Indignity: A Life Reimagined. Lea Ypi. Allen Lane. 2025.

When Lea Ypi, a professor at the London School of Economics, published her award-winning memoir, Free, it sparked numerous positive reactions around the world. Free was in virtually every library imaginable, translated into more than thirty languages, and was reviewed and praised extensively in dozens of formal outlets. Fast forward to September 2025, Ypi has written yet another fascinating book – Indignity: A Life Reimagined. 

The relationship between fact and fiction 

In an email exchange we had in 2022 after I reviewed her first book, adamant about our collective need to study history if we are to make sense of the world, Ypi described her next work as being “about the relationship between fact and fiction.” This remark stayed with me. Perhaps, I thought, it could respond to the venomous rhetoric within certain Albanian circles that discredited Free for minor historical inaccuracies. Contrasting with the international response to Free, the book’s reception in Albania framed Ypi as an apologist for communist dictatorship. Ypi’s academic background also puzzled many Albanian readers who wondered how a prominent academic could fail to produce what they expected: an “objective” and rigorously historical account. However, this was never Ypi’s intention: Free was, explicitly, a highly subjective and personal memoir. 

Indignity: A Life Reimagined opens with a photograph of Ypi’s grandparents, Leman (Leskoviku) and Asllan Ypi, taken during their honeymoon in the Italian Alps in 1941. When this black-and-white photograph was posted on the internet by a random user, it went viral across Albania and prompted a wave of accusatory comments towards Leman, who had passed away almost twenty years earlier and was unable to defend herself. 

Confronted with this posthumous indignity, Ypi decided to respond to this emotionally charged trolling both as Leman’s granddaughter and as the researcher she is. Her journey thus began in the Authority for Information of Former State Security Documents, a state institution covering the years of Albanian dictatorship. When asked about the reasons behind her visit during her taxi ride to the Sigurimi archive, Ypi (8) admitted to being uncertain why she was doing any of this: to rescue her grandmother Leman from the trolls, to ease her own guilt over the fact that her great-grandfather, Xhafer Ypi, had briefly led fascist Albania, or, perhaps, to write a book that examines a country’s history through the lens of individual people’s lives? 

Ottoman collapse and the rise of nation states

From here, Indignity (re)traces the life of Ypi’s grandmother, Leman. Born in Salonica, Leman’s story begins against the backdrop of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Questions of identification were especially pertinent in this context, as overlapping identities and multi-ethnic coexistence gave way to new nationalising states. Leman found herself in a new socio-political context where nationalism became a way of aligning political and cultural units. The collapse of the imperial order displaced communities, increased suspicion towards cosmopolitan pasts, and pressured people to conform to newly minted national categories. This first section of the book can thus be read within the broader nationalist momentum sweeping Europe.  

This sets the stage for the second part when Leman, known as “the Albanian” in Greece, moves from the cosmopolitan milieu of Salonica to Tirana, Albania’s capital and the symbolic centre of the newly established nation-state. Considering that Leman had moved to Albania during the interwar period, Ypi often notes the confusing archival references to her grandmother as “the Greek”. This aptly depicts the bitterly ironic dynamic that, although borders promised stronger identity, they often delivered the opposite. Leman was Albanian in Greece, and Greek in Albania – a life lived under the “indignity” of never fully belonging. However, Leman settled in Albania and lived there throughout the turbulent events of the 20th century that culminated with Enver Hoxha’s Stalinist dictatorship. She married Asllan Ypi, had a son, Zafo, and endured nearly fifteen years before Asllan’s release from prison. Asllan (Ypi’s grandfather, whom she never met) was imprisoned due to his alleged contacts with foreigners and, by extension, disloyalty to the Albanian state. This would have immense consequences for Leman and her Zafo (Ypi’s father). 

Living and remembering under authoritarianism

The epicentre of the book, however, is neither the story of Ypi’s grandmother nor her family’s relationship to the broader socio-political events of the 20th century. Indignity’s power lies in the deft way it moves between what is factually true yet narratively trivial, and what is narratively powerful but not verifiably true. One of the book’s key contributions is a literary one: its focus on not only what, but how we remember.  

The book illuminates the ways in which this interacting ‘what’ and ‘how’ are made complicated for those attempting to preserve a sense of self, agency and moral integrity under the indignity of authoritarian brutality.

The “what” of memory gives us facts, but the “how” of memory governs interpretation, transmission, and moral weight. More than this, the book illuminates the ways in which this interacting “what” and “how” are made complicated for those attempting to preserve a sense of self, agency and moral integrity under the indignity of authoritarian brutality. History is thus never neutral data; it is “how” we remember that sustains communities, legitimises power, or enables resistance. 

The role and limits of the archive

The book’s second key contribution is methodological, relating to a revelation that she becomes aware of late on in her research. This incident casts doubt on the question of whether and under what conditions we trust an archive unreservedly. As Ypi puts it, “[f]acts can only be reliable if one trusts the mechanisms through which they are transmitted, if error is no longer possible” (335). 

It is precisely through this merging of fact and fiction that Indignity demonstrates how all history, however rigorously pursued, is ultimately a form of narrative.

This particular experience with the archival records led Ypi to become part of a broader scholarly and literary circle that offers a degree of hybridity between conventional history and memoir. Ypi’s methods thus are comparable to Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “critical fabulation” in Black Atlantic studies, or W. G. Sebald’s fragmentary essayistic style that accentuates the unreliable nature of memory. Ypi’s work is also comparable to the Nobel Prize winner, Svetlana Alexievich, whose books challenge systems of power while giving dignity to individual voices.  

The use of narrative invention can thus be seen as an ethical attempt to give voice to what is often left unsaid. This methodological choice, among others, exposes that Ypi, the author and academic, is also against a positivistic notion of history that has shaped the Western tradition. In its slippage between archive and imagination, Indignity too attempts to protect the dignity of those whose stories exist only in arbitrary historical records. It is precisely through this merging of fact and fiction that Indignity demonstrates how all history, however rigorously pursued, is ultimately a form of narrative.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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The Next Crisis: What We Think About the Future. Danny Dorling. Verso. 2025.

Your book examines monthly Ipsos survey data on what people in different countries are most worried about. Why do you think it’s worth understanding and interrogating what issues people are concerned about?

I think people’s opinions really matter. At the start of the book I look at what experts at Davos claim as the biggest risks and crises in their annual Global Risks Report, and they’re not any better than the general public at coming up with risks that that actually materialise. Through the monthly What Worries the World surveys conducted by Ipsos, people are asked questions about what they care and worry most about. We should at least look at what they say. And what they say makes sense to me.

How did you arrive at the methodology and structure of the book?

I tried to work out a way of ranking and ordering the many crises people are concerned about. I decided to look at survey data on people’s worries, because a crisis in many ways is whatever it is that you fear. When there were still very large numbers of people worried about going to Hell, that was the crisis, and if you’re trying to understand human behaviour in Europe and other parts of the world a few 100 years ago, understanding that matters.

You group together different concerns in the chapters, for example, in chapter two on what you call the top crisis, you’re looking at a combination of concerns: poverty, inequality, and the cost of living.

That’s the most arbitrary part of the book in a way. In the Ipsos surveys, which form the main body of data for the book, people are asked about 18 questions, which was too many to grapple with individually in my book, and many of them are not issues that many people concern themselves about. I wanted to include the climate crisis – it’s only 8th in the Ipsos survey by 2024 – and I wanted to narrow the main chapters down to six, plus an introduction and conclusion.

Because the cost-of-living crisis is relatively recent, and because it’s so linked to inequality and poverty, I put those together. Immigration is usually a relatively low crisis in most countries in the world, but it can suddenly come up as an issue. It’s so linked to unemployment: why people leave places without opportunities to look for work, and fears people have about immigrants taking their jobs and opportunities away from them.

Stoking fear about immigration is also very useful for diverting attention away from who is actually taking all the money. Take somewhere like Hungary. Orban uses fear of migrants coming, particularly from the east, to keep his power, to keep people afraid.

On this topic, one of the things you mention in the book is that despite claims by politicians and some media about immigrants taking jobs, and the public’s concern around this, it doesn’t bear out in reality.

It doesn’t bear out at all. It’s quite incredible that it’s still put forward as a suggestion. But there’s a playbook about how you how you scare people an influx of people that are about to come across your borders, or that or that they’re all around you and you can’t quite see them. And having a go at these other people has frequently been used by politicians, particularly on the right, but now often across the board, as a way of claiming they’re doing something about your problems. The reality is that when people turn up in a place, it creates employment booms for the people who are already there, and for other people. The worst thing that happens to places is when nobody arrives.

