Critical Environments: Nature, Science, and Politics

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Making Our Beasts is an ethnography of science-in-action that uses a familiar topic—dinosaurs—to lead readers to understand science and its objects in new ways. Through fieldwork and interviews conducted at laboratories, dig sites, museums, and entertainment sites, Elana Shever explores vertebrate paleontology in the United States, showing how the practices of scientists and the materiality of fossils together shape the social world and also are shaped by it. The book foregrounds elements of scientific inquiry that have been sidelined: affect, touch, material agency, and the labor of volunteers, technicians, and other nonscientists. It also reveals how paleontology continues to be structured by race, gender, and colonialism.

Authors: Elana Shever

Format: Paperback

Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 9780520416727

Publication date: 20260321