New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

In Disaster Nationalism: Tsunami and Civil War in Sri Lanka (Duke UP, 2025), Vivian Y. Choi examines how the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami fostered new forms of governance and militarization during Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war that led to enduring forms of precarity and insecurity. Tracing the development of disaster management projects following the tsunami, Choi demonstrates how these projects rest on a logic that treats natural disasters and terrorism as inevitable risks in need of management. The tsunami’s destruction foreclosed the possibility of political resolution to the war, as the state leveraged these projects to justify its militarized aggression in the war against the Tamil Tigers and a new construction of the Sri Lankan nation. Choi reveals how, paradoxically, state-sponsored disaster management projects—from new buffer and border zones to early warning systems—created more insecurity. Choi amplifies the experiences of those affected by the tsunami, particularly Tamil and Muslim communities. In so doing, Choi shows how life perseveres against perpetual uncertainty and danger—caused by natural disasters and state-sanctioned violence alike.

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Will artificial intelligence soon be fighting our wars for us? Could a machine ever command an army? Anthony King is skeptical. In AI, Automation, and War: The Rise of a Military-Tech Complex (Princeton University Press, 2025), he argues that AI is changing war less by replacing soldiers than by bringing civilian tech experts into the headquarters where wars are run.
The conversation begins with how the September 11 attacks turned King toward war, and with his quarter-century of tracing changes in warfare. Then, drawing on 126 interviews across the United States, Britain, and Israel, King explains why AI can be intelligent without being an agent. King takes us inside his research, from Palantir's London office to confidential interviews with Israeli officers. He also previews his next project, a five-year, EU-funded study of the teams forming around AI software in military headquarters.
The machines are not taking over, King insists. Whether that is reassuring depends on how much we trust the humans still in charge.
Our guest is Anthony King, Professor of War Studies and Director of the Strategy and Security Institute at the University of Exeter.
Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah chats with Dr. Priyanka Bose. Priyanka is a lecturer in English Literacy Education at the School of Education at Western Sydney University, Australia and winner of the 2026 Michael Clyne Prize for outstanding postgraduate research into immigrant bilingualism and language contact.
Tazin and Priyanka talk about Priyanka’s research into heritage language maintenance amongst Bengali speakers in Australia and how emotions play a decisive role in sustaining heritage language use via digital means. Their conversation about Bengali transnational families explores how grandparents and grandchildren use all the resources in their linguistic repertoire in combination with the affordances of digital mediums to communicate in and maintain Bengali. In these exchanges, emotional factors play a crucial role, setting the scene for the continued use of Bengali between generations.
Reference
Bose, P., Starfield, S., & Perera, N. (2025). ‘Ōlē bābālē!!!’ – Exploring emotions and digital language practices in family language policy among Bengali transnational families: A multimodal approach. International Journal of Bilingualism, 13670069251336173. DOI here
For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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At a time when artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and digital technologies increasingly shape our understanding of what it means to be human, Fuchs argues that we need to recover a richer conception of the human person. Rather than viewing ourselves as information-processing systems or collections of neural mechanisms, he develops a philosophical vision centred on embodiment, relationality, and lived experience. The result is a compelling defence of human agency, dignity, and freedom against contemporary forms of reductionism and transhumanism.
Today we'll be discussing In Defence of the Human Being: Foundational Questions of an Embodied Anthropology (Oxford UP, 2021). We discuss central arguments and their implications for philosophy, psychiatry, technology, and the future of human self-understanding.
Prof. Thomas Fuchs holds the Karl Jaspers Professorship for Philosophical Foundations of Psychiatry and is head of the section “Phenomenological Psychopathology and Psychotherapy” at Heidelberg University Psychiatric Hospital. He is also coordinator of the Marsilius Project “Embodiment as a Paradigm of an Evolutionary Cultural Anthropology” as well as research unit leader of the Karl Jaspers Edition. His main scientific interests include phenomenological anthropology and psychopathology on the one hand, and the theory and ethics of psychiatry and neuroscience on the other.
Dr. Anya Daly is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics in the School of Arts and Society, University of Tasmania. Interdisciplinary collaborations are at the core of Anya’s research interests. She investigates the intersections of phenomenology with philosophy of mind, the philosophy of perception, the philosophy of psychiatry, embodied and social cognition, enactivism, ethics, aesthetics and Buddhist Philosophy.

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How AI is rewiring our social fabric—and how we can better shape our future.

The age of AI is not what you think. Rather than ushering in a fourth Industrial Revolution, AI has become a crucial social infrastructure of everyday life. It's embedded in the tools, platforms, and systems that organize our most intimate lives and our interactions with the most fundamental institutions of society, from government agencies to banks and schools. In these linkages are embedded assumptions about who we are, what we can do, and where we belong.

In Predicted: How AI Is Restructuring Social Life (U California Press, 2026), Mona Sloane offers a pragmatic framework for understanding these transformations around prediction, classification, and linearity, proposing that we think about AI as a social arrangement that we coproduce. Drawing on over a decade of empirical research and real-world examples, this book invites us to see AI for what it is: deeply social, deeply political, and open to change. Clear-eyed and provocative, Predicted is a call to reclaim deliberations about progress and innovation as a public good and to ensure that the futures we chart are the ones we choose—together.

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