Looking for the bad teachers

the radical science movement and its transnational history

Simone Turchetti

pp. 77-101

in: Elena Aronova, Simone Turchetti (eds), Science studies during the Cold War and beyond, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

This chapter explores how the 1968 protest in US and European university campuses gave impetus to the "radical science" movement and, in turn, informed developments in the history of science studies. The focus of the study is Western Europe (Great Britain and Italy especially). In particular, the chapter seeks to explain how the protest forged new transnational links between scholars conceptualizing the "non-neutrality" of science and willing to use this notion in the critique of contemporary societies. This allowed them to move beyond traditional appraisals focusing on the controversial uses of science and pay greater attention to its making and implications for cultural and material production. In this way these intellectuals highlighted shortcomings in the management of scientific research both in the Western and Eastern blocs. Although the non-neutrality concept has found widespread application in the historical study of science, also informing the work of a new generation of scholars, the chapter argues that its political suggestions have hardly ever become a distinctive feature of this literature, thus trying to explain what has happened in the transition from political radicalism to academic work.