Year: 2014
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Blogging the Circling of the Square
Members from the Making Science Public programme co-organised a very successful interdisciplinary conference (20-22 May) with the University of Nottingham’s Science, Technology and Society research Priority Group, led by Reiner Grundmann. Sarah Hartley, Philip Moriarty and Brigitte Nerlich were part of the conference committee and Warren Pearce contributed to a panel session. Almost all of…
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Academic jargon in the social sciences: self-indulgence or necessary evil?
The highly ambitious Circling the Square conference has just finished here at the Institute for Science and Society. It successfully brought together people from a wide range of disciplines around what we often describe as the science-policy interface. To get a flavour, why not check out the very active Twitter hashtag. My main impression from…
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The Impact awards: A short story for the Circling the square conference
This is a fictional story about impact written by Kate Roach for the Circling the Square conference on research, politics, media and impact (20-22 May 2014) The Impact Awards By KATE ROACH May 2114 “And here she is folks, the one and only Professor Madeleine Davies.” Vic Baker broadcast to the whole table as…
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A worm’s eye-view of science (communication)
I know this is a quirky one…. but bear with me…. Some recent tweets set me thinking about worms! This led me back to my childhood, to Charles Darwin, to regenerative medicine, to gardening, to children’s literature and education and, of course, science communication (I also remembered Alison Wollard’s 2013 Royal Institution Christmas lectures which…
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Designer babies: Are we reaching the end of the slippery slope?
A decade and a half ago Ruth Deech, then Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, said: “The public do not like, and we do not like the idea of designer babies” (quoted in The Independent, 18 October, 2000). That same year, John Harris, Sir David Alliance Professor of Bioethics at the University of…
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Doing science: Some reflections on methods
Over the last few months some members of our Institute, especially Bev Gibbs, Greg Hollin and I have had discussions about ‘methods’ in the (natural and) social sciences. In this post I want to dig a bit deeper into methods and perhaps clear up some confusions (or create more!). I’ll focus on four methodological concepts:…
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The impact of impact
This article by Ernesto Priego first appeared in Research Information and is reposted here with the author’s permission. It is based on a presentation at the UKSG conference (Connecting the Knowledge Community) earlier this month. Ernesto also maintains a blog on Digital Scholarship. The article complements an old blog post of mine on impact, but…
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On being a Science Public
POST BY STEVIENNA DE SAILLE I’m currently engaged in researching Responsible Research and Innovation, in particular its mandate for ‘inclusive engagement’. And so, a couple of weeks ago, I took advantage of an opportunity to do some ad-hoc ethnographic field research and went to attend two public engagement events which were part of my local…
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Tracking fluctuations in climate change debates
Our ESRC funded project on climate change is coming to an end soon and we are just starting to prepare our end of award conference in Amsterdam. As part of our project we intended to monitor and describe fluctuations in debates about climate change. This aim overlaps with that of a project within the Leverhulme…
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Climate realism: What does it mean?
During the publications of the various IPCC reports between September last year and today, I have increasingly come across the words ‘realism’ and ‘climate realism’. Here are just some examples: In a BBC report Roger Harrabin says about a draft of the IPCC WG3 report that it “adopts a new tone of realism”. This echoes…
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