Science for the People: Documents from America's Movement of Radical Scientists(Science/Technology/Culture)

For the first time, this book compiles original documents from Science for the People, the most important radical science movement in U.S. history. Between 1969 and 1989, Science for the People mobilized American scientists, teachers, and students to practice a socially and economically just science, rather than one that served militarism and corporate profits. Through research, writing, protest, and organizing, members sought to demystify scientific knowledge and embolden ""the people"" to take science and technology into their own hands. The movement's numerous publications were crucial to the formation of science and technology studies, challenging mainstream understandings of science as ""neutral"" and instead showing it as inherently political. Its members, some at prominent universities, became models for politically engaged science and scholarship by using their knowledge to challenge, rather than uphold, the social, political, and economic status quo.

Highlighting Science for the People's activism and intellectual interventions in a range of areas - including militarism, race, gender, medicine, agriculture, energy, and global affairs - this volume offers vital contributions to today's debates on science, justice, democracy, sustainability, and political power.

About the Author :
Sigrid Schmalzer is professor of history, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Daniel S. Chard is lecturer in history, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Alyssa Botelho is an MD/PhD candidate in the history of science, Harvard University.

Review :

"This compilation . . . promotes incorporating scientific and technical solutions to intractable problems through research, activism, and communication. The editors' goal is to rebuild trust in the scientific method in the service of the public good. Radical indeed."--CHOICE

"[A]n important contribution to the growing body of literature on the history of science and technology in the 1970s . . . Students of modern U.S. history or of the long 1960s or 1970s will find it useful as evidence of how deeply Americans of the New Left were engaged in global political debates and of how diverse the countercultural sentiments of those decades were."--Isis: A Journal of the History of Science

"This volume is long overdue. Its value is to illuminate the critical role of Science for the People in generating scholarly understandings of how science and technology are shaped by power relations, and to illuminate the ways in which these relationships might be drawn upon to produce a more just society. It will be a very important contribution to the history of science, and to science and technology studies."--Kelly Moore, author of Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military, 1945-1975