Award for Buckminster Fuller project

Congratulations to NeuWrite Nordic participant, science journalist, and scholar Pasi Toiviainen for winning the prestigious Aalto University dissertation award for his psychobiographical reinterpretation of the life and works of Buckminster Fuller.

At NeuWrite we've been excited to try to help workshop the development of Pasi's project on Fuller into a possible story about science for a general audience. And it is an interesting story indeed. Comments from the Aalto award committee:

Pasi Toiviainen’s doctoral thesis Genius or Charlatanry? is an outstanding and internationally significant scholarly work. It tackles the life and work of Buckminster fuller, who has been canonized as the protagonist and pioneer of ecological thinking, from a completely new perspective. Toiviainen’s thesis shows that a major part of Fuller’s achievements were based on plagiarism and fabrication. Toiviainen uses psychobiographical theories in a creative and original manner, supported by very extensive sources and meticulous attention to detail. Toiviainen has also forensically examined Fuller’s own writings, newspapers and magazines, and an extremely rich and extensive research literature.

This well-written thesis is likely to attract considerable attention as it challenges the accuracy of existing perceptions of the achievements, reputation, and high-level status that Fuller has enjoyed for more than 70 years. The findings are exceptionally significant for the research field and will present a new and original addition to Fuller scholarship, and more generally the historiography of ecological thinking of the 20th century.