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On the division of social knowledge and its breakdown
August 16, 2019
Most social scientists reading this title will think, aha that’s modelled on Émile Durkheim’s De La Division du Travail Social (The Division of Labour in Society) (1893). They ‘know’ that book; at least its title. It’s part of their knowledge repertoire. What’s underneath the title may not go very deep or may be forgotten, as in …
Poo and puns: Recent representations of faecal microbiota transplants in English language news media
August 9, 2019
This post, by Carmen McLeod, Brigitte Nerlich and Rusi Jaspal, has recently been published on the Microbiology Society Blog. We reblog it here with permission. *** Bacteria, germs, poo…these are words that normally don’t evoke images of health and happiness. The relationship between humans and bacteria is often understood as a combative one. Bacteria are …
Heritable Genome Editing: National and international governance challenges and policy options
July 27, 2019
This blog post has been co-authored with Achim Rosemann (University of Exeter). A shorter and slightly different version has been published by the BioMed Central ‘On Society’ Blog. *** Germline gene editing has become a hot topic in science and in society, after one Chinese scientist edited embryos in 2018, an experiment that a Russian …
What is a climate change communicator to do?
July 25, 2019
In a recent article, social scientists claim that a rhetoric of deadlines to urge action on climate change is ‘dangerous’. While I agree that it might be dangerous to get into a situation where you extend deadlines forever if you cannot achieve them, setting no deadlines at all may make it difficult to talk about …
Extreme weather talk: The sequel to the sequel
June 28, 2019
I have written quite a few blog posts over the years about extreme weather (and weather and climate). In 2013 I also published an article with Rusi Jaspal about extreme weather images… That seems now a long time ago and much better work is now done on the images front! I wrote my last post …