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This edited volume gathers eight cases of industrial materials development, broadly conceived, from North America, Europe and Asia over the last 200 years. Whether given utility as building parts, fabrics, pharmaceuticals, or foodstuffs, whether seen by their proponents as human-made or "found in nature," materials result from the designation of some matter as both knowable and worth knowing about. In following these determinations we learn that the production of physical novelty under industrial, imperial and other cultural conditions has historically accomplished a huge range of social effects, from accruals of status and wealth to demarcations of bodies and geographies. Among other cases, New Materials traces the beneficent self-identity of Quaker asylum planners who devised soundless metal cell locks in the early 19th century, and the inculcation of national pride attending Taiwanese carbon-fiber bicycle parts in the 21st; the racialized labor organizations promoted by California orange breeders in the 1910s, and bureaucratized distributions of blame for deadly high-rise fires a century later. Across eras and global regions New Materials reflects circumstances not made clear when technological innovation is explained solely as a by-product of modernizing impulses or critiqued simply as a craving for profit. Whether establishing the efficacy of nano-scale pharmaceuticals or the tastiness of farmed catfish, proponents of new materials enact complex political ideologies. In highlighting their actors' conceptions of efficiency, certainty, safety, pleasure, pain, faith and identity, the authors reveal that to produce a "new material" is invariably to preserve other things, to sustain existing values and social structures.

The list of engineering "Grand Challenges" lately developed by the National Academy of Engineering enters a long historical tradition of such epically scaled to-do lists, dating back to the profession's U.S. origins in the mid-19th century. The mission statements, codes of ethics, and, later, lists of so-called grand challenges that have issued from engineering societies have served the dual function of directing engineers' work and supporting particular cultural roles for these bodies of experts. Almost all such plans, regardless of period or sponsoring body, have also blended highly practical aims of industrial and infrastructural development with more inchoate projects of societal uplift. The Grand Challenges of the NAE, currently playing a formative role in many engineering organizations and research and teaching settings, extend this lineage, working from a selective and self-confirming view of human welfare. We might bring to the Grand Challenges the type of critical, politically informed analysis that historians and STS scholars have brought to other sites of engineering activity and professionalization, to detect the nature of interests that underlay all such projections of engineering's role in society. Who is served by the development of different technologies, products, and infrastructures? Who might be harmed? Most fundamentally, the Grand Challenges proceed from the premise that engineering research, construction, invention, and production are to take precedence over their absence, as befits a body dedicated not to the contraction of such enterprises but to their extension. Yet the interests of sustainability, global health, and other areas of human well-being might be best served in certain cases by just such a turning away from engineering. Making explicit the social and historical assumptions of the NAE's Grand Challenges, and probing the implications of those assumptions for a diverse range of actors and communities, may pave the way for more thoughtful engagement with the humanistic and democratic potential of engineering.

Abstract: Feminist studies scholars and those in related critical studies traditions have long encountered resistance arising from STEM disciplines and capitalist logics on our campuses and in the wider public discourse. The struggles to establish and preserve feminist studies and ethnic studies programs over the past five decades remind us that the present pandemonium has historical roots that can be traced, not only to identify patterns instructive for us in this moment, but also for a visceral resonance that buoys us in this time and place. We recognize our own outrage at injustice even as we feel the rage directed at feminist studies scholars from sites of elite power, sustained through false dualisms of left and right, minority and majority, woke and anti-woke, STEM and non-STEM. This piece explores the preservation of elite power through the examination of institutions and epistemics at the heart of contemporary wage capitalism: the world of engineering education and practice, and critical resistance within that world. We analyze (ostensibly nonidentitarian) projects such as technoscientific teaching, research, and production. We choose to analyze episodes from the "before times" that reveal a sustained pattern of misogyny, white supremacy, heterosexism, and ableism pervading society and the academy prior to current enactments of that kind. In so doing, we follow an emergent line of inquiry, tracing emotion as well as argument: these dynamics are now, and have long been, fraught with rage. It is the systematic, historically robust, and selective acceptance and denial of rage that we want to explore here as a foundational feature of the present pandemonium, common to feminist studies academic contexts and to engineering, as well as interactions between the two.