Making Science Public: A blog on science, language and culture
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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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Climate change on Twitter 2013: who tweeted what about the IPCC?
Climate change is a fiercely debated public issue, with much of that debate taking place in various online fora. In a new paper for PLOS ONE with Kim Holmberg, Iina Hellsten and Brigitte Nerlich – Climate change on Twitter: topics, communities and conversations about the 2013 IPCC Working Group 1 report – I explore the…
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Adaptation
There has recently been a lot of talk about adaptation in the context of climate change. The Working Group II contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (WGII AR5), published last week, certainly referred to adaptation quite often. This is not surprising, as WG2 deals with “pervasive risks” posed by climate change and opportunities for…
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Moving Responsible Innovation Upstream: GM insects and the exclusion of alternatives
‘Responsible innovation’ was the focus of an earlier post by a colleague of mine, Sujatha Raman, who argued that the concept needs to be linked to a range of policy mechanisms to become more ‘policy relevant’. I’d like to explore this idea further. While framed as a concept that has the potential to shape the…
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Development interventions need to be more responsive to citizens’ priorities in the global South
GUEST POST BY TEMILADE SESAN, UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN The marble plaque commemorating the founding of the primary health centre in Oboto, a peri-urban agrarian community in Ondo state, Nigeria, declares the facility open ‘to the glory of God and the benefit of mankind’. In the decade or so that has elapsed since its opening, the…
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‘Energy for All’ and the Challenge of Responding to People’s Needs
GUEST POST BY DANIELLE GENT, LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY Meet Doña Maria. She is a mother, housewife, agricultural worker and shop-keeper, who lives with her two daughters in a rural community, located approximately 30 kilometres from Nicaragua’s capital city, Managua. Until recently, she was one of 1.4 billion people on this planet without access to electricity. That…
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Making Energy Research More Responsive: Public Dialogue as Experiment
The UK Civil Service Reform Plan includes a commitment to embedding systems that are open to a broad range of inputs, including those of the public. Public responsiveness is therefore recognized as a key characteristic of good governance including in the field of science and technology policy-making. Since the influential 2000 ‘Science and Society’ report…
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