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Thinking with animals: The microbe

This is a GUEST POST by Richard Helliwell, a PhD student at the Institute for Science and Society, who participated in a workshop on Thinking with Animals at the University of Nottingham on 20th June 2014. What does it mean to think with animals, in particular to think with microbes, my ‘animal’ companion of thought? …

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Publicness and Öffentlichkeit – some linguistic musings

Since Roman times, the word ‘public’ has been deeply embedded in the English language, from republic to publican to public convenience; but it still causes problems, as we have discovered several times on the pages of this blog. ‘Public’ has multiple meanings; it is a staple of academic inquiry; but it is not a word …

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Re-imagining the public / re-imagining the political

  Last month (15-16 May) I attended a conference organised by Michel Ledda, Robert Cowley, and David Chandler from the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD) at the University of Westminster entitled: ‘New perspectives on the problem of the public’. Together with Sujatha Raman I work on the Leverhulme funded project ‘Models of Managing …

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Describing research in plain language is challenging – but worth it

This is a POST by DAVE FARMER first published on Physicsfocus and which I am reposting here with the permission of the author. Dave is a physics student here at the University of Nottingham. He also participated in our Circling the Square conference and made perceptive contributions from the floor. Dave is an aspiring science …

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Going round in circles?

As some readers of this blog will know, there has been a conference last week here at the University of Nottingham, which brought together social scientists and natural scientists to discuss issues related to science, politics and the media. The conference was entitled: ‘Circling the square: Research, politics, media and impact’. [Just after I posted …

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The Impact awards: A short story for the Circling the square conference

This is a fictional story about impact written by Kate Roach for the Circling the Square conference on research, politics, media and impact (20-22 May 2014) The Impact Awards   By KATE ROACH May 2114 “And here she is folks, the one and only Professor Madeleine Davies.”  Vic Baker broadcast to the whole table as …

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The impact of impact

This article by Ernesto Priego first appeared in Research Information and is reposted here with the author’s permission. It is based on a presentation at the UKSG conference (Connecting the Knowledge Community) earlier this month. Ernesto also maintains a blog on Digital Scholarship. The article complements an old blog post of mine on impact, but …

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Tracking fluctuations in climate change debates

Our ESRC funded project on climate change is coming to an end soon and we are just starting to prepare our end of award conference in Amsterdam. As part of our project we intended to monitor and describe fluctuations in debates about climate change. This aim overlaps with that of a project within the Leverhulme …

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Making weather personal

I was idly reading The Observer on Sunday (2 March, 2014), when I happened to glance at an article about the Scottish island of Lewis and Harris in the Outer Hebrides. I read: “The past few months, too, have shown how vulnerable an island community is when the weather becomes truculent”. Truculent I thought; that’s …

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