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This book explores the appropriation of science in French society and the development of an urban scientific culture. Science underwent a process of commodification and popularization during the eighteenth century as more and more individuals sought to acquire some knowledge of scientific activities and as more and more people entered public debates on science. Popular science took many forms in the eighteenth century. While books, periodicals, universities, and academies all provided a breadth of scientific popularization at different levels and for different audiences, this book focuses on popular science within urban culture more generally. More than ever before, public lectures and demonstrations, clubs, and other activities arose in the eighteenth century as new opportunities for the general population to gain access to and appropriate science. These arenas for popular science were not restricted to people of a certain education. In fact, popular science, and public lecture courses in particular, was often set at a level that could be understood by pretty much anyone. This was a bone of contention between popularizers and their critics who felt that in some cases popular science lacked any sort of real scientific content. In reality, some popularizers had specific theoretical content in mind for their courses while others were admittedly more interested in theatrics. Identifying the audience, cost, and location of popular science helps reveal its place in urban culture. The book looks at the audience, identified through advertisements and course descriptions, as well as the economics of courses.
physics courses. Just as members of the general public saw fit to offer their opinions of divining rods or support ballooning through subscriptions, so too did they feel they could tackle the job of shaping a new government. The appropriation of Enlightenment through public lecture courses of all kinds provided people with a sense of empowerment and entitlement. In any case, popularizers continued to disseminate science throughout the early years of the Revolution. The number of public lecture CONCLUSION 149 courses advertised in 1789 and 1790 in the Affiches de Paris
important part of their research careers. In this chapter we will explore the history of research communication, from research professionalisation to the creation of learned societies and public lectures, the role of museums and exhibitions, covering almost four hundred years of notable research communication activities and setting the scene for developments from the twentieth century onwards which will be covered in the remainder of the book. This chapter will draw to a close at the outset of the twentieth century, at the end of an era when research had shifted from the
cabinets.” The authors of guidebooks encouraged travelers and visitors to Paris from the French provinces or even from beyond the borders of France to attend 46 POPULAR SCIENCE AND PUBLIC OPINION popular science classes. These authors regarded such courses as one of the attractions of Paris, and books detailing the sights of the capital never failed to mention public lectures.7 More specific social groups were also singled out as potential auditors. Royalty and members of the aristocracy, for example, commonly witnessed Nollet’s demonstrations, and both he and Brisson
children’s literature and text books, public lectures and forms of entertainment. 3 It concludes that Liverpool had a particularly warm, as well as merely functional, relationship with empire. Liverpool’s association with empire through the operation of its port and ancillary services needs little discussion here. Trade on an increasingly global scale before and after the
In 1863, a group of thirteen Māori, led by Wesleyan lay preacher William Jenkins, arrived in England to present illustrated public lectures on New Zealand. This visit offers a rare and interesting insight into Māori and European encounter in the nineteenth century through the words of the protagonists themselves in the form of their surviving letters and diaries, coupled with a plethora of visual images. The tour culminated in an audience with Queen Victoria at Osborne House. In this particular encounter the “performance” of identity is aptly expressed through the medium of dress. The visit offers a unique view of not only how she observed them and how they saw her, but also more importantly, how they perceived themselves.
institutions, I explore it through the appropriation of science, in the form of public lecture courses, participation in public science, and case studies demonstrating how people used their newly acquired knowledge. Clearly, then, the culture of Enlightenment science expanded and spread throughout the urban world; but, this leads to the question of exactly why eighteenth-century science interested people. Historians of science have analyzed the place of science in public and the culture of science more generally. Works by Paula Findlen, Jan Golinski, and Larry Stewart have
Refiguring childhood stages a series of encounters with biosocial power, which is a specific zone of intensity within the more encompassing arena of biopower and biopolitics. Assembled at the intersection of thought and practice, biosocial power attempts to bring envisioned futures into the present, taking hold of life in the form of childhood, thereby bridging being and becoming while also shaping the power relations that encapsulate the social and cultural world(s) of adults and children. Taking up a critical perspective which is attentive to the contingency of childhoods – the ways in which particular childhoods are constituted and configured – the method used in the book is a transversal genealogy that moves between past and present while also crossing a series of discourses and practices framed by children’s rights (the right to play), citizenship, health, disadvantage and entrepreneurship education. The overarching analysis converges on contemporary neoliberal enterprise culture, which is approached as a conjuncture that helps to explain, and also to trouble, the growing emphasis on the agency and rights of children. It is against the backdrop of this problematic that the book makes its case for refiguring childhood. Focusing on the how, where and when of biosocial power, Refiguring childhood will appeal to researchers and students interested in examining the relationship between power and childhood through the lens of social and political theory, sociology, cultural studies, history and geography.
Women Art Workers constitutes the first comprehensive history of the network of women who worked at the heart of the English Arts and Crafts movement from the 1870s to the 1930s. Challenging the long-standing assumption that the Arts and Crafts simply revolved around celebrated male designers like William Morris, this book instead offers a new social and cultural account of the movement, which simultaneously reveals the breadth of the imprint of women art workers upon the making of modern society. Thomas provides unprecedented insight into how women – working in fields such as woodwork, textiles, sculpture, painting, and metalwork – navigated new authoritative roles as ‘art workers’ by asserting expertise across a range of interconnected cultures so often considered in isolation: from the artistic to the professional, intellectual, entrepreneurial, and domestic. Through examination of newly discovered institutional archives and private papers, and a wide range of unstudied advertisements, letters, manuals, photographs, and calling cards, Women Art Workers elucidates the critical importance of the spaces around which women conceptualised alternative creative and professional lifestyles: guild halls, exhibitions, homes, studios, workshops, and the cityscape. Shattering the traditional periodisation of the movement as ‘Victorian’, this research reveals that the early twentieth century was a critical juncture at which women art workers became ever more confident in promoting their own vision of the Arts and Crafts. Shaped by their precarious gendered positions, they opened up the movement to a wider range of social backgrounds and interests, and redirected the movement’s radical potential into contemporary women-centred causes.
The major part of this book project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 700913.
This book is about two distinct but related professional cultures in late Soviet
Russia that were concerned with material objects: industrial design and
decorative art. The Russian avant-garde of the 1920s is broadly recognised to
have been Russia’s first truly original contribution to world culture. In
contrast, Soviet design of the post-war period is often dismissed as hackwork
and plagiarism that resulted in a shabby world of commodities. This book
identifies the second historical attempt at creating a powerful alternative to
capitalist commodities in the Cold War era. It offers a new perspective on the
history of Soviet material culture by focusing on the notion of the ‘comradely
object’ as an agent of progressive social relations that state-sponsored Soviet
design inherited from the avant-garde. It introduces a shared history of
domestic objects, handmade as well as machine-made, mass-produced as well as
unique, utilitarian as well as challenging the conventional notion of utility.
Situated at the intersection of intellectual history, social history and
material culture studies, this book elucidates the complexities and
contradictions of Soviet design that echoed international tendencies of the late
twentieth century. The book is addressed to design historians, art historians,
scholars of material culture, historians of Russia and the USSR, as well as
museum and gallery curators, artists and designers, and the broader public
interested in modern aesthetics, art and design, and/or the legacy of socialist
regimes.