Oberkrainer Communism

This chapter discusses the Sixth Congress, Comintern, which was run by Soviet bigwigs and a few representative party leaders from the West that sat as its steering Political Secretariat. It highlights the Balkan Bureau that was headed by Bohumír Šmeral, one of the founders of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. It also mentions British science-fiction writer H. G. Wells, a socialist and communist sympathizer, who visited Moscow in the early 1920s as a guest of Vladimir Lenin and realized that even the highest-ranking officials' clothes were falling apart. The chapter recounts how tried to loosen up the revolutionary course by introducing the NEP, which was supposed to stimulate small farms on private plots to produce basic market supply. It demonstrates how the advance of fascism pushed more parties underground, leading them to become utterly dependent on organizational and material assistance from abroad.

Barriers to Learning for Sustainability: Reflections from a British Science Teacher

We collectively face a constellation of complex and interconnected environmental, social, and economic problems that threaten human and planetary wellbeing now and in the future. Learning that enables students across all levels and settings of education to become change agents for a more sustainable future, is widely expected to play a crucial role. However, “education as usual” with its one-way transmission of information from teacher to passive learners, disciplinary silos, and high-stakes, facts-based assessments, will not suffice to equip learners with the knowledge and competencies needed to address chronic and complex obstacles to sustainability. Forging a more sustainable path forward will require rethinking of traditional educational systems that were designed for different times. It will also necessitate a shift from traditional, teacher-centered pedagogies to strategies that nurture action-oriented, experiential and reflective learning in the face of complexity, uncertainty, and rapid change. In this contribution, the reflections of a British science teacher provide a first-hand perspective on the disconnect between the international discourse on transformative learning for sustainability and everyday classroom practice within the constraints of prevailing educational systems.

‘We have come to be destroyed’: The ‘extraordinary’ child in science fiction cinema in early Cold War Britain

Depictions of children in British science fiction and horror films in the early 1960s introduced a new but dominant trope: the ‘extraordinary’ child. Extraordinary children, I suggest, are disturbing because they violate expected developmental norms, drawing on discourses from both the ‘psy’ sciences and early neuroscience. This post-war trope has been considered by film and literature scholars in the past five years, but this existing work tends to present the extraordinary child as an American phenomenon, and links these depictions to adults’ psychoanalytical anxieties about parenthood and the family. This article, considering Village of the Damned (1960), Children of the Damned (1963), The Damned (1963), and Lord of the Flies (1963), will contend that the extraordinary child was British before it was American, and tapped as much into nuclear anxieties generated by the early Cold War as fears about the ‘permissive society’, especially given that many of these films preceded the peak of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and were based on British science fiction of the 1950s. The ‘psy science’ that was dominant in these films was developmental psychology, not psychoanalysis. Moreover, adolescents as well as adults were key audiences for these films. Drawing on self-narrative essays written by English adolescents aged 14 to 16 between 1962 and 1966, I will demonstrate that this age group employed their own fears of nuclear war and their knowledge of psychological language to challenge adult authority, presenting a counter-narrative to adult conceptions of the abnormal and irresponsible ‘rising generation’.

Public science in the private garden: Noblewomen horticulturalists and the making of British botany c. 1785–1810

This study considers three noblewomen – Lady Amelia Hume (1751–1809), Jane Barrington (1733–1807), and Mary Watson-Wentworth, Marchioness of Rockingham (c. 1735–1804) – whose contributions to plant studies were so important that Linnean Society President James Edward Smith dedicated three books to them. Their skills in cultivating newly imported exotic plants rivaled those of elite nurserymen, and taxonomists of the highest caliber came to depend on them to unlock information encoded within flowers to enable classification and publication. Eventually, the women played strategic roles within national scientific studies of the world’s plants orchestrated by Smith, Joseph Banks, and William Roxburgh. The stories of Hume, Barrington, and Rockingham complicate our understandings of the gendered, professional, and disciplinary hierarchies of knowledge that constituted British science in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They also resituate the domestic hothouse as a publicly engaged laboratory and museum.

The Multifarious Mr. Banks

As official botanist on James Cook's first circumnavigation, the longest-serving president of the Royal Society, advisor to King George III, the “father of Australia,” and the man who established Kew as the world's leading botanical garden, Sir Joseph Banks was integral to the English Enlightenment. Yet he has not received the recognition that his multifarious achievements deserve. This book reveals the true extent of Banks's contributions to science and Britain. From an early age Banks pursued his passion for natural history through study and extensive travel, most famously on the HMS Endeavour. He went on to become a pivotal figure in the advancement of British scientific, economic, and colonial interests. With his enquiring, enterprising mind and extensive network of correspondents, Banks's reputation and influence were global. Drawing widely on Banks's writings, the book sheds light on his profound impact on British science and empire in an age of rapid advancement.

Angela Saini: dispelling the myths of science past

Angela Saini is a British science journalist and author. She presents radio and television programmes on the BBC, and her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Sunday Times, Prospect, New Scientist, New Humanist and Wired among others. She has won a number of national and international journalism awards. She spoke to Emma Pettengale, Managing Editor of The Biochemist.

Reaching non-specialist audiences and engaging them with science at an affordable seaside campsite

In 2018, the British Science Association piloted a project that involved partnering with an activity provider and campsite in Ramsgate to determine whether affordable, accessible campsites near the seaside would be an effective location to reach audiences unengaged with science and engage them with food sustainability and eating insects. Results suggested that mostly unengaged audiences were present and that their attitude towards science improved after taking part. Future work should trial different activities and campsite partnerships across the UK, on a larger scale and at busier times of year.