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conference sponsors
Large investments are being made in Britain in initiatives designed to make science and technology more accessible to the general public. Examples include National Science Week and the new generation of regional science centres popping up like mushrooms around the country.
A House of Lords, Select Committee has just produced an extensive Report entitled “Science and Society” which begins with the sentence “Society’s relationship with science is in a critical phase” and goes on to assert that there is a crisis of confidence in science and technology that could potentially have an enormous impact on both British society and British science.
[Full report at http://www.publications.parliament/]
So how are relationships between science and the public going to be rebuilt and who is going to build them? A role clearly exists for science communicators. These communicators are usually also the funders and the nature of the message tends therefore to reflect the aims and aspirations of the funding agencies. These motives are diverse, ranging from the Research Councils wish to increase popular acceptance for aspects of scientific innovation, like biotechnology, to the Office of Science and Technology wishing to strengthen participatory democracy.
The audience is heterogeneous and many initiatives fail to take account of the fractured and pluralistic nature of society in Britain. Targeting of audiences when consciously attempted tends, once again to reflect the agendas of the major funding agencies. For example, Learned Societies invest heavily in communicating with 16 and 17 year olds in an effort to raise the number and quality of applicants to science degree programmes.
However, large sections of the community are excluded from debates around science, either because they are not considered as a relevant audience, or because communication initiatives have not considered their particular needs.
The communications themselves are equally diverse with no common agenda being agreed by the key funders. Such diversity can be seen as having positive ramifications in the preservation of a plural and inclusive approach to taking science to the public. However, an undesirable outcome is the great difficulty in either auditing what is being attempted, or verifying its impact.
The work being undertaken within the School of Interdisciplinary Sciences at the University of the West of England, Bristol aims to explore and elaborate models for taking science out into the community. This presentation will include examples of this work, including a national Science on the Buses poster campaign. The emphasis is, as much as is practicable, on promoting dialogue about science by underlining its centrality to everyday life.
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