Stoking fear about immigration is also very useful for diverting attention away from who is actually taking all the money. Take somewhere like Hungary. Orban uses fear of migrants coming, particularly from the east, to keep his power, to keep people afraid. Trump does the same thing. Stable societies do it least, or sometimes not at all. Finland, for instance, celebrates the arrival of immigrants, but it’s got a fertility rate of 1.3 – low, like in most European countries. It’s “game over” without immigration for low fertility countries economically.

Let’s talk about the Finns, because in chapter five you discuss the happiest countries, and Finland has topped this poll for the last eight years. Why are Finns so happy? You mention low inequality as a factor.

Yeah, that’s definitely there as one of the key factors behind societal happiness. I wrote a piece in The Conversation in 2023 showing the correlation internationally between low inequality and happiness, which applies in Finland, but is found across the board.

The wording of the question could have something to do with it too: the international question is “how happy are you on a scale from 0 to 10, all things considered,” and culturally, Finns are very good at considering. The more you actually so consider all things, and how bad they could be, you’re more likely to rank yourself higher in terms of happiness. That may be why Finland, initially at least, ended up edging over some of the other countries at the very top, places like Norway and Denmark which are equally equal. It could also be that now they’d like to stay in the habit of ranking above their neighbours.

Finland was once one of the poorest places in Europe with very high emigration rates. It has achieved its contemporary prosperity without exploiting others much, without an empire of any kind, without oil, which partly explains why Finns can be quite self-satisfied or patriotic about these achievements. Finland has also avoided the Russians invading, and that’s an ever-present and very realistic fear – so all things considered, why not be happy there?

[In France] there is consistently high concern about equality which you can date back to the revolution. There is a sense that France should be a fairly equal country, and if it isn’t, something’s going wrong.

France, on the other hand, is not so high on the happiness list – 27th in 2024, despite being much more equal than most other countries in Europe. What accounts for this?

There are often particular historical reasons why a country is slightly happier or less happy than you’d expect. South Africa is happier than it ought to be, but it’s down to the aftermath of getting rid of apartheid, the celebration of that achievement.

There’s a stereotype of the French being a bit less sanguine than their counterparts in other nearby European countries, a bit less likely to say that things are wonderful. I think one of the reasons why France is the most equal of large countries is because there is consistently high concern about equality which you can date back to the revolution. There is a sense that France should be a fairly equal country, and if it isn’t, something’s going wrong. Whereas the in the UK, some of us – and especially many of those that rule us – feel we ought to be unequal, and that’s what we are. You can see something similar in Spain and Italy, where inequality is seen as more normal, whereas Germany is much more like France.

You also mention India and the US, where inequality doesn’t feature very high as a concern, you say, because people are used to inequality.

Inequality is definitely engrained in the US. If you ask a standard survey question like, “should children have warm winter coats?” you’ll much more often than elsewhere get the answer, “only if their parents can afford it”. People have been conditioned not to think about others as being like them.

India is also very unequal, and it traditionally had the caste system, which the British exploited for their own advantage, this idea of certain people in society being more deserving of power and wealth than others. Narendra Modi, despite a slight decline in his popularity recently, is still extremely popular and India has the highest government approval rating worldwide. It’s a propaganda win, and this is despite the fact that life expectancy in India dropped by four years during the pandemic three of which are not due to COVID. By March of 2021 there had been 228,000 extra child and maternal deaths due to COVID-disrupted healthcare were reported across South Asia. The only other country that rivals India for how badly handled the pandemic is Russia, which also a four-year drop in life expectancy since the pandemic. The invasion of Ukraine was perfect timing to stop people in Russia looking at what was happening in Russia.

All the work [climate adaptation] would require becomes much harder if you’re allowing a few people to amass the vast amount of money, which they often do through things that create emissions

On the climate crisis, you’ve mentioned it doesn’t rank as highly in the Ipsos surveys as the more bread-and-butter issues. But you do say in the book that adapting to the climate crisis will require reducing income inequality. Why do you make that claim?

Global interest in the climate crisis is definitely dropping. It’s a case of crying wolf so much, “12 years to save the Earth”, that kind of thing. After you’ve had enough of that, and you’ve got a memory of it, it begins to lose its urgency.

There is a big problem in that the climate crisis is perceived as the biggest worry of the well-meaning very rich, partly because they don’t have other things to worry about and they want to be useful. But they don’t necessarily not want to be rich, so worrying about climate is something they can do. We’ve absolutely got to get carbon down, but we’re certainly going to have to adapt because it seems certain that global average temperatures will rise by 1.5, much more likely by two degrees.

The realisation that inequality, poverty and cost of living are our biggest issue is not something we knew 20 years ago. People are beginning to get it.

In theory, if you’re incredibly well-coordinated, you can give up some coastal cities, move populations northward. But we’re not very good at being coordinated as a species. Furthermore, all the work it would require becomes much harder if you’re allowing a few people to amass the vast amount of money, which they often do through things that create emissions, like high-tech products which involve huge amounts of energy to run so many computer servers. It’s also this group of wealth elite who pollute most through what they consume. Until you curtail at the top, it’s very hard to ask other people to change what they’re doing. Recent climate books like Tony Juniper’s Just Earth: How a Fairer World Will Save the Planet cite inequality as the key to addressing the climate crisis.

How optimistic or pessimistic are you that there will be significant inequality reduction in the next decade?

I’m quite optimistic, partly because in most countries in, say, Europe, it’s already happening. Even in the UK since 2018, it’s begun, income inequality has been falling there for seven years. We’ve brought down the inequalities before, around the world, which means we can do it again. The realisation that inequality, poverty and cost of living are our biggest issue is not something we knew 20 years ago. People are beginning to get it. They are now worrying about how much the rich have and the gaps between people, that is what we’re beginning to see right across the world in surveys. Something has got through. The question is, how can you go from the population beginning to realise that what’s making their lives bad to action that will change that reality.

Note: This interview gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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The Evolution of Religions: A History of Related Traditions. Lance Grande. Columbia University Press. 2024.

One cannot but admire the energy and optimism of this book. Roger Lansing Grande (writing under the name Lance Grande) is an outsider to the academic study of religion, a natural scientist by training who describes himself as an “evolutionary systematist” (3). But in writing The Evolution of Religions Grande has attempted a feat that would be ambitious even for a leading scholar of the field: a comprehensive, largely chronological genealogy of the world’s religions, from the earliest evidence of supernatural thought in prehistory through to the 21st century.

The method in Evolution of Religions is derived from evolutionary biology and consists in the mapping of lineages

It’s important to note that Grande is not – as might be supposed in view of his expertise as an evolutionary biologist – proposing an explanation of religion through human evolution, such as one finds in the work of cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer. Rather, the method in Evolution of Religions is derived from evolutionary biology and consists in the mapping of lineages – technically speaking, the construction of “phylogenetic trees.” Nodes on Grande’s trees represent discrete “religions,” which Grande sometimes refers to as “ideological belief systems.” Grande is thus concerned with demonstrating not how human biological evolution has shaped religion but rather that “today’s branches of Organized Religion were all influenced by branches before them that were influenced by branches before them” (34).

Readers are introduced to the rudiments of Grande’s systematising method in the opening chapters, along with terms like “symplesiomorphy” and “monophyly,” which will undoubtedly look foreign to many of those coming from the humanities and social sciences. Grand’s initial discussion also deals with the history of evolutionary approaches to religion, and the disrepute these once attracted through their association with racist ideology. Grande clarifies at length – some readers might say ad nauseum – that he disavows any notion of natural progression from one religion to another, being instead solely concerned with systematic classification.

Organised religion, in Grande’s view, emerged from forms of archaic religion, which in turn emerged from ‘supernaturalism’ – and this Evolution of Religions takes to be the kernel of religion in all times and places.

Astute readers will at this point be wondering, what counts for Grande as religion? Organised religion, in Grande’s view, emerged from forms of archaic religion, which in turn emerged from “supernaturalism” – and this Evolution of Religions takes to be the kernel of religion in all times and places. But when he attempts to make nuanced distinctions between cases, Grande is often tripped up by the inherent complexity of the topic. For instance, Grande declines to call Scientology a religion, justifying this on the grounds that the movement began as a secular undertaking (550). Why then admit “new-age Gaianism” (56)? Does Grande think that James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis saw their undertaking in overtly religious terms? Similar instances can be found throughout the book.

Readers may find it curious that Grande’s innovative methodology produces such traditional accounts of its subject matter. The core chapters consider in turn the branches of Grande’s overall phylogenetic tree of religions. Grande presents narrative descriptions of his different trees, with reference primarily to secondary and tertiary sources. These overviews do disappointingly little with the terms of art referred to above (“cladogram” is another) which are introduced in the book’s early sections. Readers with expertise in particular topics are likely to notice a general unevenness of coverage, as when Grande belabours points that are virtually uncontroversial (eg, that Christianity emerged from Second Temple Judaism [571]) whilst rather unreflectively hewing to religious tradition in areas of significant scholarly uncertainty (eg, early Islam).

