Models of Public Engagement: Nanoscientists’ Understandings of Science–Society Interactions

This paper explores how scientists perceive public engagement initiatives. By drawing on interviews with nanoscientists, it analyzes how researchers imagine science–society interactions in an early phase of technological development. More specifically, the paper inquires into the implicit framings of citizens, of scientists, and of the public in scientists’ discourses. It identifies four different models of how nanoscientists understand public engagement which are described as educational, paternalistic, elitist, and economistic. These models are contrasted with the dialog model of public engagement promoted by social scientists and policymakers. The paper asks if and in what ways participatory discourses and practices feed back into scientists’ understandings, thus co-producing public discourses and science.     

Spaceship Archeology: Methodological Experiments in NSF Counter-Insurgency at the 2017 Oregon Eclipse Festival

Abstract

This article examines several aspects of knowledge production among practitioners of 21st century capitalism, critiquing the motivations, funding, methods, and dissemination of today’s politically and economically dominant epistemology. We document a methodological experiment undertaken during the Oregon Eclipse Festival—a week-long event coinciding with the solar eclipse that crossed the United States on August 21, 2017. As commissioned participants in the festival’s Art & Science exhibit, we designed an interactive archeological excavation that sought to produce material evidence corroborating the (un)reality of UFO activity in Oregon. From this performance, we highlight four insights into the relationship between science, evidence, and responsibility.     

Epistemological and Moral Conflict Between Religion and Science

Debates about religion and educational attainment often assume that members of certain religious groups do not seek out knowledge of science because they are opposed to the use of the scientific method. Using the science module of the 2006 General Social Survey, the analysis indicates that no religious group differs from the nonreligious comparison group in its propensity to seek out scientific knowledge. A more subtle epistemological conflict may arise when scientists make claims that explicitly contradict theological accounts. Findings indicate that Protestants and Catholics differ from the comparison group only on the very few issues where religion and science make competing claims. A third possible source of conflict may not be epistemological, but rather derives from opposition to what is understood as the public moral agenda of scientists. Findings indicate that conservative Protestants are opposed to scientific influence in public affairs due to opposition to the scientists’ moral agenda.     

Rhetorical Strategies for Scientific Authority: A Boundary-Work Analysis of ‘Climategate’

The term ‘Climategate’ refers to the episode in November 2009 when emails between climate scientists were stolen and published online. The content of this private correspondence prompted criticism from diverse commentators who cast doubts on the methods, claims, and members of the climate science community. In response, individual scientists and scientific institutions published statements responding to the allegations of scientific fraud. Gieryn's concept of ‘boundary-work’ can be used to analyse the rhetoric of scientists in situations where their legitimacy is disputed. More specifically, boundary-work can be used to analyse the responses of scientists in terms of: how they represent the attributes of science, what types of boundary-work they undertake (e.g. expulsion, expansion, and protection), and the professional interests that come into play. A boundary-work analysis of the commentaries published in the aftermath of Climategate reveals that scientists characterised climate science as consensual, asocial, and open. Scientists depicted climate science as consensual with the purpose of expelling dissenters and protecting areas of climate science from criticism. Scientists also described knowledge about climate as being ideally produced apart from society so that they could preserve their autonomy and exclude individuals who are accused of being ‘politically biased’. Scientists characterised climate science as necessarily open as the means to justify both existing and additional public funding for science and to avoid external corrective interventions against scientific opacity. Scientists and their critics alike interpreted the stolen emails as embarrassing deviations from the alleged social demands of a consensual, objective, and accessible science.     

Why Frankenstein is a Stigma Among Scientists

As one of the best known science narratives about the consequences of creating life, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) is an enduring tale that people know and understand with an almost instinctive familiarity. It has become a myth reflecting people’s ambivalent feelings about emerging science: they are curious about science, but they are also afraid of what science can do to them. In this essay, we argue that the Frankenstein myth has evolved into a stigma attached to scientists that focalizes the public’s as well as the scientific community’s negative reactions towards certain sciences and scientific practices. This stigma produces ambivalent reactions towards scientific artifacts and it leads to negative connotations because it implies that some sciences are dangerous and harmful. We argue that understanding the Frankenstein stigma can empower scientists by helping them revisit their own biases as well as responding effectively to people’s expectations for, and attitudes towards, scientists and scientific artifacts. Debunking the Frankenstein stigma could also allow scientists to reshape their professional identities so they can better show the public what ethical and moral values guide their research enterprises.     

