Sarah R. Davies

Constructing Communication Talking to Scientists About Talking to the Public

Recent work has started to explore “scientific understandings of publics” alongside public understandings of science. This study builds on this work to examine the ways in which public communication is talked about by scientists and engineers. The author identifies a range of ways of talking about the purposes and content of science communication to the public, arguing that the dominant framework for these is one-way communication, and that, in addition, such communication tends to be constructed as difficult and dangerous. However, the author further identifies a range of minority discourses that understand public communication in more complex terms.

Discussing Dialogue: Perspectives on the Value of Science Dialogue Events that do not Inform Policy

While theoretical work and empirical research have examined science policy-informing “dialogue events,” dialogue events that do not seek to inform public policy are under-theorized and under-researched, even though they are common and growing in popularity in the UK. We describe how, from a critical perspective, it may initially appear that such events cannot be justified without returning to the deficit model. But with this paper, we seek to open up a discussion about these non policy-informing events by arguing that there are in fact further ways to understand and frame them. We deliberately draw on different literatures and seek to make use of practitioner expertise within our discussion, in order to display several perspectives on the value of non-policy dialogue on science as sites of symmetrical individual or small-scale learning —rather than institutional learning—through social processes .

Constituting Public Engagement: Meanings and Genealogies of PEST in Two U.K. Studies

This article uses data from two U.K. studies in order to explore the meanings attached to public engagement. It focuses on two issues of importance to contemporary discussions of science communication: the degree to which there has been a smooth transition, in practice, from models of public understanding of science to those of public engagement with science and technology (PEST), and the histories, or genealogies, of such models. Data from two qualitative studies—a case study of one of the United Kingdom’ssix Beacons for Public Engagement and a study of contract research staff—are used to characterize the ways in which U.K. academic communities understand PEST. It is argued that engagement is construed as multiple, relational, and outcomes oriented, with seven key outcomes ranging from better research to empowered individuals. These differences are traced to personal and professional backgrounds, suggesting that multiple and overlapping meanings around PEST are derived from particular histories that have been brought together, through the rubric of public engagement, in assemblages such as the Beacons.

Understanding Public Responses to Emerging Technologies: A Narrative Approach

ABSTRACT Previous studies aimed at understanding public responses to emerging technologies have given limited attention to the social and cultural processes through which public concerns emerge. When probed, these have tended to be explained either in cognitive social psychological terms, typically in the form of cognitive shortcuts or heuristics or the influence of affective variables, or in social interactionist terms, as a product of the micro dynamics of the social interaction. We argue for an alternative approach that examines how public attitudes are formed in relation to the interplay of wider cultural narratives about science and technology. Using data from recent qualitative research with publics on nanotechnology and other emerging technologies, we develop a typology of five cultural narratives that underpin and structure public talk. The narratives we identify within focus group talk are familiar stories that are deeply embedded in contemporary culture, and which provide cultural resources for navigating the issues posed by emerging technology. Substantively, they inform a ‘tragic’ mood on the prospects of emerging technology, reflecting the loss of belief in science, when coupled to neo-liberal logics, as guaranteeing social progress. The implications for policy-making are discussed.

Crafting the group: Care in research management.

This article reports findings from an interview study with group leaders and principal investigators in Denmark, the United Kingdom and the United States. Taking as our starting point current interest in the need to enhance ‘responsible research and innovation’, we suggest that these debates can be developed through attention to the talk and practices of scientists. Specifically, we chart the ways in which interview talk represented research management and leadership as processes of caring craftwork. Interviewees framed the group as the primary focus of their attention (and responsibilities), and as something to be tended and crafted; further, this process required a set of affective skills deployed flexibly in response to the needs of individuals. Through exploring the presence of notions of care in the talk of principal investigators and group leaders, we discuss the relation between care and craft, reflect on the potential implications of the promotion of a culture of care and suggest how mundane scientific understandings of responsibility might relate to a wider discussion of responsible research and innovation.

