Pat J. Gehrke

Organic Public Engagement with Nanotechnology: Advantages and Challenges

Using recent advances in the study of human behavior to consider how people understand and perceive nanotechnology provides us with a richer and more actionable set of insights into public perceptions of this exciting emerging technology. At the same time, using public perceptions of nanotechnology to explore the potential of new methods of studying human behavior provides us with a case study in the power of these techniques. It demonstrates their capacity to produce insights that are not only more valid and have a greater capacity to explain human perception and action but also more useful to people who need to communicate with publics about new technologies and set regulations for those technologies.

Ecological Thinking in Science and Public

This chapter traces a broad history of ecological thinking, starting with the early proto-ecological natural scientists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After laying out some of these early conceptions of ecology, we then turn to the social sciences and humanities, exploring how ecological thinking influenced sociology, anthropology, psychology, ethnography, and philosophy. From this foundation, we suggest that ecological thinking can be used to revisit the concept of ecological validity, originally developed in the mid-twentieth century by psychologists Egon Brunswik and Kurt Lewin. This chapter concludes by explaining how ecological validity and ecological thinking in general provide public engagement with science both concrete guidelines for better research and heuristics for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of competing engagement methods.

Scientific Expertise and Engagement Experts

This chapter offers a perspective that combats both cynical and idealist forms of public engagement. Engaging in a conversation with the “demarcation problem,” this chapter suggests that a rhetorical standpoint helps reframe the difference between expert and nonexpert discourse and alleviates the cynical mindset. This conceptual development invites us to reconsider the authority of publics to deliberate on technical and scientific issues. Following our discussion of demarcation, ending with the collision between Kuhn and Popper, we examine how demarcation is enacted in legal settings. Our final task in this chapter is to briefly review and synthesize some of the arguments we have made in previous chapters and suggest that a rhetorical sensibility can assist in producing more ecologically valid public engagement with science.

Publics and Counterpublics of Engagement

This chapter investigates the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the idealist and cynical purposes of public engagement. Scholars in the field of public engagement with science have noted the influence these two camps have made on our modern conception of public engagement. Having laid out the basic contours of these debates we then attend to the implications of the dominant ideas of what a “public” is and how it relates to theoretical and philosophical discussions. We then turn to studies of publics, counterpublics, and vernacular rhetoric. Together these constitute a compelling case for a method of public engagement with science that engages actually existing publics as they communicate and deliberate “in the wild.”

Generating Outcomes from Organic Engagement Events

This chapter explores how organic public engagement is informed by middle-range methodological approaches. Drawing from sociological research, we argue that studying public engagement events through grounded theory and multi-sited ethnography produces more ecologically valid results. Grounded theory provides the ability to develop theories for understudied phenomena and draw new conclusions on existing studies. Multi-sited ethnography ameliorates the common concern that studying only single sites of engagement can distort researchers’ views of how publics engage with science. We conclude the book with a discussion of how the combination of multi-sited ethnography and grounded theory in the context of organic public engagement with science produces middle-range theories that are more robust and actionable than the insights generated by traditional models of artificial public engagement.

Organic Engagement of Public Ecologies

This chapter articulates a public engagement methodology that carefully navigates the middle ground between idealist and cynical purposes, combining Warner’s understanding of publics with vernacular rhetoric and ethnography, leading to a coherent set of principles for more ecologically valid research, which we call “organic public engagement.” Working from the conclusions of the previous four chapters and research in quasi-ethnography and ethnographic approaches to science and technology studies, we develop six principles that guide organic public engagement. The chapter concludes with a description of how the methodology was deployed in a specific case, offering a concrete example for future research and practice.

Engaging Public Ecologies

This chapter argues that most current research in public engagement has weak ecological validity. Surveys fail to capture how publics encounter, utilize, synthesize, or otherwise engage with information. Media studies often infer characteristics of a public, when what they actually capture is the ecology of journalistic practices. Oral, curatorial, and digital engagements are more suited for engagement research, yet current research on these spaces either focuses on narrow spaces or timeframes, or is primarily concerned with the number of participants. Deliberative engagements are by far the most popular, novel, and widely researched sites for understanding public engagement; however, these events usually utilize artificially constructed spaces of engagement and therefore studies that infer public opinions or beliefs from these events have weak ecological validity.

Lessons for Science Communicators: Assumptions and Assessment

The results and discussions in Chaps. 1, 2, 3 and 4 detailed the public understanding of nanotechnologies, their discussions, and their responses to various speakers in public engagement events. While these are useful and important insights with implications for future public communication, engagement events, and potential regulation of nanotechnologies, these events and the data we gathered from them also offer guidance for science communicators and public engagement practitioners. This chapter provides that practical guidance in a brief, straightforward way, using both details from the 11 public engagement events in this study and previous research on effective science communication and public engagement with science.

Nanotechnology Applications and Risks: Valences and Ambiguities

Regardless of the amount of information public groups possess or demonstrate, most seem willing to communicate preferences and apprehensions about new and emerging technologies. One of the goals of this study was to discover such preferences and apprehensions about nanotechnologies in various public groups. This chapter details those findings as well as what the expressed preferences teach us about how public groups form opinions about emerging technologies. Few studies have mined into the details of how different applications of nanotechnology evoke different responses from various public groups. In this study, we found such data emerged naturally in the course of the public engagement events. Our results indicate that some areas of nanotechnology have broad public support, while some almost universally produce public demands for regulation.

Public Understanding of Nanotechnology: How Publics Know

Most previous studies of public understanding of nanotechnology have found that very few members of the public know much about this emerging field. Such results set the expectation among scientists, regulators, industry, and science communicators that publics are largely ignorant of nanotechnology and, hence, unprepared to engage in a discussion about research priorities or regulation. However, things may not be as grim as these studies and the engagement skeptics make out. Because these studies have largely relied on survey research to determine public understanding, they have captured data that reflects only what individuals know in isolation (the condition in which they tend to answer such surveys). For precisely this reason, these studies tend to miss not only the “wisdom of the crowd” but even the collective knowledge and cooperative ways to reasoning that make up most of how people think and live their lives.