Although the book initially gives an impression of meticulousness through its attractive physical form – folio in full colour – a closer look reveals that whatever care went into its design was not matched by its editing. Typos of every description may be found throughout each chapter (eg, “Tower of Babble” [186]); the massacred editor of Charlie Hebdo, Stéphane Charbonnier, is referred to as “Stephanie” [483]). A more serious issue are the many absurdities and infelicities of expression, such as where, for instance, Grande tells us that “atheist was coined well before the fifth century BCE as a derogatory term for Christians and other monotheists” (518) (there obviously were no Christians in the fifth century BCE). Indeed, Evolution of Religions is sadly teeming with solecisms, misapprehensions, and errors of fact. Moreover, one would have thought that Grande’s phylogenetic method might be of use in particular for avoiding anachronism in religious history. Yet, it’s as if Grande’s method actually inserts a kind of teleological bias, such that, for instance, Grande refers to something called “Roman Catholicism” existing from the birth of Christianity, or to “Anglicanism” as having been a coherent idea from 1534 onwards (366–68).

Grande concludes with a discussion of how the findings of his enterprise might promote interfaith understanding. In doing so he conjoins scholarly aims to extra-scientific ones, and it might reasonably be wondered whether Grande doesn’t end up implicitly defending a hierarchy of religions

Grande concludes with a discussion of how the findings of his enterprise might promote interfaith understanding. In doing so he conjoins scholarly aims to extra-scientific ones, and it might reasonably be wondered whether Grande doesn’t end up implicitly defending a hierarchy of religions – even whilst stating the very opposite intention. Readers of Grande could be forgiven for taking away the lesson that at the apex of religions stand Unitarianism and the Bahai’i faith, which are singled out again and again as exemplars of inclusiveness and ecumenism. In his valorisation of all things pluralist, Grande almost seems to suggest another form of progressionism. Grande makes no secret of what he regards to be spiritually salutary: “The blind, unquestioning faith that sometimes comes with Organized Religion has often been used by people in power to justify tribalistic hypernationalism, aggressive expansionism, and cultural subjugation” (503). Such statements, leaving to one side any question of their accuracy, sit awkwardly alongside Grande’s scholarship.

The book has much back matter, and these sections make up a large proportion of the whole. The glossary is helpful, but also contains some of Grande’s more dubious assertions. There are two sets of notes, one discursive and the other a list of chapter citations. The discursive notes contain some of the book’s most interesting and involved passages. The citation system is difficult to use, because it requires that one complete two steps in looking up a source: superscript markers in the chapters point to author-date citations, which then need to be looked up in the bibliography. The bibliography appears to be missing some references.

Grande’s big, bold book will test many readers [… ] But it should be given serious attention by anyone interested in fresh approaches to the study of religion.

Grande’s big, bold book will test many readers with its profusion of typos, imprecise formulations, and methodological aporias. But it should be given serious attention by anyone interested in fresh approaches to the study of religion. It’s not uncommon that terms and ideas from STEM subjects are appropriated for philosophical or theoretical purposes – just consider the academic industry that has arisen around the term “anthropocene.” Nor is it uncommon to see charges levelled, across the two-cultures divide, of borrowed materials being improperly used. It’s less usual for a representative of the natural sciences to take tools from her own field and apply them to the human and social sciences, as Grande does here with his classificatory panorama of religions. As a lesson in such cross-disciplinary ambition, the outcome of Grande’s project deserves to be widely discussed.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Pragmatism and Methodology: Doing Research That Matters with Mixed Methods. Alex Gillespie, Vlad Glăveanu and Constance de Saint Laurent. Cambridge University Press. 2024.

Pragmatism and Methodologies: Doing Research That Matters with Mixed Methods draws from philosophical perspectives to provide both foundational and contemporary understandings of research methodology. It takes a realistic point of view, clearly stating its aim “to outline practical consequences of pragmatism in social science” methodology. The clarity of the aim enables the reader to easily visualise what to expect in the book: an analysis of pragmatism as an emergent middle ground between the much acknowledged theoretical and philosophical approaches (x).

The nine-chapter book convincingly proposes pragmatism as a, “coherent, flexible, and robust framework” for creating useful knowledge that can enhance society (xii).It traces the origin of pragmatism to US scholars such as Charles Peirce, John Dewey, Jane Addams, William James and George Mead, whose  heterogenous belief  held that “science within the context of democracy” could improve society (1). The book then conceptualises pragmatism as a methodological approach based on human activity (142), arguing that people directly affect research processes and findings, making objectivity unattainable. It uses the philosophical premise that “every philosophy has to start with something”; to illustrate that pragmatism begins with people’s “everyday actions and experiences that comprise the world as we know it” (6).

The book […] conceptualises pragmatism as a methodological approach based on human activity, arguing that people directly affect research processes and findings, making objectivity unattainable.

The first chapter engages the reader in situating pragmatism within a process paradigm that emphasises temporality and change and prioritises timeless things. Here, the authors contrast the pragmatic approaches that emphasise temporality with the ones that centre timelessness, to allow for multimethod research. They use figurative language such as “is the oak superior to the acorn?”, to argue about which of the two came first in terms of reproduction, thereby illuminating the importance of processes in research. This enables the reader to relate to the methodological arguments at the human experience level, effectively simplifying some philosophically opaque concepts such as “paradigms” and “epistemology” discussed in Chapter Two.

The authors’ ability to delicately balance between articulating complex philosophical concepts and writing accessibly is perhaps best demonstrated through the discussion of res extensa and res cogitans (3), things with three dimensions and things that appear in mind, respectively. The authors highlight the increasing citation of the phrase “there is nothing as practical as good theory” (ix) in the academic realm. They use the phrase to refer to the misconceptions researchers hold about theory, but it also arouses the reader’s interest in the unlikely pairing of these contrasting concepts – practice and theory. They analyse this paradox in the subsequent chapters, demonstrating that theory is not just about how knowledge is made, but also a guide on methodological decisions. The analysis anchors contemporary arguments on traditional philosophical conceptions in an accessible way.

Theory is not just about how knowledge is made, but also a guide on methodological decisions.

Although the authors rightfully acknowledge that their social and cultural psychology background influenced their writing, this gives the reader two contrasting experiences. First, the infusion of a psychology perspective into the book simplifies complex philosophical concepts using general human-life experiences, for the reader to easily understand. However, it also makes the reader from a non-psychology background wonder if the book is appropriate for them. As a reader from the media background, I easily understood the philosophical concepts such as paradigms, as explained from the psychological point of view (1, 2 and 4). However, they seemed too removed from media research to be able to apply them there. I I had to read the discussions on disinformation, conspiracy theories (Chapter Two), the emergence of “big data” (109), including “Social media data, video footage, live data, and digital archives” (110-111), to learn how the concepts might apply.

The book’s most outstanding aspect is that the reader can easily draw from lived experiences such as US electoral politics in 2016, to relate to the arguments therein.

Arguably, the book’s most outstanding aspect is that the reader can easily draw from lived experiences such as US electoral politics in 2016, to relate to the arguments therein. This is especially visible in Chapter Two which explores what it means to live in a “post-truth” society where factual basis of truth can be undetermined (26-27). Although the book’s pragmatic approach may be criticised for portraying ethics as a “box-ticking” exercise (162), it creates a basis for common ground around effective knowledge, while also avoiding presenting science as something beyond critical questioning.

The book effectively shows how practical methodologies can enable researchers to navigate contemporary challenges amid increasing relativist and realist contentions. It persuasively navigates the division between qualitative and quantitative extremists; and adds to the justification for mixed methods research (19). Chapter Three describes the division as “bypassing the subjective-objective dualism” to focus on human activity (49). For instance, the book’s allegorical discussions in Chapter Four, enables the reader to see beyond the traditional quantitative (realism) and qualitative (relativism) divide, which simplifies the concept of theory (74). It argues that research should be about “creating questions as answering them” (75). The argument enables the book’s conceptualisation of theory as a “tool in the world that dis/empowers human activity” rather than a mirror of the world (50). In this way, the book figures theory in terms of what it enables them to do, rather than whether it belongs to the real or relative duality.

The book [conceptualises] theory as a ‘tool in the world that dis/empowers human activity’ rather than a mirror of the world.

This view enables researchers to rise above paradigmatic wars between quantitative and qualitative methods. For instance, Chapter Seven advocates for multi-resolution research that uses “qualitative analysis to zoom in, revealing contextualised particulars, and quantitative analysis to zoom out, revealing statistical patterns” (135). The book successfully argues that our lived experiences can be combined with qualitative and quantitative approaches to provide “breadth and depth”, that bring rigor, robustness and insight in research (117).