Learning to Generate Dialogue: Theory, Practice, and Evaluation

Abstract Over the past decade in the UK, communities of scientists, governmental bodies, and informal learning organizations have increasingly promoted public engagement with science. One of the most visible features of these efforts within museums is the staging of adult-focused, face-to-face forums-commonly called dialogue events-that bring scientific and technical experts, social scientists, and policymakers into discussion with members of the public about contemporary science-based issues. This article clarifies the difference between non-policy-informing dialogue events and other interactions in museums. It then describes how one institution, the Science Museums Dana Centre, London, has conceptualised, implemented, and refined its understanding of dialogue events based on iterative processes of theory-building, practice, and evaluation. It concludes by outlining future directions for promoting a broader culture of engagement through dialogue related to science and society.

Experiments in engagement: Designing public engagement with science and technology for capacity building.

Public engagement with science and technology is now widely used in science policy and communication. Touted as a means of enhancing democratic discussion of science and technology, analysis of public engagement with science and technology has shown that it is often weakly tied to scientific governance. In this article, we suggest that the notion of capacity building might be a way of reframing the democratic potential of public engagement with science and technology activities. Drawing on literatures from public policy and administration, we outline how public engagement with science and technology might build citizen capacity, before using the notion of capacity building to develop five principles for the design of public engagement with science and technology. We demonstrate the use of these principles through a discussion of the development and realization of the pilot for a large-scale public engagement with science and technology activity, the Futurescape City Tours, which was carried out in Arizona in 2012.

Responsible Innovation in the US, UK and Denmark: Governance Landscapes

This chapter explores the notion of responsible innovation (RI) as it is currently being imagined in policy and governance practice. It does this in the context of three different countries: the UK, US and Denmark. We ask how RI is being constituted within policy discussion. What is it understood as being? What kinds of actors are implicated in it? And what is its scope, or field of action? In exploring these questions we argue that responsible innovation is currently a largely international discourse, and that it remains unclear, from current policy discussion, how it should be put into practice. Though it is tied to a linear model of science and technology, in which both the process and outputs of scientific research are, through RI, imbued with responsibility, the actors involved and the fields in which they are assumed to operate are exceedingly general. As such, RI appears to be a fundamentally de-individualised process.

Characterizing Hacking: Mundane Engagement in US Hacker and Makerspaces*

The rise of a “maker movement,” located in hacker and makerspaces and involving the democratization of technologies of production and support of grassroots innovation, is receiving increasing attention from science and technology studies (STS) scholarship. This article explores how hacking is characterized by users of hacker and makerspaces and relates this to broader discussion of the maker movement as, for instance, promoting innovation, engaged in countercultural critique, or as accessible to anyone. Based on an interview study of users of twelve hacker and makerspaces across the United States, it argues that for these users, hacking is not about politics, commercial innovation, or critique. Rather, it is understood as a lifestyle one subscribes to, a meaningful leisure activity, or as providing access to a welcoming and close-knit community. Contrary to expectations of the maker movement as heralding social change, the benefits of hacking were viewed as personal rather than political, economic, or social; similarly, democratization of technology was experienced as rather incidental to most hackers’ and makers’ experiences.

‘Nothing really responsible goes on here’: scientists’ experience and practice of responsibility

ABSTRACTScientists face increasing demands to integrate practices of ‘responsibility’ into their working lives. In this paper, we explore these developments by discussing findings from a research project that investigated how publically funded scientists perceived and practiced responsibility. We show that, though the scientists in this study mostly viewed policy discourses such as Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) as irrelevant to them, they articulated and practiced a range of ‘bottom-up’ responsibilities, including for producing sound science, taking care of employees, creating ‘impact’ and carrying out publically legitimate science. The practice of these responsibilities was often shaped by wider dynamics in the governance of knowledge production, such as academic capitalism and the marketisation of universities. Based on these findings, we suggest that RRI scholarship should, first, work to develop a shared language of responsibility with scientists, and, second, more actively address the pol...