Popularization of Scientific Knowledge Around 1968: Performative Practices and the Normativity of the Popular

Using the example of disruptions and anti-rituals at West-German universities in the 1960s, this article examines how alternative knowledge and alternative conceptions of science were enforced in the 1968 movement, and what consequences this had for the conception of the roles of experts and laypeople, of professionals and their clients. Starting from time-specific semantics of »masses« and »elites« and notions of popularity as a result of manipulation and strategic agitation, actionist forms of critique and subversion of traditional role relations in the scientific sphere are embedded in a process of the discovery of the performative as a medium of »popularization from below.« It becomes apparent that popularization in the 1968 movement was committed to a normative concept of the popular, according to which only knowledge was considered popular that was discovered and constructed by the masses for the masses in a process of merging reflection and social practice. © 2023, The Author(s).