Although the book attempts to simplify its philosophically anchored arguments for the reader, some arguments remain shrouded in philosophical jargon, especially in Chapter One. This may discourage unseasoned researchers who may not yet be grounded in the philosophical foundations of research methodology. That notwithstanding, the book remains a must-read for students and researchers interested in a contextual understanding of pragmatic methodology.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Good Governance in Nigeria: Rethinking Accountability and Transparency in the Twenty-First Century. Portia Roelofs. Cambridge University Press. 2023.

Good governance: a phrase laden with meaning and history. Good governance in Africa? Even more trouble at hand. Colonial and neocolonial projects in Africa have been justified in the name of good governance. However, to assume a sense of foreboding when one hears the phrase “good governance” is also to assume – and even to locate – its meaning in a particular provenance. This is exactly what Portia Roelofs, in her book Good Governance in Nigeria: Rethinking Accountability and Transparency in the Twenty-First Century, wants to trouble.

The author wants to draw out a re-conception of good governance: namely, as conceived of by everyday people rather than, say, the World Bank or other institutions whose projected definitions come with immense repercussions.

Roelofs, a lecturer in politics at King’s College London, has spent time in Nigeria, including undertaking research in the universities of Ibadan and Maiduguri. It is from her fieldwork in Nigeria that she wants to draw out a re-conception of good governance: namely, as conceived of by everyday people rather than, say, the World Bank or other institutions whose projected definitions come with immense repercussions. To do so, this work “places the voices of roadside traders and small-time market leaders alongside those of local government officials, political godfathers and technocrats…[theorising] ‘socially embedded’ good governance.” Using this method, she defends the argument that “power must be socially embedded for it to be accountable”, in opposition to those who cast social embeddedness as sullying politics and leaving room for all the varied forms of corruption that may hinder good governance.

If society and social demands might be seen as an enabler of corruption […] the necessary flip side is that it can also represent a constraint on the actions of those in power.

Indeed, Roelofs extends Peter Ekeh’s erudite analysis (in Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa) of a “third space” that defies the binaries of political science’s beloved public and private spheres. Ekeh presented a space from which Nigerian (and wider African) politics could be more fruitfully analysed, a space that was “neither absolutely rational-bureaucratic public authority [nor]…patrimonial authority conceived as the personal or individual authority of a Big Man’s private household”. Roelofs presents evidence that “points towards the existence of more social forms of governance which are neither personalistic […] nor ethnic, but speak to a more general sociality”, which provides the basis for the notion of governance that is “both public and yet includes some social elements and the further possibility that this may constitute good governance”. If society and social demands might be seen as an enabler of corruption (something that is not, the author reminds us, a uniquely African problem), the necessary flip side is that it can also represent a constraint on the actions of those in power. In fact, the insistence on detaching the state from its societal embeddedness increases the opacity and unaccountability of the state.

Roelofs’ methodology may be controversial to those devoted to hyper-abstraction, but for those of us who theorise as we live rather than save theory for the books, good governance must always be socially embedded. However, Roelofs is engaging with real biases that run deep in both political theory and development studies, and that have had immense consequences. As she writes, “While personal contact between voters and politicians is pathologized in scholarly analysis of Africa, it is celebrated by political scientists working in Western democracies.” Social-embeddedness has been a kind of dirty word in a lot of the mainstream writing on African politics – it is this entanglement of the political with the social that causes diagnoses such as “the cancer of corruption” and other terms that pathologise African politics every which way.

This is a book that is quite close to me in terms of method, as a person who roots herself primarily in political theory but believes ardently in the ways other methods and sources, including history and fieldwork, must educate political theory. Along with this, the book is supposed to demonstrate “the associated possibilities for decolonising the study of politics”. One might question the extent to which this book rigorously engages this latter goal, but it continues in the tradition of thinkers including Thandika Mkandawire (to whom the book is dedicated) and others like Ndongo Samba Sylla and Leonce Ndikumana.

Roelofs contests the dominant World Bank discourse on good governance that is projected as universally accepted and uncontroversial. She proposes an alternative mode of governance whereby the people decide for themselves the terms of engagement – something that the World Bank has in multiple, egregious ways denied the continent. This very act is noteworthy – the “problem” of African politics has been repeatedly deemed “too embedded in social and material relations”, leading to the oft-cited ills of neopatrimonialism, corruption, etc.

Roelofs is self-conscious of her position as a white woman trying to turn the tables on colonial, trope-filled discourse and asks for thoughts on how such a move might be more conscientiously made.

However, though this goal of challenging what good governance means is named explicitly at the outset, it would have been useful to see the precise ways in which the book operates as a (potentially) decolonial act. Roelofs is self-conscious of her position as a white woman trying to turn the tables on colonial, trope-filled discourse and asks for thoughts on how such a move might be more conscientiously made. Indeed, many have questioned how “Africanists” – often white, often working outside the continent – have positioned themselves at the centre of changing tides in African political discourse. The racial blindspots (or worse) underlying African Studies must be called out alongside those of the financial institutions; the neocolonial project is a concert of efforts.

The author hints at this issue, but often in diplomatic terms. As Robtel Neajai Pailey writes, one needs to “speak into existence the proverbial elephant in the room of development: race”. However, one must balance this move with the recognition that all of us, including white academics, are responsible for taking the decolonial bull by the horns – that one must not shirk responsibility via the false generosity of “making space” for “people of colour”. The hard work of taking responsibility and being responsible must be consciously and explicitly engaged.

Another danger the book sometimes falls into is to play up the narrative of what Africa can teach the world.

Another danger the book sometimes falls into is to play up the narrative of what Africa can teach the world. This viewpoint is problematic in that it may suggest a need to peg the meaningfulness of work done in Africa to its importance for the Big Bad West (and elsewhere). The greater purpose may instead be to unearth meanings that only have value locally, to study Africa for its own sake, and not for the West’s education. The question of where meaning should be focused relates to Toni Morrison’s observations on racism as a distraction. This burden leaves a person desperately trying to prove that they, too, are worthy; that they, too, have important things to show the world, unaware that by that very token they are upholding a particular standard of worthiness.

Despite this, Roelofs’ book serves as both rigorous, extended analysis of the good governance discourse and a worthwhile historical introduction to the troubles that have besieged state-making in Africa. Roelofs keenly dissects several key historical moments in Nigeria to tease out how they theoretically shape contemporary understandings of good governance.

 Roelofs’ book serves as both rigorous, extended analysis of the good governance discourse and a worthwhile historical introduction to the troubles that have besieged state-making in Africa.

To this end, she writes about how good governance in Nigeria is often tied to the person (and myth) of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, who, to some, was the best President Nigeria never had. However, there is more to the picture than the “modernising, elite-led, progressive” elements that epitomise notions of good governance in Nigeria and that Awolowo represented. Working through the contested ideas that surround good governance, Roelofs comes up with what she calls the “Lagos model”. This is a homegrown approach, made of a shared set of reference points acting as a yardstick against which governance is evaluated. Roelofs names the reference points as “an epistemic claim to enlightened leadership, a social claim to being embedded in one’s constituency and a material claim about the sharing of resources”. Roelofs shows that the ideas of good governance grounded in epistemic superiority were in tension with more populist visions that emphasised the need for satisfying short-term economic desires and connecting with leaders. From this dialectic “a full and rounded picture of legitimate leadership as containing epistemic, social and material aspects” emerges. The struggle to balance each of these three aspects is what produces good governance, and the gaps in managing the give and take across the three is what gives various kinds of actors, nefarious and otherwise, entry to “fix” what appears broken.

Overall, the book is accessible and unpretentious, even while quite history-heavy. Though it may lack the poetry and passion of a Mudimbe or Mbembe, its appeal to democratise understandings of good governance demands the reader’s engagement reckon. It is a refreshingly democratic take on what it means to govern well, by rooting the definition in what everyday people in a specific context truly seek.

Note: This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credit: Tolu Owoeye on Shutterstock.

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Tactical Publishing: Using Senses, Software, and Archives in the Twenty-First Century. Alessandro Ludovico. The MIT Press. 2024.

Working at the intersection of art, technology, and media, Alessandro Ludovico is known for his contribution to shaping the term “post-digital” through his book Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing Since 1894. Ludovico’s notion of the post-digital, in brief, challenges the divide between digital and physical realms by exploring the normalisation and ubiquity of the digital in contemporary culture and urges for a nuanced perspective beyond its novelty, as boundaries between online and offline experiences blur.

Tactical Publishing is presented as a sequel, evolving and updating Ludovico’s concept for the concerns of a contemporary computational media landscape shaped by technologies and platforms (social media, algorithms, mobile apps and virtual reality environments) owned by large multinational corporations. Through discussing a wide variety of antagonistically situated experimental and activist publishing initiatives, Ludovico discovers fresh roles and purposes for books, publishers, editors, and libraries at the centre of an alternative post-digital publishing system. This system diverges from the “calculated and networked quality of publishing between digital and print … to promote an intrinsic and explicitly cooperative structure that contrasts with the vertical, customer-oriented industry model” (8).

