Doing science: Some reflections on methods
April 30, 2014
Over the last few months some members of our Institute, especially Bev Gibbs, Greg Hollin and I have had discussions about ‘methods’ in the (natural and) social sciences. In this post I want to dig a bit deeper into methods and perhaps clear up some confusions (or create more!). I’ll focus on four methodological concepts: …
Making Energy Research More Responsive: Public Dialogue as Experiment
March 31, 2014
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 …
Neo-liberalism: a problem of social science and for society
May 29, 2013
This is a post by JOHN HOLMWOOD, sparked by some discussions on twitter and on our ‘Making Science Public’ internal discussion list. A recent post by John Field has called neo-liberalism an ‘overworked concept’, much in use in the UK social science, but less frequently elsewhere. He implies that its use is largely normative, and …
Families of climate scepticism I: faulty science?
April 12, 2013
At last week’s British Sociological Association conference, I presented some initial observations from my research on climate change scepticism. My starting point was that climate change scepticism – or as it is often inaccurately described, denial – is not monolithic. Those people typically labelled as sceptics vary in their arguments. Sometimes may employ many different arguments, some may focus on …
Which Publics? When? – Part II
April 3, 2013
by Alison Mohr, Lecturer in Science and Technology Studies, University of Nottingham with Beverley Gibbs and Sujatha Raman This post was originally written for the Sciencewise-ERC blog: http://www.sciencewise-erc.org.uk/blog/?p=915 Part 2: When should dialogue take place? In this second blog post we look at when to carry out public dialogue. That public dialogue should take place ‘upstream’ …
Which Publics? When?
March 22, 2013
by Alison Mohr, Lecturer in Science and Technology Studies, University of Nottingham with Beverley Gibbs and Sujatha Raman This post was originally written for the Sciencewise-ERC blog: http://www.sciencewise-erc.org.uk/blog/?p=926 Part 1: Which publics should be invited to a public dialogue?In the discussions around public dialogue the term ‘public’ is often taken for granted. However the decision about …
Is there something dehumanising about science?
March 12, 2013
At the recent launch of Making Science Public, the Rt. Rev Dr Lee Rayfield – a member of our programme’s advisory board and, as Bishop of Swindon and a trained medical scientist, the lead contact on science matters for the Church of England – participated in a late-afternoon panel. He posed an interesting question, which …
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