Seminar med Karen Rader

Café Scientifique at 25+: A Populist ‘Movement’?

2022 represented the silver anniversary of Café Scientifique. The first such event was staged by Duncan Dallas, a BBC producer, at a wine bar in Leeds in May 1998 (Dallas 1999), and it was frequently billed as “a place where, for the price of a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, anyone can come to explore the latest ideas in science and technology.” Using archival accounts and assessments of the history of science cafés (in English and French), I will suggest that what was first envisioned as a broad ‘movement’ of events designed to bridge fraught relations between science and society became, in practice, a public science engagement community marked by more narrow national and local class, education, and cultural assumptions.

References Duncan Dallas 1999. Science in culture. Nature 399: 120. 0. https://doi.org/10.1038/20118

Professor Karen Rader studies and teaches the history of science, with a particular focus on the intersections of U.S. science with other social, cultural, and intellectual institutions. She is the author of "Making Mice" (Princeton UP, 2004) and the co-author of "Life on Display" (Chicago, 2014; with Victoria Cain). She co-edited the scholarly journal Journal of the History of Biology (2018-2022) and received grants and fellowships from the NSF (STS and AISL), ACLS, and the Mellon Foundation. She is now researching postwar twentieth-century U.S. informal and adult science education.