Ludovico develops this argument around a captivating array of well and lesser known examples from the realms of analogue, digital, and post-digital publishing stretching the prevalent boundaries of what a book was, is, and can be. Ranging from Asger Jorn’s and Guy Debord’s sandpaper covered book Mémoirs (1958), to Nanni Balestrini’s computer generated poem “Tape Mark 1” (1961), to Newstweek (2011), a device for manipulating news created by Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev. Tactical Publishing also ventures into the complex relationships, practices, socio-political and economic contexts of the production and reception of books. It draws on these relational contexts to explore their disruptive potential. For example, through forms of “liminal librarianship” practiced by DIY libraries, networked archiving practices of historically underrepresented communities, and custodianship in the context of digital piracy.

Ludovico develops this argument around a captivating array of well and lesser known examples from the realms of analogue, digital, and post-digital publishing stretching the prevalent boundaries of what a book was, is, and can be

As in Post-Digital Print, Tactical Publishing offers an abundantly rich resource for scholars interested in exploring the ways in which experimenting with the manifold dimensions that make up books, can be a means for creative expression, intellectual exploration, and social change in the digital age. Ludovico dedicates considerable attention to these case studies, allowing them ample space to shine and speak by themselves in support of his argument.

The book is divided into six chapters, each mixing illustrative instances of practical application with theoretical reflection. Chapter one explores how reading is transformed by digital screens. These, as the author explains, tend to enforce industrially standardised experiences, while neutralising cultural differences and leading to a potential loss of sensory involvement. Ludovico proposes to reclaim enriched and multisensory reading experiences by combining digital tools and physical qualities. He illustrates this proposition by discussing a series of publishing experiments in music publishing that have used analogue and digital technologies to integrate text and music media.

Chapter two examines the transformation of the role of software in writing. Here, Ludovico presents a transition from an infrastructural to an authorial function that blurs distinctions between human and artificial “subjectivities”. The latter being a simulation of human-like experiences, characteristics, and behaviours often associated with human subjectivity, such as learning, decision-making, or emotional responses. This simulation Ludovico argues increasingly obstructs the ability to distinguish between actions and expressions originating from humans and those generated by technological systems. Ludovico contends that the “practice of constructing digital systems, processes, and infrastructures to deal with these new subjectivities can become a political matter” (89). One that requires initiatives intertwining critical and responsible efforts in digitising knowledges, making digital knowledge-bases accessible and searchable, and developing and maintaining machine-based services on top of them. However, the origin and nature of these institutions, and what their efforts might entail remain unspecified.

Ludovico presents a transition from an infrastructural to an authorial function that blurs distinctions between human and artificial “subjectivities”.

Chapter three explores how post-truth arises from a constant construction and deconstruction of meaning in transient digital spaces, and through media and image manipulation. Ludovico emphasises that, in this context, it is important to build “an information dam … to protect our minds from being flooded with data, especially emotionally charged data” (123). Chapter four, “Endlessness: The Digital Publishing Paradigm”, makes the case that the fragmented short formats characteristic of digital publishing underscore the importance of the archival role of print publications and the necessity of networks of “critical human editors” (130). These can act as a counterbalance to this flood of information and foster a more focused and collaborative exchange of information.

Chapter five proposes a transformation of libraries from centralised towards distributed and networked knowledge infrastructures in which librarians strategically contribute to the selection and sharing of “relevant collections” (197). Chapter six concludes Tactical Publishing synthesising the previous chapters by proposing the strategic integration of analogue and digital realms within an “open media continuum” rejecting a calculated, networked approach in favour of a cooperative structure sustained by “responsible editors” (212), publishers, librarians, custodians, and distributors. Last but not least, a useful appendix offers a selection of one hundred publications, encompassing both print and digital formats.

Tactical Publishing sits within a well-established canon of critical media studies, digital humanities, and cultural studies, focusing on the materiality of media, historical dimensions of technology, media ecology, politics of information, and socio-cultural implications of post-digital communication. However, its theoretical contributions are at times subdued by the host of examples presented. Some readers may also be left wanting a more pronounced engagement with recent theoretical works discussing the concept of post-digital publishing and its interventionist potential into dominant publishing systems, norms, and cultures from cultural hegemony critical, post-Marxist, various feminist, post-hegemonic, and ecologically-minded perspectives. Such an engagement might have helped clarify questions about the politics and ethics related to the alternative post-digital publishing system and the “comprehensive liberatory attitude” (4) Ludovico advocates for, beyond the motivation to counter the alienation of the current computational media landscape.

Tactical Publishing sits within a well-established canon of critical media studies, digital humanities, and cultural studies, focusing on the materiality of media, historical dimensions of technology, media ecology, politics of information, and socio-cultural implications of post-digital communication.

Similarly, Tactical Publishing also leaves unresolved related questions of positionality, accountability, and agency. For example: Who is the “we “Ludovico addresses, not least in the final chapter titled “How we Should Publish in the 21st Century”? What drives “the critical human editors” (130) whose role is to “filter the myriad of sources, to preserve their heterogeneity, to … include new sources, but to keep their final number limited, and to confirm them, transparently acknowledged, in order to strengthen trusted networks” (211), and what legitimises their activity? And where, in a post-digital world, is “the personal trusted human network” situated that, according to the author, can be “resistant to mass manipulation by fake news and post-truth strategies” (123)?

However, despite (or exactly because) the theoretical argument occasionally takes a backseat to numerous meticulously selected and well-arranged examples, Tactical Publishing is an inspiring resource for all scholars and practitioners in design, the arts, humanities, and social sciences that are interested in the ways in which experimental publishing can help question, challenge and rearrange dominant publishing systems.

Note: This article was initially published on the LSE Impact of Social Science blog.

This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credit: Dikushin Dmitry on Shutterstock.

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Understanding Humans: How Social Science Can Help Solve Our Problems. David Edmonds. SAGE. 2023.

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In the Social Science Bites podcast series, David Edmonds, a Consultant Researcher and Senior Research Associate at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, collaborated with Nigel Warburton to explore the dynamics of modern society, interviewing eminent social and behavioural scientists on different topics. The engaging discussions that resulted led Edmonds to curate a selection of the episodes in a written format to bring the research to new audiences. The resulting book, Understanding Humans: How Social Science Can Solve Our Problems, offers valuable insights into various aspects of human life and society, covering subjects from morality, bias and identity to kinship, inequality and justice.

Understanding Humans […] offers valuable insights into various aspects of human life and society, covering subjects from morality, bias and identity to kinship, inequality and justice.

In his foreword to the book, Edmonds highlights that the selection of interviews, which translate into different chapters, reflect his own interests, though the criteria for their inclusion remains undisclosed. The book consists of eighteen chapters split between five thematic sections titled, respectively: Identity, How We Think and Learn, Human Behaviour, Making Social Change, and Explaining the Present, and Unexpected. Some topics introduced in one section can also fit into others, leading to overlaps between certain sections.

In his discussion of class, Friedman states that despite educational attainments, class privilege still significantly impacts career progression.

In the section on Identity, Sam Friedman discusses the insufficiency of education to eliminate the influence of class privilege, while Janet Carsten talks about the interconnectedness of kinship with politics, work, and gender. In his discussion of class, Friedman states that despite educational attainments, class privilege still significantly impacts career progression. The level of autonomy in the workplace, alongside one’s position and salary, could indicate whether career success correlates with social class. Friedman suggests that societal beliefs in meritocracy often overlook the inherent class-related barriers that hinder individuals’ opportunities for career development.

In the next section, Daniel Kahneman, Mahzarin Banaji, Gurminder K. Bhambra, Jonathan Haidt, Jo Boaler, and Sasika Sassen discuss various aspects of human thinking and learning. In his chapter on bias, Kahneman sheds light on biases in human thinking, discussing the dual processes of thinking: fast, associative thinking (System 1) and slower, effortful control (System 2). System 2 assists us in providing reasoning or explanations for our conclusions, essentially aiding in articulating our feelings and emotions. Education enhances System 2 and develops rational thinking, although achieving absolute rationality remains an elusive goal.

Boaler challenges the myth of innate mathematical ability, highlighting the crucial role of active engagement in developing mathematical skills.

In her chapter on the “Fear of Mathematics,” Boaler challenges the myth of innate mathematical ability, highlighting the crucial role of active engagement in developing mathematical skills. Deep thinking is crucial for developing maths skills, but it is a slow process that requires time. There is also a need for reforms in maths education, particularly addressing the issue of timed assessments that impede the brain’s capacity to develop mathematical skills effectively. Boaler states that the purpose of mathematics shouldn’t glorify speed, considering that many proficient mathematicians acknowledge working at a slower pace.

