To popularize or not to popularize Darwinism in Franco’s Spain
Clara Florensa2018, Roundtable: "Popular Science in Franco's Spain". European Society for the History of Science Biennial Conference 2018 in conjunction with the British Society for the History of Science, London 14-17 September. Theme: Unity and Disunity
Although, in the last decades, the historiography of popular science/science popularization has significantly evolved from the “deficit model” legacy to “knowledge in transit” and the “participatory turn” (Secord 2004, Bucchi, Neresini 2007, Topham 2009, Nieto-Galan 2016), not much is known about the role of popular science in 20th-century Western societies (Bowler 2009, Schirrmacher 2013), and even less about the role of science popularization in dictatorial regimes, in the “age of extremes” – as historian Eric Hobsbawm defined the century-. Since non-democratic, dictatorial regimes have a very weak “public sphere”, often submitted to strict government control and censorship, the audiences’ epistemological role remains highly problematic. To what extend did readers, visitors, patients, users, and consumers, among other audiences, shape science in that kind of top-down, vertical and hierarchical political contexts? Was there “knowledge in transit”, if any, under a strict social control and repression? Was popular science/science popularization a tool for the legitimation of a dictatorship? This round table will try to answer these questions through the analysis of several cases studies in Francoist Spain (1939-1975) (Riquer, 2010). The regime resulted from the fascist victory in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), and lasted up to the 1970s (Preston 1995), in a country, in which, after years of totalitarian rule – 1940s and 1950s-, the introduction of economic liberalism – from the 1960s onwards- was fully incompatible with political freedom in the public sphere. Papers on environmental controversies (Santiago Gorostiza), national parks (Judit Gil), Darwinism (Clara Florensa), popular astronomy (Pedro Ruiz-Castell), science on the air (Jordi Ferran), the public image of the chemical industry (Agustí Nieto-Galan), among other examples, will contribute to build up a stronger interpretative framework on how and why did popular science circulate in that dictatorial regime.