Storywork in STEM-Art: Making,Materiality and Robotics within Everyday Acts of Indigenous Presence and Resurgence

Abstract

This article presents findings from TechTales, a participatory design research (PDR) project where learning scientists, public library staff members, informal science educators, and staff members from Native-American-serving organizations collaborated to design a family-based robotics workshop that was grounded in storytelling. We approach this by engaging Indigenous ways of knowing and being from a sociocultural learning theory perspective. Through analyzing families-in-interaction as they constructed dioramas with robotics that told their family stories, we explore how cultivating consequential learning environments in STEM is intimately intertwined with historicity, knowledge systems, and the agentic positioning of learners to design new technologies. We find that using storywork as the design focus of building dioramas created learning environments where computer programing and robotics became dynamic tools toward family-making, collaboration, and the active presencing of Indigenous knowledge systems and cultural practices. Living and interrelating with story and its knowledge systems through making were enactments of Indigenous resurgence in everyday ways. From a structure of social practices perspective, this opens up learning spaces for engagement in STEM-Art practices and in relation to other social practices of consequence, such as cultural flourishing and affiliation, collaboration and family-making, and societal repositioning.     

Tensions of Accountability: Scientists,Technicians and the Ethical Life of Data Production in Astronomy

ABSTRACT

Laboratory ethnographies have emphasized the importance of trust and accountability among scientists and technicians when working in co-presence. But what happens to their relations when data production is outsourced, widely separating scientists and technicians? In contemporary astronomy, observing has largely become a service that observatory staff members do for researchers. This has increased the efficiency of telescope use while also resulting in arrangements prone to some researchers’ dissatisfaction and a raised visibility of technicians’ work. Attending ethnographically to situated evaluations reveals that some data-using researchers and data-producing technicians typify each other as moral figures: staff observers come to be seen as objects of blame and scientists as excessively demanding users. Wherever data travel, the quality and quantity of data can serve as ethical affordances for assigning blame to staff technicians. By contrast, the moral figure of the excessively demanding data user does not travel beyond the observatory, and the social accountability of interactions that visiting astronomers experience in the observatory’s control room is confined to its situated enactment. As scientist–technician interactions have become discontinuous and fraught, moral figures and ethical accounts thus travel unevenly in the landscape of data production, and the importance of social interactions remains often unrecognized.     

Assembling Upstream Engagement: the Case of the Portuguese Deliberative Forum on Nanotechnologies

This article analyzes a deliberative forum on nanotechnologies, organized in Portugal within the scope of the research project DEEPEN—Deepening Ethical Engagement and Participation in Emerging Nanotechnologies. This event included scientists, science communicators and members of the “lay public”, and resulted in a position document which summarizes collective aspirations and concerns related to nano. Drawing upon our previous experience with focus groups on nanotechnologies—characterized by methodological innovations that aimed at suspending epistemological inequalities between participants—this paper delves into the performativity of the deliberative event, exploring some of the tensions and power/knowledge asymmetries generated by the forum. Recognizing that the design of participatory assemblages matters, we reflect on our role as facilitators and explore the difficulties in organizing exercises of upstream engagement with emerging technologies.     

Food Fight! The Swedish Low-Carb/High Fat (LCHF) Movement and the Turning of Science Popularisation Against the Scientists

Science popularisation is widely recognised as having its ‘political uses’ and as serving as a conventional means for buttressing the epistemic authority of the institutions of science in society. By separating the work of producing new knowledge from its dissemination, popularisation promotes public understanding and appreciation of science placed beyond public reach and influence. However, simply by insisting upon such a separation, so popularisation remains vulnerable to ‘capture’ by skilled and resourceful communicators intent on turning it against the established authority of scientists. This is a phenomenon which can be analysed in relation to the communicative strategies pursued by a collection of general practitioners, diabetics and self-styled dietary experts in Sweden championing a low-carbohydrate/high fat (LCHF) dietetics akin to the Diet Revolution initiated by Robert Atkins in the early 1970s. By dedicating themselves to achieving an overwhelming public presence in the propagation of simplified accounts of dietary science, the LCHF movement has been able to fashion science popularisation into a weapon capable of being turned back upon established dietary expertise in Sweden. In this effort they have proceeded on two fronts; firstly by debunking established dietary advice for failing to live up to idealised standards of ‘sound science’, and secondly, by effectively mobilising the personal testimony and endorsements of dieters themselves in order to publicly confirm the authenticity and trustworthiness of the LCHF regimen.     

