Making Science Public: A blog on science, language and culture
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Metaphors, metaphors, metaphors
Recently somebody asked me something about metaphor and I thought to myself, what the heck do you know about metaphor? Actually, not an awful lot, given all the stuff I have written about it, or rather the stuff that I have written which involves some sort of reference to metaphor. So, I started to make…
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Public engagement with ‘post-normal science’
It is relatively rare, I think, for mainstream newspapers to deal with Science and Technology Studies (STS) concepts and discuss them publicly.* An article by Sonia Sodha from 20 March for The Guardian is an exception. She uses the concept of ‘post-normal science’ to try and shed some light on the vaccination debates in Europe.…
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From covidiots to vaxxies: How our pandemic language changed over a year
When the pandemic started in early 2020, I began to record some of the changes in our language that this global upheaval brought with it. The language of war was everywhere, a type of language that we are quite used to from other health emergencies. But a new language also began to emerge. We started…
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Symmetry as false balance? Questions for STS
I am not getting involved in the Richard Dawkins tweet debate about whether ‘science’ is a social construct or not. However, seeing the debate flow past me on Twitter triggered a stream of thoughts which I’ll summarise in this blog post – about STS, the symmetry principle, false balance, and how to find ways to…
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Percy and Ginny: Science and politics in space
For about a decade, I have, off and on, been writing blog posts about space, space probes and space travel as part of the Making Science Public blog. Since 2012, I have been following the Mars rover Curiosity on Twitter, or rather its digital alter ego the Sarcastic Rover. I have a cast iron model…
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Naming without shaming: A virus communication conundrum
We have all heard about the Kent strain of the coronavirus, or the UK or English strain for that matter, or the South African strain, or the Brazilian strain, not to forget the despicable references to the China or Wuhan virus by a former president of the United States. It’s good that we know about…
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Science Communication Research: Past Patterns and Future Perspectives
This post was first published by Alexander Gerber on the Public Understanding of Science Blog on 7 January 2021. It is cross-posted here with permission. This post provides an overview of a book Alex and his team recently published (open access) entitled Science Communication Research: An empirical field analysis. *** Just like other research fields…
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Mutation, vaccination, communication
It is extremely difficult to keep up with pandemic news at the moment. We are now a year into the Covid-19 pandemic and instead of just running away from the virus through social distancing, we are now engaging in a race with it through vaccination. Whether we will win the race depends on how many…
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Vaccines: Between hope and hesitancy
I was listening to the BBC Today programme on Saturday morning (30 January, 2020), becoming rather depressed about the current vaccine row, when I heard Nick Robinson talk about something I had wondered about: the absence of happy vaccination cards – a real gap in the greeting cards market. I had used an online card…
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Lockdown fatigue: A tale of two discourses
A while ago I wrote a brief post on ‘lockdown words’, amongst them ‘lockdown fatigue’. At the time I hadn’t noticed all the other quasi-synonyms, apart from ‘lockdown lethargy’. Over time more words crept past my horizon: behavioural fatigue, pandemic fatigue, isolation fatigue, quarantine fatigue and so on. In the UK, we are now in…
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