Making Our Beasts - Paleontology in the United States

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
Making Our Beasts is an ethnography of science in action that uses a familiar topic--dinosaurs--to lead readers to understand science and its objects in new ways. Through fieldwork and interviews conducted at laboratories, dig sites, museums, and entertainment sites, Elana Shever explores vertebrate paleontology in the United States, showing how the practices of scientists and the materiality of fossils together shape the social world and also are shaped by it. Foregrounding elements of scientific inquiry that have been sidelined--including affect, touch, material agency, and the labor of volunteers, technicians, and other nonscientists--Shever reveals how paleontology continues to be structured by race, gender, and colonialism.

Product details

• Authors: Elana Shever, Shever Elana
• Publisher: University Of California Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 23.01.2026
• EAN: 9780520416727
• ISBN: 978-0-520-41672-7
• No. of pages: 270
• Series: Critical Environments: Nature, Science, and Politics
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Pre and early history; Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Technology > Structural and environmental engineering; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories; NATURE / Animals / Dinosaurs & Prehistoric Creatures, Anthropology, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / General, SCIENCE / Paleontology, environmental science, engineering & technology, Science / Environmental Science, Palaeontology, Environmental science, engineering and technology, Dinosaurs & the prehistoric world, Dinosaurs and the prehistoric world: general interest