In the chapter “Before Method,” Sassen discusses how prior experiences shape research approaches, introducing the concept of “before method”, referring to both the desire for conducting research in a particular way and the actual execution of a research study. The rationale behind selecting a specific research method and topic is connected with the pre-existing experience preceding the method itself. Sassen challenges established categories by questioning whether it is possible to perceive things without initially considering categories, potentially influencing the direction of the study. She acknowledges that her awareness of prior research studies, established categories, and personal life experiences significantly shape her perception of the world as a researcher.

Following this, Stephen Reicher, Robert Shiller, David Halpern, and Valerie Curtis talk about various facets of human behaviour. Reicher discusses group dynamics, elucidating how physical proximity and psychological commonality foster different groups. Reicher also posits that group boundaries are loose and attributes this to the social changes, which, according to his explanation, result from a we-they dichotomy. Understanding intergroup interactions is crucial, particularly when individuals might not wish to be associated with confrontational aspects. However, belonging to a specific group often leads to labelling individuals, linking all their actions with that group, despite the distinctive nature of their involvement.

Halpern in his chapter on nudging explains that humans are not solely rational beings; their behaviour is influenced by various factors including impulses and emotions.

Halpern in his chapter on nudging explains that humans are not solely rational beings; their behaviour is influenced by various factors including impulses and emotions. He elaborates on how nudging proves beneficial for jobseekers, where incorporating specific human-related elements in emails encourages them to attend interviews. Halpern also posits that our inherent ‘groupish’ tendencies are intricately linked to human psychology. Various factors influence our proximity or distance from others, ultimately affecting societal progress, including economic development. Trust, for instance, varies significantly among different social classes. An individual from an impoverished social class facing financial challenges tends to have lower social trust. Conversely, someone from an affluent background might experience the opposite due to their social circle being influenced by their wealth.

Chenoweth’s research highlights the efficacy of nonviolent political action when contrasted with violent approaches, emphasising its higher success rates and potential to facilitate democratic transitions.

In the section on “Making Social Change” Jennifer Richeson, Erica Chenoweth, and Alison Liebling discuss how employing various approaches and research methods can drive social changes. Chenoweth’s research highlights the efficacy of nonviolent political action when contrasted with violent approaches, emphasising its higher success rates and potential to facilitate democratic transitions. Within the political sphere, an emerging trend is the digital revolution, distinct in some aspects from other revolutions. Erica Chenoweth also states that the digital revolution might foster a misleading impression by mobilising thousands to march in the streets.

In the section “Explaining the Present and the Unexpected,” Hetan Shah discusses the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on social and economic spheres, while Bruce Hood talks about supernatural attitudes or beliefs. Shah elucidates how the pandemic has shifted societal norms and behaviour. He also draws attention to the impact of these norms on human behaviour and the potential for fostering a fair society. Examining the pandemic from multiple angles – medical, social, and economic – deepens our understanding of human behaviour Shah emphasises that social sciences play a crucial role in unveiling how biases shape our thoughts and actions, addressing the social problems.

[Understanding Humans] provides readers with a compelling overview of exceptional research studies on how we think and act as individuals, and the social, economic, educational and political structures that we operate within.

Overall, the eclectic chapters in ‘Understanding Humans: How Social Science Can Solve Our Problems’ illuminate the profound role of social sciences in exploring and addressing social issues. This book serves as a valuable resource for a broad audience, being accessible and engaging for readers without prior knowledge or expertise in the fields drawn upon by the researchers. It provides readers with a compelling overview of exceptional research studies on how we think and act as individuals, and the social, economic, educational and political structures that we operate within.

This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.

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Art, Science and the Politics of Knowledge. Hannah Star Rogers. The MIT Press. 2022.

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Art and science are often described in oppositional terms. Artists engage in subjective, creative, right-brain activities to produce beautiful objects while scientists use their left-brain skills in objective and methodical ways to improve our collective understanding of the world. In Art, Science and the Politics of Knowledge (The MIT Press, 2022), Hannah Star Rogers challenges and disrupts these dichotomies through a detailed examination of how art and science intermingle and influence one another. She argues that we should set aside the long-standing assumptions about the differences between art and science, and instead recognise their common approaches to knowledge-making.

[Rogers] argues that we should set aside the long-standing assumptions about the differences between art and science, and instead recognise their common approaches to knowledge-making.

Rogers draws upon Science and Technology Studies (STS) theories and methods to interrogate the overlapping knowledge communities of art and science. Just as STS has been used to destabilise scientific and technological knowledge practices since the 1970s, she argues that it can also be directed towards art and art-science practices. Her social constructivist lens draws upon well-known STS concepts such as Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker’s notion of interpretive flexibility, Geoff Bowker and Susan Leigh Star’s emphasis on the power of classification, and Bruno Latour’s immutable mobiles to reveal the multiple ways that art and science are indelibly intertwined. She follows scientists and artists in their laboratories, studios and exhibition spaces to develop ethnographic evidence of the commonalities and synergies between their knowledge practices.

 Just as STS has been used to destabilise scientific and technological knowledge practices since the 1970s, she argues that it can also be directed towards art and art-science practices.

Rogers’ first two case studies are based on archival studies of artists who contributed to scientific knowledge production. From the 1880s to the 1930s, the father and son team of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka used their artisanal expertise in glassmaking to represent wonders of the natural world, notably sea creatures and flowers. Rogers argues that these models were not simply representations of the natural world but contributed to scientific knowledge in substantive ways. As she writes,

To create three-dimensional, detailed representational objects, the Blaschkas had to do their own studies and observations, and in doing so they were creating new ways of knowing sea creatures that would otherwise have been represented by flaccid specimens in jars or two-dimensional drawings. The knowledge that these artisans created was a method of displaying the salient features of marine life to the satisfaction of the scientific community (47). In other words, the Blaschkas positioned themselves as co-producers of scientific knowledge and their models provided new ways of seeing and knowing the field of natural history.

The Blaschkas positioned themselves as co-producers of scientific knowledge and their models provided new ways of seeing and knowing the field of natural history.

The power of visualisation is reinforced in Rogers’ second case study of the renowned 20th-century photographer Berenice Abbott. In the 1940s, Abbott developed a photo-realist technique that could accurately depict physical science laws and principles. She worked in close collaboration with scientists to stage images of soap bubbles, magnetic filings, light traveling through prisms, and falling objects such as balls and wrenches. These images were prominently displayed in science textbooks and were used to inform the scientific literacy of the general public. The realist photos of Abbott and the lifelike glass sculptures of the Blashckas extend earlier STS scholarship by Latour, Michael Lynch, Steve Woolgar, and others on the centrality of images and models to scientific knowledge making while also highlighting their aesthetic achievements. These artefacts are simultaneously works of science and works of art.

The fourth case study of tactical media is an outlier in the book. Tactical media is a social activist movement that emerged in the 1990s as subversive individuals began to employ the World Wide Web for political messaging. Rogers describes various performative, ephemeral interventions to critique capitalism and challenge authority through disinformation, humour, playfulness, and creativity. The case study provides fascinating insights about how technical artefacts can be used to promote alternative ways of knowing, but the work of tactical media practitioners has tenuous connections to the art-science thesis in the rest of the book.

Bioartists shared laboratory space, techniques, and materials with scientists to do science while also critiquing it.

Rogers’ fourth case study returns to the art-science knowledge nexus with an ethnographic study of SymbioticA, a laboratory for the biological arts at the University of Western Australia in Perth. She shadowed the activities of bioartists who collaborate with biotechnologists to develop interactional expertise and expand the knowledge domain of biotechnology. The bioartists shared laboratory space, techniques, and materials with scientists to do science while also critiquing it. As she notes, “Bioartists have seen themselves not as the mediators of scientific knowledge to the public but as the producers themselves” (145). The case study provides vivid examples of how artists and scientists contribute to the hybrid field of art-science in novel ways.

[Rogers] makes a compelling case for using exhibitions in art galleries and libraries to promote STS ways of knowing and to frame research activities as a collective intervention.

In her final case study, Rogers transforms from observer to action researcher by curating an art-science installation titled “Art’s Work in the Age of Biotechnology: Shaping Our Genetic Futures” at North Carolina State University in 2019 and 2020. The exhibition included objects with accompanying videos to create an open-ended, iterative, and interactive space where scientists, artists, and the general public could come together in a shared dialogue on biotechnology and society. She makes a compelling case for using exhibitions in art galleries and libraries to promote STS ways of knowing and to frame research activities as a collective intervention. As she notes, “Curators create new knowledge around objects by analyzing the layers of meaning added to them in different context[s]” (245).

