Claire Votava

UCLA

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Research Fellow

“Contesting Science and Technology: The British Radical Science Movement, 1968–1990”

This project investigates the British radical science movement, focusing on the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science (BSSRS), a pivotal but under-examined organization that emerged in the late 1960s to challenge the political and economic entanglements of science. Drawing on archival research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Wellcome Collection, the project explores two central questions: the transnational connections between the BSSRS and its American counterpart, Science for the People, and the movement’s place within a longer genealogy of British scientific dissent, stretching from the socialist science movements of the 1930s to the critical interventions of the British New Left. The project further situates the BSSRS within the conceptual afterlives of Luddism, tracing how historical analogies shaped strategies of scientific resistance. Ultimately, this research highlights how British radical science reimagined the role of science in society and questioned the technoscientific order from within.