"As someone who has not previously engaged with religious studies in any substantive way, I did not expect to be captivated by this book. And yet it drew me in, held my attention, and has continued to resonate with me since. . . . Part of what made the book accessible to me--in addition to the lucid writing--was its robust engagement with canonical STS literature as well as with the feminist and antiracist scholarship I do know well. He brings together bold-faced names for STS such as Thomas Kuhn and Bruno Latour, as well as incisive antiracist thinkers ranging from Audre Lorde to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. And yet a key thing that made it interesting to me was that it brought those too-often-siloed literatures together with each other and with new-to-me literatures in a way that is original."--Anne Pollock "Zygon" (12/4/2024 12:00:00 AM)
"Reading Donovan Schaefer's book has been an experience. At times I felt almost dizzy as his intellectual range is breathtaking. Schaefer effortlessly engages with a vast range of topics normally not discussed in one breath, in one book. He gives us an outline of cogency theory on how thinking feels and then debates it in relation to racialized reason, secularism, Darwin and Huxley and their science, new findings in neuroscience, creationism and more. Each chapter is like a stand-alone episode of the most gripping drama, reading which I had a Hitchcockian feeling--never a dull moment. The book is a page-turner. The nuance, the richness, the poetics of Schaefer's prose--the book is indeed a testimonial of a passionate love affair with an idea."--Esha Shah "Zygon" (12/2/2024 12:00:00 AM)
"Wild Experiment is a very well-written book that sheds a new light on how to perceive science. It provides good grounds for rejecting naïve arguments about objective and value-free knowledge in science."--Kostas Kampourakis "Quarterly Review of Biology" (3/1/2024 12:00:00 AM)
"Perhaps humanities scholars such as Schaefer can be useful in the climate crisis. They can help scientists pay attention to how knowledge feels--and thus how to be more effective in communicating it."--Amy Frykholm "Christian Century" (9/1/2023 12:00:00 AM)
"This fascinating book is a valuable contribution to the field of affect studies and secularism studies, as it starts a first conversation between these previously somewhat unconnected fields."--Nur Yasemin Ural "Politics, Religion & Ideology" (8/3/2023 12:00:00 AM)
"Through Schaefer's endeavor to expand the conversation between secularism studies and STS, the field of STS has an illuminating new vantage from which to look at knowledge, feeling, and belief. And it feels right."-- "Society for the Social Studies of Science Ludwik Fleck Prize Committee"
"Wild Experiment is an indispensable addition to any course syllabus on race, religion, affect theory, and any interdisciplinary topic on the intersections between feeling and thinking."--Abdulrahman Bindamnan "Material Religion" (6/15/2023 12:00:00 AM)
"Inaugurate[s] a project of secular theorization that adds a distinctive and needed methodological angle to studies of the secular in North America. . . . A must-read for scholars of American religions. . . ."--Valeria Vergani "American Religion" (5/1/2023 12:00:00 AM)