While Rogers’ description of the curatorial process provides a titillating glimpse on how STS ideas can be mobilised in new ways, it also raises important questions about the role of the public in knowledge production processes. In the case study, she frames the public as critics rather than pupils of art-science knowledge production, but her description of the curated exhibit includes no evidence on how the public contributed to this shared dialogue. This omission highlights the long-standing challenge of transcending the boundary between experts and non-experts to co-produce knowledge through more democratic forms of engagement.

Rogers provides a wealth of compelling examples to reveal the networked production of art-science knowledge that enrols people, artefacts, and ideas in studios and laboratories through complementary modes of questioning and experimentation.

Overall, the case studies in this book illustrate how art and science are distinct yet overlapping knowledge domains with multiple commonalities. Rogers provides a wealth of compelling examples to reveal the networked production of art-science knowledge that enrols people, artefacts, and ideas in studios and laboratories through complementary modes of questioning and experimentation. The findings make a compelling case for how an STS perspective can be used to deconstruct and critique knowledge domains that extend far beyond scientific and technological development.

This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.

Image Credit: Museopedia on Wikimedia Commons.

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Escape from Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do about It. Erica Thompson. ‎Basic Books. 2022 (Hardback; 2023 paperback).

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“World is on track for 2.5°C of global warming by end of the century.” “US recession odds are falling fast.” “New wave of Covid predicted as UK’s return to school and social mixing hit.” Amidst the challenges of recent years, mathematical modelling has become an ever-more-important tool for understanding our world. Done right, this can empower us. Distilling complexity into bite-size pieces, after all, can be a key step towards changing things for the better.

Embedded within every model are certain assumptions about how the world works. Sometimes, they do the job. Yet, other times, our visits to model land go awry. Thompson fears that modern society never learned to tell the difference

Yet modernity’s faith in modelling has come with a dark side, suggests statistician Erica Thompson in Escape from Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do about It (Basic Books: 2022). Embedded within every model are certain assumptions about how the world works. Sometimes, they do the job. Yet, other times, our visits to model land go awry. Thompson fears that modern society never learned to tell the difference, and that as a result, we’re becoming trapped in a mirror-world of our own making.

The core problem? That it’s all too easy to approach models as sources of objective scientific fact. Yet “[s]uch naive Model Land realism,” Thompson warns, “can have catastrophic effects because it invariably results in an underestimation of uncertainties and exposure to greater-than-expected risk.” “Data, that is, measured quantities, do not speak for themselves,” and at nearly every stage of finding the story, the world finds ways of seeping in.

It’s all too easy to approach models as sources of objective scientific fact.

Let’s say, for example, you want to know how climate change will impact GDP. A preeminent tool for doing so is the DICE model family. As recently as 2018, its factory settings concluded that global warming of 4˚C by 2100 would reduce global economic output by only around 4%. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, meanwhile, has warned that such warming would bring about “high to very high” planetary risks “in all reasons for concern.” So how does one conclude that a world of cataclysmic weather, of cities swallowed up, of climate-driven refugee and food crises would barely register in the economic metrics?

First, there’s what’s fed into the model: since costs and benefits of building a solar farm or passing a clean energy regulation don’t play out all at once, one must instruct a model how much to value the present versus the future. This variable (one of many dials to which DICE is highly sensitive) is called a “discount rate,” and no amount of math can hide the fact that it’s ultimately a moral judgment. As its main creator, Yale economist and Nobel laureate William Nordhaus, has himself written, “[t]he choice of discount rates is central to the results” – DICE can be made to say just about anything depending on what inputs are chosen. Relatedly, there’s what’s not fed into a model: models are informed by pre-existing knowledge. As a consequence of history, less economic and climactic data are readily available from the developing world, for instance.

Models are informed by pre-existing knowledge. As a consequence of history, less economic and climactic data are readily available from the developing world

Then follows the construction of the model itself.  As economist Nicholas Stern and co-authors point out in a recent paper, certain presumptions of rational actors, of market efficiency, and of exogenous technological progress are embedded into DICE’s fundamental wiring. More broadly, Thompson notes, DICE takes as granted that “the burden of allowing climate change can be quantitatively set against the costs of action to avoid it, even though they do not fall upon the same shoulders or with the same impact.

Models are by nature parsimonious: their utility derives from reducing complex phenomena to a much smaller set of parameters. Yet the real world is full of higher-order impacts (good and bad) beyond what gets specified in the math

Then, there’s how results are generalised to the world at large. Models are by nature parsimonious: their utility derives from reducing complex phenomena to a much smaller set of parameters. Yet the real world is full of higher-order impacts (good and bad) beyond what gets specified in the math. And when models set the bounds of what’s possible, viable, or optimal (DICE, Thompson points out, is enshrined in policy analysis pipelines at some governmental and intergovernmental agencies), nuance risks being lost in translation: “The whole concept of predicting the future can sometimes end up reducing the possibility of actively creating a better one.”

None of this is to say that DICE is useless. Assumptions, even simplistic ones, are necessary for making decisions about complex phenomena. But at the same time, they indelibly embed the modeller in the modelled, and we get nowhere by ignoring this reality.

Thompson isn’t the first to point out that model-making is a deeply human endeavour. But it is in these case studies of present-day debates in the modelling community, as informed by first-hand expertise, that her work really shines. Alongside DICE, Thompson deftly pries open black box after black box in cases ranging from financial markets to public health to atmospheric dynamics, finding in each case that turning morality into a math problem doesn’t purge the human touch. It only buries it just below the surface.

Models emerge as ‘tools of social persuasion and vehicles for political debate’ as much as they are quantitative processes

Models emerge as “tools of social persuasion and vehicles for political debate” as much as they are quantitative processes. And since “we are all affected by the way mathematical modelling is done, by the way it informs decision-making and the way it shapes daily public campaigns about the world around us,” it becomes a real challenge for modern democratic society when models are insulated from understanding or accountability.

The easiest response at this point might be to surrender – to declare that the ineffability and complexity of the world makes mathematical modelling inadequate. And yet… there’s also the pragmatic reality that, amidst compounding crises, models have quite simply proven useful. The empirical record has largely vindicated scientists’ (and, for that matter, literal fossil fuel companies’) climate predictions. Energy system simulations from Princeton played a key role in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, one of the most globally significant pieces of climate legislation to date. And modelled pathways from the International Energy Agency are playing key roles in guiding a rapid buildout of clean energy – and in challenging fossil fuel expansion.

How does one ensure that, in grappling with the social nature of modelling, the baby isn’t thrown out with the bathwater?

History, after all, is full of seemingly progressive (and indeed radical) critiques of objectivity, scientific consensus, and expert practice that end up merely reinforcing the status quo: just take the long history of social constructivist scholarship being used by allies of the tobacco and fossil fuel industries to support and justify their misinformation campaigns. Meanwhile, the climate denialist camp has long had the reliability of climate modelling in their sights. So how does one ensure that, in grappling with the social nature of modelling, the baby isn’t thrown out with the bathwater? It’s a tough needle to thread, yet something Thompson manages to do with grace. Just as there is “a problem in trusting models too much,” she writes, “there is equally a problem in trusting models too little.” Although “failing to account for the gap between Model Land and the real world is a recipe for underestimating risk and suffering the consequences of hubris,” she counters that “throwing models away completely… lose us a lot of clearly valuable information.”

More transparency and intentionality about the role of expert judgement, Thompson suggests, might help close the ‘accountability gap’ between the models and the humans acting on them

This may be the book’s most valuable contribution: it’s ultimately a call not to abandon model land altogether but instead to become better travellers. This begins with seeing the social nature of models as a feature, not a bug. More transparency and intentionality about the role of expert judgement, Thompson suggests, might help close the “accountability gap” between the models and the humans acting on them. Similarly (echoing a rich literature in the philosophy of science), she notes that greater institutionalised diversity of methods and standpoints might result in fewer unseen biases and blind spots.

Ultimately, this book is a plea for humility. It’s wrong, Thompson tells readers, to presume that we’ve somehow created the capacity to transcend the limits of human rationality. Instead we must realise that “taking a model literally is not taking a model seriously,” as Peter Diamond noted in his Nobel acceptance speech – that only by cultivating an ethos of responsibility can we truly treat our creations with the care they deserve.

Such a conclusion may be uncomfortable, but it’s also deeply pragmatic advice for better modelling, better truth-seeking, and better public reason in an empirical age. Modellers, scientists, policymakers, and more would do well to take it to heart.

The post Escape from Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do about It – review first appeared on LSE Review of Books.

Q: Why was LSE Press founded and what is its mission?

