Search for "synthetic biology"
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 …
3D printing: When science and technology take us by surprise
March 14, 2014
3D printing (or ‘additive’ or ‘digital manufacturing’) has been around for a while (and we’ll see for how long further on in this post); even 4D printing has been around for a while. However, 3D printing only really came into focus for me quite recently, when I came across the metaphors ‘3D printer of life’ …
Dan Kahan public lecture 13/2/14: Democracy and the Science Communication Environment
January 29, 2014
UPDATE: over 100 people attended the event at Lakeside Arts Centre. Dan has posted a detailed synopsis with link to slides. We are delighted to announce that Dan Kahan (Professor of Law and Psychology, Yale Law School) is visiting the university to deliver a public lecture on February 13th. This is a rare opportunity to …
What on earth do you mean? An outsider’s view on Public Understanding of Science
January 17, 2014
This is a guest post by Hilary Sutcliffe provoked by a twitter exchange: Yesterday Patrick Sturgis tweeted a link to an article he has just published in the journal Public Understanding of Science. Hilary asked for a copy, as the articles are behind a paywall; I sent her the article and asked at the same …
Making science in public: Kickstarters – promises and perils
June 15, 2013
A few weeks ago my son showed me a ‘new thing’ he had discovered online. It was a ‘kickstarter’ for a publishing project called ‘to be or not to be that is the adventure’. I thought it looked like good fun, especially since the creator is Ryan North whose Dinosaur Comics I sometimes read. A …
Handmaidens and plumbers: The role of the humanities and social sciences in modern academic life
September 14, 2012
A few days ago I attended a student-organised conference on interdisciplinarity, Enquire, held at the School of Sociology and Social Policy here in Nottingham. Professor Alison Pilnick, a specialist in doctor-patient interaction and conversation analysis, gave a keynote lecture in which she explored some of the pitfalls of working between disciplines. In her conclusions she …
Hype, honesty and trust
April 25, 2012
This week I am participating in a workshop on ‘Sociologies of Moderation: Problems of democracy, expertise and the media’* organised by Dr Alexander Smith at the University of Huddersfield. The workshop will scrutinise the meaning of ‘moderation’, mainly from a political perspective. My contribution strays somewhat away from that core political meaning, as it deals with …
The story of ‘of’
March 6, 2012
Since moving away from linguistics and into Science and Technology Studies (STS), I have often been asked what I am (a question I dread) and what I do (a question that is slightly more easy to answer). These questions came back to me recently when reading a very interesting article in New Scientist about the …