Everyone is welcome to the next installment of the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Colloquium Series. UCLA’s own Margaret Spaulding and Claire Votava will be presenting.

Meg’s talk is titled “Wasteland to Date Garden”: Eugenics and Agriculture in the California Desert. Previous historians have shown how the conservation movement inspired eugenicists, who anthropomorphized trees and forests in order to make eugenic arguments about racial preservation. This presentation will reveal how a different environment the desert- and different circumstances- agricultural expansion- nonetheless led to a similar result, wherein eugenic discourses of reproduction, control, and purity became entangled with the emergence and growth of the commercial date industry.

Claire will be presenting Between Radicalism and Technocracy: The Council for Science and Society and the Politics of Risk and Expertise, 1973-1990. This paper recovers the overlooked Council for Science and Society (1973-1990) to reconsider the history of technoscientific critique in late 20th-century Britain. Positioned alongside but distinct from the more activist British Society for Social Responsibility in Science, the CSS advanced a cautious, deliberative mode of critique through elite working parties and policy reports on risk, expertise, and technological governance. Its ambivalent stance- neither fully technocratic nor overtly radical- illuminates alternative models of scientific responsibility and the contested politics of expertise.

See you in the History of Science Room or join us over Zoom:

https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/rDDLSdqDQN2Qy6G7dBdcsQ