Being Modern The Cultural Impact of Science in the Early Twentieth Century
 Edited by Robert Bud 
Paul Greenhalgh 
Frank James 
Morag Shiach

PDF E-BOOK
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10057847/1/Being-Modern.pdf

Foreword
History of science lacks organising narratives for the twentieth century.
This is especially true when we widen the lens to the discipline’s
more-inclusive coterie: science, technology, engineering, mathematics
and medicine. Mostly, we’ve chosen war as a narrative structure.
Add imperialism. Add globalisation, though that seems simply to be
imperialism by another name. We seek narratives that either describe or
explain science’s growing presence, resonance and (dare we suggest)
hegemony across a plenitude of landscapes. Try as we might, these
continue to prove elusive.
One viable choice engages the century’s endlessly nuanced
encounter with Modernity. Whatever Modernity is, or was, we seem
certain science is somehow intimately associated. At once science seems
causal for and caused by this thing, this philosophy, this miasma. Our
quest to delineate precisely what and how has led us scholars towards
ever more refined species of its genus. We seem to be getting somewhere,
though the going is slow and the way is sometimes lost.
Being Modern shifts our perspective from observer to participant.
The aim is to capture Modernity at work within mentalities, within
cultural and biographical aesthetics, within the collisions between
scientific and other things occurring in the lived experience of the people
we study and from within their perspective. This anthology is a collective
study of potency, infection and resistance.
The result is a refreshing alternative to scholastic delineations of
movements seen from abstracting distances. This collection of original
papers delivers richly researched, critical and thought-filled case studies
of Modernity as an actor’s category, observed in situ. It ranges across
familiar and new settings. It certainly will help us as we build a better
conceptualisation of the Modern both as project and product.
Joe Cain
Professor of History and Philosophy of Biology
Head of Department of Science and Technology Studies
UCL