From Radical Science to STS

Abstract

Many people who went on to become scholars and writers about technoscience in its social context, that is, to become contributors to the field now called Science and Technology Studies (STS), were involved in or influenced by counter-cultural and radical activities from the late 1960s, '70s and '80s. This Science as Culture forum consists of responses to a call to make sense of the biographical (or autobiographical) changes of such radical scientists and critical commentators on technoscience. Or to make sense of ways that subsequent STS academics have been influenced by that earlier generation and by the 'proliferation' since 'of new institutions of deliberation, participation, activism, enterprise, and social movement mobilization' (Moore et al., 2011, p. 505). These biographies of technoscience in this social context reveal the relationships, instruments and outcomes of power struggles as the scholars and writers have contributed the field of STS.We hope that making these biographies public may reveal previously hidden connections, similar to other work that seeks to reveal the interaction between the academic discipline and activism (Quet and Noel, 2014;Sang-yong, 2017). The essays in the forum are primarily social biographies, describing the social context of academic labor. Further, the essays foreground the importance of counterculture endeavors, including the radical science movement, in developing critical analysis of technoscience within STS. For some of the authors in the forum, these endeavors help to illustrate various legacies of counterculture, including the efforts to 'create new organizations that prefigured the society they wanted' (Taylor, this issue), as well as radical science that were turned into STS agendas, whether directly through the development of new institutions and models of learning, or obliquely, as touchstones for critical thinking or advocacy.Taken together, these essays are more than a reflection of lives in STS. In the words of Peter Taylor, they are a refractive practice, an opportunity for 'pausing to take stock and identify alternative paths ('refract') before leaving one phase/ project and moving to a new one' (Taylor and Szteiter, 2019, p. 47). Given the