Honored to have a chapter (co-written w/ Tom Turnbull) in the volume Big Science in the 21st Century edited by a team headed by Pano Charitos & Theo Arabatzis. Despite the title, there's a long historical section incl. an impressive line-up of authors... iopscience.iop.org/book/edit/97... - ThreadSky

ccmmody.bsky.social • 261 days ago

Honored to have a chapter (co-written w/ Tom Turnbull) in the volume Big Science in the 21st Century edited by a team headed by Pano Charitos & Theo Arabatzis. Despite the title, there's a long historical section incl. an impressive line-up of authors...

https://iopscience.iop.org/book/edit/978-0-7503-3631-4

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ccmmody.bsky.social•261 days ago

For our chapter, Tom & I write ab/ three arms of the US federal govt that "turned" in the 1970s: NASA (which shrank), the NSF (which grew), and the National Laboratories (which stayed ab/ the same but transitioned from AEC to ERDA to the DOE)...

https://iopscience.iop.org/book/edit/978-0-7503-3631-4/chapter/bk978-0-7503-3631-4ch31

krekberg.bsky.social•261 days ago

Looking forward to read this!

ccmmody.bsky.social•261 days ago

We argue that by the end of the 1960s, all 3 faced an imperative to move away from Cold War aims & respond to needs of civil society. Their initial forays in that direction were scattered, but esp. from 1973 to 1980 or so energy R&D became the focus of their civilianization...

ccmmody.bsky.social•261 days ago

But we show that the turn toward energy was also in part a turn toward the market & thus that the energy crisis was a vehicle for importing neoliberalish ideas that remained influential in US federal agencies long after the energy crises of the 1970s receded...

ccmmody.bsky.social•261 days ago

that's most obvious w/ the NSF's Research Applied to National Needs program, which had its roots in late Great Society liberalism but shifted under Nixon toward studies of productivity, efficient government (sort of proto-NPM) & energy (both alternative & fossil fuel)...

ccmmody.bsky.social•261 days ago

RANN was always opposed by many scientists in & out of NSF & was thus killed off under Carter. But we argue that in many ways RANN didn't die, but rather the NSF simply *became* a bigger version of RANN...

ccmmody.bsky.social•261 days ago

That's an argument I originally hoped to put in The Squares but didn't have time/room for a chapter on the NSF & RANN. So it's been a pleasure to explore the topic further w/ Tom. Many thanks to Panos & Theo for the opportunity to publish this work in their volume.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262543613/the-squares/

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