Year: 2013
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Mitigation, adaptation, geoengineering: Patterns of discourse, patterns of mystery
This blog relates more to an ESRC project on climate change than to the Leverhulme project on climate change and scepticism, but I think there is a tangential link. As part of the ESRC project, we are interested in finding patterns in climate change communication and policy over time and across countries. In that context…
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Making science public is a snowclone
Recently Warren Pearce has been working on a paper in which he discusses the famous Bloomberg Businessweek front cover proclaiming “It’s global warming, stupid”. It was published on November 5, 2012, after Hurricane Sandy had hit New York. (The magazine bears the name of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg) This headline is obviously modelled…
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Neo-liberalism: a problem of social science and for society
This is a post by JOHN HOLMWOOD, sparked by some discussions on twitter and on our ‘Making Science Public’ internal discussion list. A recent post by John Field has called neo-liberalism an ‘overworked concept’, much in use in the UK social science, but less frequently elsewhere. He implies that its use is largely normative, and…
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Responsible innovation and close encounters of the third kind
Responsible (Research and) Innovation is gradually becoming a cornerstone of ‘making science (and technology)’ in Europe, intended to steer innovation to the ‘right’ impacts in an ethical and democratic way. When reading various chapters in a book on responsible innovation that has just been published by Richard Owen et al., I began to think that…
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Bring on the Yawns: Time to Expose Science’s “Dirty Little Secret”
Guest post by visiting fellow, Jeff Tamblyn, film maker and director of Kansas vs. Darwin. As a visiting fellow in the “Making Science Public” project, I’ve had a great first week at the University of Nottingham, filled by conversations with social science scholars and capped off with the events of May Fest – a day in…
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Science communication: Bridging theory and practice
On Friday 17 May 2013 I was at the Science Communication Conference 2013, organised by the British Science Association. I participated in a session on ‘Bridging theory and practice’ coordinated by Paul Manners, Director of the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement and Helen Featherstone, Project Manager (Public Engagement) for the CATALYST project at Exeter…
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Debating empty chairs: creationism, climate and public engagement
This week, Making Science Public has been very proud to welcome US film director Jeff Tamblyn during his UK visit. On Wednesday we screened his amazing film, Kansas vs Darwin, a documentary charting the attempts by members of the Kansas School Board to introduce creationism and intelligent design into high school science teaching. The film…
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Gabriel Tarde and science communication – some reflections
More than a century ago the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde began to think seriously about knowledge, influence, politics and publics (Tarde, 1895, 1898, 1903; see here). Most importantly, he wanted to study the dynamics of interaction between various actors in networks of ‘conversation’ (Nerlich, 1992, 1996) (Clark, 1969, Katz, 1993, Katz, 2006). Communication, opinion, power…
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Public Worth of STS: Drawing on STS Sensibilities to Inform the Design of an Ethical Surveillance System
Here at Nottingham we are busy preparing to host the Science in Public conference in July. It is all very exciting and looks like it is shaping up to be a busy event with around 90 papers – the draft programme will be announced and registration opened very soon .. perhaps even this week. In…
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Epigenetics: Switching the power (and responsibility) from genes to us?
We have always known that we are who we are because of our ancestors. We also know in ever more detail that we are who we are because of our genes. Since 1953 we know the structure of the genes that are passed down from generation to generation and since 2003 we know the structure…
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