hogan, Cymene Howe, Tung-Hui Hu, Jacqueline Jenkins, Baldeep Kaur, Stefan Laser, Sebastián Lehuedé, Esben Lorentzen, Steven Gonzalez Monserrate, Naomi Okabe, Edward Ongweso Jr., Anne Pasek, Estrid Sørensen, Nicole Starosielski, Laura Watts

    We are living through times of incredible social and political unrest, confronted by the rise of fascism, genocidal wars, the looming spectre of nuclear attack, climate catastrophes, the near-certainty of a new pandemic, and tech failures that do nothing but enrich the very, very few. Promising future gains and revolutions has become the main advertising…Read more

    Coming soon! Homo Textor

    Weaving as a (Technical) Mode of Existence

    Edited by Ellen Harlizius-Klück Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Julian Rohrhuber, Giovanni Fanfani, Anthony Tuck, Cole Reilly, Cinzia Presti, Joseph Capozzi, Lars Hallnäs, Kalliope Sarri, Adeline Grand-Clément, Annapurna Mamidipudi, Denise Y. Arnold, Ebru Kurbak, Alex McLean, Caroline Radcliffe, Victoria Mitchell, David Griffiths

    Homo Textor examines how weaving as a technical mode of existence constitutes conceptual challenges to Homo faber and the way the Moderns (as described by Latour) talk about technology. Contradiction a hylomorphic schema where an actor gives form to matter, the characteristic weaving mode is histomorphic – referring to a generative process where intelligible forms…Read more

    Technoscientific Globalisation from Below

    Edited by Mathieu Quet, Koichi Kameda, Jessica Pourraz and Yves-Marie Rault-Chodankar

    Across eleven varied and lively chapters, Technoscientific Globalisation from Below provides fresh perspectives on how global asymmetries in wealth and resources stimulate technological innovation across the Global South. Readers with an interest in STS, globalisation and development studies will be inspired by these essays that demonstrate how the imaginative reappropriation of technologies to suit local…Read more

    The Ethnographic Case (2nd Edition)

    Edited by Emily Yates-Doerr and Christine Labuski

    The 1st Edition of The Ethnographic Case, published in 2017, was an experiment in post-publication peer review, with the book published online and open to comments from readers. In this new 2nd edition, the editors and authors have updated the text, both in response to these comments and taking into account changing contexts in the…Read more

    Democratic Situations

    Edited by Andreas Birkbak and Irina Papazu

    Democratic Situations challenges researchers and students in Science & Technology Studies and related fields to treat democracy as an empirical phenomenon. This means leaving behind off-the-shelf theoretical notions of democracy that may have travelled into STS unexamined. The alternative strategy pursued in this volume is to pay as much analytical attention to the study of democratic politics…Read more

    Concealing for Freedom

    The Making of Encryption, Secure Messaging and Digital Liberties

    Ksenia Ermoshina and Francesca Musiani (Foreword by Laura DeNardis)

    Concealing for Freedom: The Making of Encryption, Secure Messaging and Digital Liberties sets out to explore one of the core battlegrounds of Internet governance: the encryption of online communications. Current debates around encryption have fundamental implications for our individual liberties and collective presence on the Internet. Encryption of communications at scale and in increasingly usable…Read more

    Engineering the Climate

    Science, Politics, and Visions of Control

    Julia Schubert

    This book unpacks the turbulent trajectory of one of the most contested techno-political projects of our time: the idea to deliberately alter, to engineer, the earth’s climate to counteract global warming. As the text follows the emergence of this controversial project from the turn of the twentieth century to the teens of the new millennium, we learn how historically specific versions of what we now refer to as climate engineering have continuously linked scientific to political agendas. By disentangling the various threads of scientific inquiry and policymaking that have brought us to the present point, the book challenges us to fundamentally rethink our understanding of the relationship between science and politics.

    With Microbes

    Edited by Charlotte Brives, Matthäus Rest and Salla Sariola

    With Microbes front cover

    Without microbes, no other forms of life would be possible. But what does it mean to be with microbes? In this book, 24 contributors attune to microbes and describe their multiple relationships with humans and others. Ethnographic explorations with fermented foods, waste, faecal matter, immunity, antimicrobial resistance, phages, as well as indigenous and scientific understandings of microbes challenge ideas of them being simple entities: not just pathogenic foes, old friends or good fermentation minions, but much more. Following various entanglements, the book tells how these relations transform both humans and microbes in the process.

    Environmental Alterities

    Edited by Cristóbal Bonelli and Antonia Walford

    In the context of accelerating environmental crises and exhausted intellectual paradigms, this book asks what comes after ‘after nature’. Instead of demanding new models and approaches, it invites its readers to look to the endpoints and failures of what is already known, in order to generate alternative forms of ethical engagement with worlds both on this planet, and beyond it. Drawing together scholarship from across science and technology studies, philosophy, and anthropology and bringing it into conversation with rich ethnographic and empirical material, the book asks how we might potentialise the contradictions and oppositions of critical social scientific thinking in order to develop a mode of paradoxical engagement that is in constant movement between knowledge and its edges, practices and their limits, and which allows us to relate to that which is excessive to relations and relationality.

    Sensing In/Security

    Sensors as Transnational Security Infrastructures

    Edited by Nina Klimburg-Witjes, Nikolaus Poechhacker & Geoffrey C. Bowker

    Overview Sensing In/Security: Sensors as Transnational Security Infrastructures investigates how sensors and sensing practices enact regimes of security and insecurity. It extends long-standing concerns with infrastructuring to emergent modes of surveillance and control by exploring how digitally networked sensors shape securitisation practices. Contributions in this volume examine how sensing devices gain political and epistemic relevance in…Read more