Developmentalism And The Child In Nineteenth-Century Science

In recent years, public science events have been designed as a means to foster a dialogue between science and the public and to contribute to ongoing policy processes. Regardless of their tangible outcome, such events rely on a certain framing, reconfigure scientific knowledge and conceptualise the public in specific ways. These constructs are exemplified by a science festival that was held in the train station hall in Zurich. Novel insights can be gained from a spatial, an object and an actor-related approach borrowed from the artistic context: the discussions about the White Cube can be adapted to contribute to the analysis of the science festival. When we look into the spatial situation created to foster exchange about scientific knowledge, we find how the exhibition display is taking care of minor details. While the organisers transformed the station hall into a laboratory, they created a kind of dialogic situation that filled an authority gap as it equally enabled exchange. The objects put in place in the exemplary case helped to design a customer–supplier relationship between the public and science. Under the umbrella of the science event, a range of diverse research endeavours was homogenised and unified. The audience, finally, was invited to familiarise itself with scientific knowledge. However, they were allocated a consumer role that obliged them to remain guests in the laboratory environment of the station hall. Thus, public science events may be successful in attracting large attendance and allowing more experiences with science, but while they create novel forms of familiarisation with science for visitors, they do not necessarily remedy public doubts about science and technology.     

Knowledge Justice: An Opportunity for Counter-expertise in Security vs. Science Debates

ABSTRACT

Knowledge justice provides a conceptual framework to apply principles of social justice in environments of competing interests regarding science. Both knowledge and its making can be seen as a good to be distributed, including all voices for whom the science will matter. In this framework, knowledge production is shared among a broader constituency of knowers representing both local and cosmopolitan voices. The problem of knowledge injustice can be seen in the U.S. government’s recent attempt to secure scientific knowledge about H5N1 or avian bird flu virus. The censorship produced a global debate between scientists and policy-makers over how to balance the nation-state’s desire for security with the life science’s tradition of open and shared research. This conundrum, known as the dual-use dilemma, obscures larger questions that lie outside of expert-centered domains—namely the concerns of many communities in the Global South struggling with the impact of the virus in their daily lives. An example of such counter-expertise is that of the backyard poultry farmer whose ways of knowing are foreign to science and policy experts who frame the ways in which knowledge about H5N1 should be developed, controlled, and used. While the H5N1 debate illuminated competing positions regarding knowledge production between powerful elites, it ignored the social justice inequities produced by the dual-use dilemma. The concept of knowledge justice provides a way of thinking about science that can include locally situated counter-expertise, disrupting the dual-use dilemma produced by competing dominant priorities of security and public health.     

科学假说在揭示嗅觉奥秘中的作用--解读2004年度诺贝尔医学奖

通过分析2004年诺贝尔医学奖的发现过程,揭示假说对科学研究的指导意义.只有勤观察,多思考,大胆假设,小心求证,才能揭示自然规律.     

临床科研的成功与典范

通过分析2005年诺贝尔医学奖的发现过程,揭示从临床中发现问题对科学研究的重要意义。只有尊重事实、勇于挑战传统,在实践中拓展方向才能揭示自然规律。     

Public Participation and Scientific Citizenship in the Science Museum in London: Visitors’ Perceptions of the Museum as a Broker

ABSTRACT

Science museums in Europe play an emerging and important role as brokers between the public and policy-making institutions and are becoming platforms that enable scientific citizenship. To do so, museums rely on the participation of their visitors. However, little is known about the relation between visitors’ interest to participate, their engagement with science, and their perceptions of the museum as a platform of scientific citizenship. This study analyzes visitors’ interest in 3 levels of participation: Sharing opinions and feedback (the museum as “forum”); co-developing programs and activities; and participating in the governance of the museum. Quantitative analysis of the data from a survey conducted among 364 adult visitors to the Science Museum in London reveals that interest in the forum function of the museum does not depend on visitors’ prior engagement with science, but rather on how the museum enables the scientific citizenship of its visitors. However, for interest in co-development the reverse was found—previous engagement and frequent visits are more important than scientific citizenship. The forum function of the museum and its perceived role in public policy further determine visitors’ interest in museum governance.     

