Search for ""
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 …