This dissertation improvement award is being used to defray the costs of major research trips in the United States to various repositories and libraries holding literature on the Appropriate Technology (AT) movement. Defined by its preference for small-scale, democratically controllable technologies that are not capital intensive, adaptable to local cultural conditions, and environmentally sustainable, the AT movement has been dismissed by some scholars as a product of the self-indulgent countercultural escapism of the 1960s and 70s. Others have seen great promise in the movement's ideas and projects. Through extensive archival research, oral histories, and empirical observation of demonstration projects at governmental and non-governmental organizations across the nation, the student will use primary sources and intensive immersion in the ideas and activities which shape and constitute the AT movement to consider the merits of these alternative views. The dissertation will examine the historical significance of the AT movement and explore its relationship to the environmental and sustainable agriculture movements, as well as its views on urbanization, professionalization, and democratic participation. The work will attempt also to place the AT critique of industrial society in the context of a growing body of American social criticism of orthodox technological practice. By evaluating the promise of the movement's vision, the dissertation fills an important gap in American historical scholarship and brings contemporary deliberation over America's technological direction into sharper focus.
