Episode 18: Science Policy, with Alondra Nelson

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[instrumental music] Welcome back to Dreaming Against the Machine. I'm your host, Adam Becker. This week's guest is Alondra Nelson, who is a sociologist of science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and used to run the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under Joe Biden. And I feel like that right there tells you why I wanted to have her on this show, but, uh, I think politics is important. I think politics is something that happens the minute that you have more than one person in a room, and I think that it will always be with us. And I think that governance and policy are important things, and if we are going to think about what a better future could look like, we are going to need to talk about what a better politics and policy should look like, and that means that we have to talk with people who have been on the inside. And Alondra spans two worlds. That, that world, but also the world of studying science itself from the inside and the outside, and