Eren Zink's Hot Science, High Water examines a range of scientific and development projects in contemporary Vietnam, focusing in particular on "what it means to be a scientist and to do science" * (vii). Based on one year of fieldwork and mostly English-language published sources, Hot Science applies an STS framework to analyze various disciplines supposedly related to development projects including agriculture, aquaculture, and nature conservation. Hot Science challenges dichotomies such as local/ global, Vietnamese/foreign, and science/politics by showing that such dichotomies more aptly describe the framing of these projects than the targets of their interventions. In this way, the book offers a corrective to commonly held conceptions of how science and development currently intertwine in non-Western countries that receive foreign aid.
