Category: Language
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Certainty
There has recently been some discussion in climate change circles about climate sensitivity and predictions of warming trends about which I will not talk, as I have no expertise in those fields. However, as I am nevertheless trying to keep up-to-date, I recently read a reblogged blog post about just such issues on And then…
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Do online user comments provide a space for deliberative democracy?
This is a guest post by Luke Collins who is working with Brigitte Nerlich on an ESRC funded project dealing with climate change as a complex social issue. Yesterday, he gave talk about his research to an interdisciplinary audience attending the Institute for Science and Society/STS PG seminar series. The internet has enabled traditional newspaper…
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Science as a cultural institution: The role of metaphors
I have recently discovered some (old) books written by Jacob Bronowski, scientist and science communicator, which are a real joy to read. I wrote a blog post based on them where I explored issues around science and values; I also promised to write something about his views of metaphor. Finding likenesses For Bronowski science and…
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The ‘Making Science Public’ blog: What is it for?
Our ‘Making Science Public’ blog puzzles some readers, and perhaps rightly so. One blogger in particular pointed out recently that he found what we are doing ‘confusing’. This confusion emerged in particular in the context of us posting some guest-posts on climate science and climate politics (and climate scepticism) and also in the context of…
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The language of knowledge: A new tower of Babel?
For some time I have been intrigued by the word ‘knowledge’. The more I hear it being used, the less I understand its meaning. The confusion increases with every ‘compound’ use that I come across (in linguistics a ‘compound’ refers to a combination of two or more words). Most recently I came across the compound…
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Abseiling down the climate cliff metaphor
Since its very beginning in the 1980s, public discourse about climate change has been structured by metaphors. We had the greenhouse effect, the carbon footprint, the hockey stick, the tipping point, and we also had climategate; and to these metaphors we can now add the ‘climate cliff’ (which one can almost see as an upside…
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The Threat of Fracking: Real or Constructed?
Guest post by Dr. Rusi Jaspal, Research Fellow on the ESRC’s Climate Change as a Complex Social Issue programme in the School of Sociology & Social Policy. (This post can be read in conjunction with Rusi’s 2014 article in The Conversation) Global energy consumption is likely to rise significantly over the next two decades with…
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Taking charge of the apocalypse: On serendipity, walruses and last men
A week ago somebody sent me this YouTube video of a walrus that makes noises on command. I sent it on to a few people, including my sister. She sent me back a picture of a sea lion taken while on holiday in Alaska, which I have used as the featured image for this blog.…
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Making science public: The issue of language (jargon)
This is a guest blog by Gregory Hollin, a PhD student at the Institute for Science and Society (School of Sociology and Social Policy) Over recent days there has been a fascinating blog-based debate of great interest to the Making Science Public agenda. This debate focused on the nature of writing in the natural and…
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Metaphors in science and society
I recently had an interesting twitter conversation with Alex Brown, Peter Broks, Bev Gibbs, Angela Cassidy and Sophia Collins about some outdated metaphors for the spread of knowledge and for science communication, for example as transmission or transporting of ideas from one head to another and so on. I also read two interesting blog posts…
Making Science Public 