Mittwoch, 08. November 2017, 17:15 - 18:45 iCal

Gastvortrag Prof. Christina Brandt

The "premature arrival of the future": Temporal shifts in the 1970s debates on life sciences and culture

Hörsaal 3E im Neuen Institutsgebäude (NIG)
Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien

Vortrag


In this talk, I will discuss shifting temporal concepts in the public debates about science and technology in the 1960s and the 1970s with a special focus on the life sciences. I will argue that the controversies about scientific developments in life sciences, especially research on genetic engineering, cloning and reproduction, contributed not only to major changes in the public view of the social consequences of science and technologies more generally in this period, but, moreover, to fundamentally changing social concepts of historical time and temporalities. In the 1970s, ideas of “progress”, but also the way of how the “future” of technologically driven societies was perceived, changed drastically. The public debates will be analyzed in the context of other developments that deeply affected the public view of technological outcomes at that time, such as ‘futurology’ or the increasing awareness of an environmental crisis since the early 1970s. It was a period of transition in which a futuristic discourse on techno-scientific optimism and technological utopia (that had been typical for the 1950s and 1960s) turned into a discourse of risks, crisis and the needs of prevention, leading to ideas of an ‘anticipation’ of future scientific developments as a main political task for present societies. As a result, the boundaries of temporal concepts such as the present and the future became blurred and a view of the future took shape in which the future was not conceptualized any more as an open, unpredictable or distant horizon but simply as an extension of the present.

Christina Brandt is Professor of History of Life Sciences and Philosophical Anthropology at the Institute for Philosophy I & Centre for Anthropological Knowledge in Scientific and Technological Cultures (CAST), Ruhr-Universität Bochum (DE).


Veranstalter

Doktoratskolleg "Naturwissenschaften im historischen, philosophischen und kulturellen Kontext"


Kontakt

Mag. Mag. Mag. Ramon Pils, DipTrans
DK Naturwissenschaften/Kontext
01 4277 40872
dksciences.geschichte@univie.ac.at