Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM)
University of Manchester
Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIoIR)
University of Manchester
Seminar, Monday 11 May, 13:00-14:00
Room 10.05, 10th Floor, Manchester Business School Harold Hankins Building
Booth Street West
Manchester, M15 6PB
https://goo.gl/maps/QhRZb
The Scientific Revolution that Wasn’t: Uncovering the Radical Science Movement
Alice Bell
Writer and campaigner specialising in the politics of S&T and Head of Campaign Communications at 10:10
Most scientific revolutions are more about politics than nature, but this is the story of an especially overtly political one. It's the story of the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science, BSSRS, or Bizrus to their friends. Science, these revolutionaries argued, had lost its way. Science had become too focused to the whims of senior staff and their cronies, allowing its energies to be applied to war and environmental destruction. If the public didn’t like science, so the argument went, maybe they had a point. In the shadow of the still-blazing light of the atomic bomb, with increasing concern over chemical and biological weapons as well as an emerging environmental crisis, science needed to take a good, hard look at itself. Elitist and stuffy, science had let itself fester a bit. The time had come to imagine a new way of doing science. Active and reasonably well-known throughout the 1970s, they fell apart in the 1980s and are largely forgotten today. We'll examine what they stood for, why they seemed to fail, and the long-term impact the movement had, even if the extreme change they called for never happened.
All are welcome and please feel free to pass this announcement on to interested colleagues.
Event co-organised by CHSTM and MIoIR
http://www.chstm.manchester.ac.uk/newsandevents/seminars/chstm/index.aspx
http://www.research.mbs.ac.uk/innovation/News-Events
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