STS Colloquium: Patrick Slaney Nov 8

Patrick-Slaney

Patrick Slaney of the UBC Department of History delivers an STS colloquium talk entitled “Scientific Freedom and the Limits of the Administrative State: Don K Price and the Bureau of the Budget on Science and Government” on Thurs, November 8, 5:00-6:30pm in Buchanan Tower 1197.

In this talk I’ll argue that public administration needs to be taken seriously as a field concerned with the relationship between knowledge, power and democracy. Specifically, I’ll argue that administrative concerns were an important and neglected influence on the creation of post-war science institutions (such as the NSF and AEC), and that the analysis developed by public administration thinkers can enrich our understanding of the politics of post-war science, which tends to be dominated by Vannevar Bush and concerns about the capture of scientists by the national security state.