Collection : Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge

Expertise is a new book series from Cornell University Press dedicated to publishing innovative scholarship situated at the vibrant juncture of the anthropology of knowledge, science and technology studies, and new media studies. The proliferation of new technologies across the world today is generating new forms of knowledge and techniques of knowing that are in turn transforming existing practices and institutions. Understanding these emerging cultures of expertise ranks among the most challenging and rewarding horizons of the human sciences. Expertise seeks to extend this horizon and to create new opportunities for conversation and collaboration. We seek theoretically sophisticated, historically attuned works of ethnography from anthropologists and other scholars.

The following is an illustrative but not exhaustive list of areas of research and scholarship that interest us:

•Professions, professionalism, and cultures of expertise
•Technocracy, bureaucratic practices, and institutions
•Expertise and authority in scientific, technical, and medical communities
•The diversification of digital media and information technologies and their cultural and political effects
•New media and information practices in contemporary political and social movements
•The intersection of religious and spiritual knowledge with scientific and secular knowledge
•Late liberal and neosocialist forms of political expertise, administration, and management
•Contemporary efforts to commodify knowledge and capitalist knowledge industries and economies
•Globalization, transnational ecologies of expertise, and circulating forms of knowledge and information

The series editor for Expertise is Dominic Boyer, Department of Anthropology Rice University (dcb2@rice.edu).