Patrick Dunleavy (PD): LSE was for many decades a college of the wider University of London. The School has never had a university press, and so all our academic books had to go to external publishers. Numerous successful journals were founded in individual units of the School (such as Modern Law Review, Economica and the British Journal of Sociology) and continue today, but otherwise we also had no corporate capacity for publishing journals.

From 2010, the developing and now runaway success of seven major School academic blogs (such as British Politics and Policy, Europp, USAPP, LSE Business Review, LSE Review of Books and LSE Impact blog), all initially established by my LSE Public Policy Group and now run by LSE Communications Division, and several academic blogs more recently established, grew the importance of publicising LSE’s academic work (alongside other evidence-based social science work) in open access forms via social media.

This short-form publishing success (accounting for 40 per cent of all LSE website traffic in 2022) prompted the previous Librarian, Nicola Scally, to launch long-form publishing via LSE Press in 2018. It became very important for LSE to redirect some of its resources to enhance global open access to excellent social science work from LSE and other universities.

Q: Why is open access publishing a cornerstone of its approach to academic publishing?

PD: LSE Press is essentially a digital open access publisher of books and journals, committed to making available all our book and journal outputs completely free to anyone across the globe who has access to an internet-enabled device.

Many academics and students in the world’s less advantaged universities are denied access to paywall publications, as of course are many working in business, government and public services, independent students and researchers without library access, and ordinary citizens. It is a key part of LSE’s new global mission to help grow the capacity of the global social sciences and (along with the blogs) LSE Press will become an ever more important part of that mission. We also sell paperback versions of all our books, but again at the lowest feasible cost.

Around 75 per cent of journal articles worldwide are now open access, and so can be widely read. However, the authors or their universities have had to pay costly Author Public Charges (APCs) for this “gold OA” – typically running at £1500 to £2500 per paper. Such high costs discriminate against more disadvantaged and well-funded members of the world’s academic community outside the top global institutions. Our commitment is to boosting low-cost open access publishing of high-quality social science journals on a merit-only basis. Accordingly, APCs on all our journals are under £500, and we are committed to no author with great work being denied publication for lack of finance.

On books we welcome any co-funding from departments and universities if available, but we are committed to publishing open access, purely on academic merit. We appraise all books without references to funding, using rigorous closed review processes, overseen by our lead academic Editorial Board, drawn from across LSE’s departments, and its Chair.

Q: What have been some of the greatest challenges for a new academic press starting out? What are some of the advantages? 

PD: As with the academic blogs, academic communities can be somewhat risk-averse towards academic innovation, and many people need to see something new up and running before they can appreciate it. In addition, any new academic press faces a big “start-up dilemma” with authors – who legitimately ask, “Why should I trust my book or journal article, which has cost me years of labour to produce, to a new operation?”

For books especially we look to publish the best academic social science work – and so we are competing with established university presses, like Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard or Princeton. Our editorial standards, production quality, dissemination capabilities and public reputation have had to be comparable to theirs from Day 1 – not an easy task to accomplish fresh out of the blocks.

We have been able to overcome this barrier by recruiting some brilliant and committed authors from LSE and beyond who are committed to open access publishing, and then by getting our first 20 books out at a great standard and demonstrating the enormous reach possible with digital open access publishing. We have worked very intensively with authors on our early books to fully develop the potential of their work, and to create the largest feasible readership for them, whether their books are textbooks, academic research monographs, impact books or shorter contributions to debate – and across a wide range of social sciences and humanities. We are enormously grateful to all our authors for their unstinting help and deep attachment to the highest academic values (including OA).

Q: What achievements are you and the rest of the LSE Press team most proud of at this five-year mark?

PD: In the last three years in particular, the LSE Press team has performed extraordinary feats, successfully developing our three early journals,”flipping” the journal Economia from closed access under Brookings Press to open access with us (including its entire back catalogue) and starting the new Philosophy of Physics journal – their brilliant first issue is out in the next two weeks.

But I guess we are most proud of the range and quality of our first 20 books (some still in press) and their huge success in reaching audiences worldwide. Two early books, Advanced Macro-economics and The UK’s Changing Democracy have both now passed 35,000 downloads each, and we are confident that even such demanding academic books as Paul Kelly’s (sadly all-too-topical) epic Conflict, War and Revolution will achieve 10,000 downloads. Other recent books, like How Africa Trades and Spectrum Auctions, have accumulated huge readerships already and had major public policy impacts. Our books have showcased excellent social science research from many institutions, and have covered the UK, Europe, Africa, South-east Asia, China, Latin America and the USA. The discipline range includes economics, applied economics, political science, philosophy and political thought, public policy and administration, international relations, sociology, geography, media studies, area studies and contemporary history. All our team members have contributed over and beyond expectations, and I am enormously grateful to every one of them for their wisdom, expertise, guidance and commitment.

Q: As the newly appointed Chair of LSE Press, what values and objectives are you keen for LSE Press to prioritise going forward?

Sarah Worthington (SW): I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so excited by a new role as I am by this one. Patrick Dunleavy has done a fabulous job in proving the concept of an LSE Press and showing it works as a viable start-up. My job is to build on that, and – with others – to work to give the LSE Press its defining personality and ensure its growth is sustainable.

The values side is easy. This is the LSE Press, so it must be infused with LSE’s values and principles. When LSE Press was launched in 2018, its aim was to become one of the leading open access publishers for the social sciences. But to get there we need a plan, and you ask me what my immediate priorities are.

As I see it, the most important task is to refine the LSE Press vision and clarify its focus. It can’t be all things to all people. We need to develop a focused commissioning strategy which will drive not only commissioning work, but also editorial decisions and philanthropic requests.

The second objective is to get LSE Press funding onto a sustainable footing. This won’t happen overnight. Open access is obviously free to the reader, but it is not free – it takes time and effort and money to turn a manuscript (even a free manuscript) into a good book, and then make that book accessible on some suitable user-friendly OA digital platform. If LSE Press is to grow, its resources need to grow.

Finally, but crucially, I want to help build the Press team, and become a part of it myself. The present LSE Press team is tiny but simply wonderful: I know we’re going to have fun together. I’ve only met the Editorial Board online, but they seem skilled and enthusiastic, so I hope they are up for an increasingly significant role in these next steps. There’s a lot to do, but I’m optimistic. I’m probably eternally optimistic, but I really think we can do this, and do it well.

Q: LSE Press publishes a dynamic range of books across the social sciences, by authors and within and beyond the institution. What is the editorial board looking for in a book proposal?

SW: LSE Press is intent on publishing across the full range of the social sciences, including interdisciplinary and cross-jurisdictional collaborations. We want authors from around the world to publish with us, and will work with any who are struggling with Book Processing Charge paywall barriers. And we want to ensure we have a reputation for publishing work that is likely to have real impact and influence across the widest possible audiences.

Some of these books will exemplify the social sciences in action; some will explain and evaluate social science principles and methodologies; some will look backwards, exposing the trajectories of ideas that changed the world; some will look forwards, setting agendas for the future. There is no set model, but the value of OA is its ability to reach large numbers of readers and change their perceptions. So we seek books that have this potential.

But LSE Press is also a quality gatekeeper. We aim to publish only the very best social science research, and – in true LSE style – to focus on research that educates, informs and contributes to collaborations and innovations for the benefit of societies around the world. In pursuit of that last goal, we want to ensure that research is presented to readers in the most accessible, robust and compelling way possible, on user-friendly digital publishing platforms. That said, all our books are also available as rather beautiful print-on-demand books – I love them!

Q: Are there any emerging trends in social science research or changes in how research is shared and consumed that are impacting academic publishing?

SW: There are lots of changes in publishing already on our doorstep, some good, some downright bad, depending on how the tools are used – take OA and generative AI as easy examples. Research agendas and methodologies are changing too, with interdisciplinary work, international collaborations and open data only increasing the speed of change and faster delivery of new insights.

OA is the new mantra in publishing, and it certainly makes publication faster and reader access easier. But we live in an information deluge, and one of the roles of the LSE Press is to mine the research terrain for the real gems, so that readers can be confident that what is presented to them is based on rigorous research and robust analysis, and that counterarguments are fully acknowledged, even if only to be dismissed.

Q: What’s next for LSE Press (such as forthcoming titles)?

SW: You can view our forthcoming titles on our website, including Michael Cox’s Ukraine: Russia’s War and the Future of the Global Order (December 2023) and Naila Kabeer’s Renegotiating patriarchy: Gender and the Bangladesh paradox (2024). Beyond that, watch this space! I’d love to come back with news of our next major steps at LSE Press, especially in this exciting growth phase, so perhaps I should stop here and hope you’ll want more later on.

Note: This interview gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The interview was conducted by Anna D’Alton, Managing Editor of LSE Review of Books.

Image Credits: LSE Press.

The post Five years of LSE Press: Q and A with Patrick Dunleavy and Sarah Worthington first appeared on LSE Review of Books.