Category: public participation
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Ash dieback (Chalara), science, and plant biosecurity
Much has changed since the trade-related arrival of ash dieback (Chalara) at a nursery in Buckinghamshire, England, in February 2012. On the negative side, 652 sites across England, Scotland and Wales are now known to contain trees infected with the potentially fatal disease. Also, it is now accepted that the spread of the disease cannot…
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Making Science Public blog posts 2015: An overview
This year the Making Science Public blog has been dominated by two topics: climate change and synthetic biology. One topic is on the way out, so to speak, as the climate change focused project within our research programme is coming to an end. It will continue though in a new guise, in the shape of…
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Infectious futures
On Sunday (9 August) I did something for the first time. I went to a ‘con’ or convention: the Nine Worlds Geekfest 2015. How did this happen? A few months ago, Lydia Nicholas from Nesta approached me with a fascinating project. In collaboration with Joshua Ryan-Saha, the Assistant Manager of the Longitude Prize, she had…
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Nanoscience, images and technologies of visualisation: A space odyssey
This blog post is a story about an intellectual and collaborative adventure that should be all too familiar to academics. However, opportunities for such adventures may sadly be disappearing in an era of impact driven research. It is a story of how enthusiasm, curiosity, serendipity and collaboration can lead to unexpected and joyous outcomes. At…
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Citizen science
I recently wrote a post about ‘scientific citizenship’. Today I want to home in on a related concept: ‘citizen science’. First I’ll show you how the Oxford English Dictionary has defined the phrase; then I’ll examine how the concept was used in the news and who employed the concept first; and finally I’ll briefly reflect…
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Agilkia and public participation in science
On 12 November 2014 the space craft Rosetta will deploy its lander Philae and Philae will try to land on the Comet 67P or Churyumov-Gerasimenko. As I have written about the Rosetta mission and Philae, I thought I had to at least try and write something very short about the landing site (formerly known as…
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Risk assessment policy as regulatory science
This blog is a joint posting by Sarah Hartley and Warren Pearce Following the University of Nottingham’s Circling the Square conference an interesting debate emerged around some of the fundamentals of science: objectivity, the confounding of science with regulatory science and what counts as science. Much of this took place under a post by our colleague,…
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Publicness and Öffentlichkeit – some linguistic musings
Since Roman times, the word ‘public’ has been deeply embedded in the English language, from republic to publican to public convenience; but it still causes problems, as we have discovered several times on the pages of this blog. ‘Public’ has multiple meanings; it is a staple of academic inquiry; but it is not a word…
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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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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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