Social Movements and the Politicization of Science

Abstract

It is doubly appropriate that my contribution in honor of Stevan Dedijer should deal with the relation of the ecology, or new environmental, movement to the development of science and technology. As has been the case with so many valuable concepts in the social study of science, Stevan was one of the first to speak of the “politicization of science” in the late 1960s. From his vantage point in Lund, at his recently established Research Policy Program, Dedijer, the renegade old leftist, found himself confronted by a new generation of critics of science and society. He grew aware of a shift from what had previously been a more narrowly-defined science policy discourse to a broader social discourse over the politics of science. Of course, this shift was not confined to Lund, nor to Sweden; it was rather a kind of universal phenomenon. But I like to think of Dedijer’s RPP — or RPI, as it now calls itself, for the program has become an institute — as one of the pioneers in the international academic response to this shift. Under Stevan’s inspiration, we were discussing these matters at least as early as anyone else. As so often, Stevan Dedijer was well before his time. Before there was a field calling itself the social study of science, or, more precisely, the political sociology of science, Stevan and his humble followers were practising the trade. (2)