From Small Talk to Microaggression: A History of Scale

A provocative and eye-opening history of how we have studied and theorized social interaction.

In this ambitious, wide-ranging book, anthropologist Michael Lempert offers a conceptual history that explores how, why, and with what effects we have come to think of interactions as “scaled.” Focusing on the sciences of interaction in midcentury America, Lempert traces how they harnessed diverse tools and media technologies, from dictation machines to 16mm film, to study communication “microsco...