Creating a Peripheral Trading Zone: Satyendra Nath Bose and Bose–Einstein Statistics,Doing Science in the Role of an Outsider

The term ‘boson’ appears in almost all discussions on elementary particles and carries a reference to the name of Satyendra Nath Bose, the co-founder of quantum statistics. Yet, in spite of this wide use of a term coined after his name, Bose himself remains a shadowy figure in the history of science. This article is an attempt to reconstruct how Bose arrived at the statistics for which he is now remembered, and his subsequent two-year brief role in international science. Through the lens of Bose's practice, I seek to grasp the contexts of those peripheral scientists who enter the practice of science from outside of the main group, and yet somehow manage to create a lasting contribution within it.     

Undone Science and Counter-Expertise: Fighting for Justice in an Argentine Community Contaminated by Pesticides

ABSTRACT

STS and social movement scholars have shown the importance of ‘getting undone science done’ to advance the goals of social movements fighting environmental health injustice. The production and mobilization of counter-expertise, meaning the reliance on expertise, broadly construed, to contest regulatory decisions based on scientific knowledge, must be further analyzed by differentiating among types of expertise and strategies to mobilize them. In social mobilization against the unrestricted use of pesticides in Argentina, the affected community in Ituzaingó Anexo developed three types of expertise. The community first drew upon its own local knowledge of cases of illness and, as lay people, produced the first epidemiological map of this area. Then, they enrolled scientists and NGOs as allies to jointly learn about pesticide contamination as an explanation for illness. The enlisted scientists produced new knowledge by conducting environmental and epidemiological studies. Finally, sympathetic public health authorities, legal experts, and a district attorney designed a successful legal strategy to stop fumigations in that area and enforce local regulations. The case confirms the importance of producing undone science, and shows that its effectiveness can be explained by intertwined strategies deployed by a triad of lay/local, scientific, and legal experts to overcome the expertise barrier.     

Why scientists should cooperate with journalists

Despite a widespread impression that the public is woefully ignorant of science and cares little for the subject, U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) surveys show the majority are very interested and understand that they are not well informed about science. The data are consistent with the author’s view that the popularity of pseudoscience does not indicate a rejection of science. If this is so, opportunities for scientists to communicate with the public promise a more rewarding result than is commonly believed among scientists. In fact, the increasing visibility of science in the mass media correlates with a slow, steady improvement in public understanding of science in recent years.     

Theology and Science

Abstract

The active engagement between science and religion is one of the preeminent ways in which we explore the sanctity of the world and the world reveals the sacred to us. Using Karl Rahner's concepts of transcendental/categorial causality and everyday mysticism, this paper enters into dialogue with the scientific insights of Stephen Hawking and Andrew Newberg, engaging the mystery of the cosmos and the mystery of the human person as an avenue to experiencing the mystery of God. In doing so, theology is challenged by scientific insight to a mysticism that engenders a less ontocentric and more humbly apophatic approach.     

Negotiating the Boundaries of Science and Religion: The Case of Henry Margenau

The life of Henry Margenau (1901–1997) offers a case study in the complexity of the science-religion relation. As a physicist-philosopher at Yale University, he pursued a public program of "amalgamating religion with science." He drew upon his authority as a physicist and a tradition of philosophical idealism to advocate a "reciprocity" between the two spheres. He argued that a "new modesty" and "metaphysical attitude" among scientists created new opportunities for collaboration. At the same time, his view of faith and his sense of the religiousness of science created troubling ambiguities. In the end, Margenau embodied the ambivalent relation between science and religion while revealing the limits of renegotiating the boundaries.