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Notes Science Communication 2.0: Dialogue and transdisciplinarity
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Notes from 12 lectures, week 1 - week 6.
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Week 1Lecture 1 From silos in the ivory tower to transdisciplinary in public
science
Opening up the boundaries about science: From Ivory Tower to Agora
- What do we commonly consider the ‘scientific process’?
- Where does science happen? (e.g. laboratory, in society)
- Who does science?
- What is it for? (e.g. improving society, improving our well-being)
Science Communication 2.0: A basic shift
Why this shift?
- Simply disseminating ‘facts’ is not particularly useful
- Science doesn’t happen in a social vacuum
- Science is increasingly considered a site where democracy is promoted and
exercised
Why simply disseminating facts is not particularly useful?
1. Wicked problems
2. Facts
3. ‘Softs’ vs. ‘hard’ impacts
Wicked problems - there is no certainty, but there are high stakes
,Lecture 2 From silos in the ivory tower to transdisciplinary and
public science
An example of a wicked problem: sustainable agriculture
Examples why sustainable agriculture is a wicked problem:
- There is no definitive formulation of unsustainable agriculture (despite a meaning-
bounded term)
- We don’t really know when we have reached sustainable agriculture
- We can’t try something, and then undo it
Wicked problems, 40 years on… (Head, 2019)
- We need a second-generation of work on wicked problems that considers what we
actually know (form policy studies and social science) about how to best address
wicked problems.
- Mainstream the analysis of ‘wicked’ problems by drawing on, and evaluating, that
policy models that have been developed in the past 40 years.
- There is a need for a more scientific approach to science communication, i.e., one
that is less exclusively driven by intuition, personal experience, or traditional ways of
‘doing communication’, and more by an empirical understanding of how modern
societies make sense of and participate in debates over science and emerging
technologies.
What’s the problem with deploying facts to convince people?
- Biased assimilation: People take information in a way that makes it coherent with
their previous position.
- Climate change: no attitude polarization
- Nanotechnology risk: attitude polarization
- Attitude polarization: is a phenomenon in which a disagreement becomes
more extreme as the different parties consider evidence on the issue.
- More informed people with more confidence in scientists are not more likely to feel
responsible for global warming or more concerned about it - sometimes just the
opposite (through causal direction here is unclear but… the implication is that even
people who may be labelled as ‘skeptics’ may actually be very interested in science)
Distrust in science? Distrusts in experts
- Generalized distrust in science and scientists is actually rare, but distrust in the
institutions where science is done can be high, distrust in particular scientists can be
high, as well as distrust of policymakers
- Why might people distrust science institutions? (e.g. might not have the same values,
missteps in the past) What kinds of institutions do you expect people might distrust?
Example: anti/critical vax-movement (against vaccination)
Vaccine resistance emerges from:
- A distrust of public and private institutions in safeguarding children
- A cultural context that emphasizes personal responsibility for health
- A parental culture where extensive and extraordinary care for your child is
encouraged and celebrated
Experts often aren’t equipped to address soft impacts, and don’t speak to these impacts in
debates
Experts tend to make themselves accountable for:
, - Hard (biomedical health, safety and environmental) impacts: quantifiable risks
But not for:
- Soft (or social, cultural, moral) impacts (e.g. impact of cellphones).
Which is what the public is more likely to focus on (and it is their area of expertise)
Taking the ‘soft impacts’ of technology into account
- Dutch funding institutions require engineering projects to consider ‘societal relevance’
but there is little to guide what that actually means, so it often gets equated to…
- Number of people that would want the technology
- Benefits people would receive from the technology
- The cost of producing the technology
- Nobody really asks whether the technology would be ‘good’ in a moral or cultural
sense for society
- ‘Soft impacts’ are one way we could approach ‘societal relevance’
Summary
- Wicked problems
- No clear definition
- Definition projects solutions (politics)
- Unique but interrelated
- Can’t just try things out
- Problems with facts
- Biased assimilation
- Attitude polarisation
- Not science denial
- People and values
- Expertise
- Distrust of science vs. distrust of institutions and elitism
- Hard vs. soft impacts
Week 2
Lecture 3 New science and society relationships
Recap: ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ impacts
Experts tend to make themselves accountable for:
- ‘hard’ (biomedical health, safety and environmental) impacts: quantifiable risks
But not for:
- ‘soft’ (or social, cultural, moral) impacts
Soft impacts → This is what the public is more likely to focus on (and it is their
area of expertise)
We need to find ways to include knowledge and expertise about soft impacts. The necessary
way to do this, is to include people who know about the soft impacts, the public.
Public focus on ‘soft concerns’:
- No physical harm
- Not quantifiable
- No direct effect of technology mediated (no direct outcome, it is often mediated by
culture or social architecture)
, Expertise is not neutral: politically, an entitlement to speak:
- Categories, such as ‘expert’ or ‘the public’ are discursively made up
- Experts also have values (they are also the public, they have interests)
- The public participation in science according to prescribed identities (how public is
described has influence on how the public is incorporated in the solutions for
problems)
- The general public (abstract notion of public, statistics, general information
about the public, demographics)
- The pure public (the way we think about the public who doesn’t know
anything about the topic, traditional model of the public)
- The affected public (how they are emotionally affected, important aspect of
decision-making, it doesn’t recognize the expertise of this group, it focuses on
emotions)
- The partisan public (organized collected group, group that is critically
complaining, troublemaking, not really engaged with good faith approach)
Discussion: When working out solutions to a wicked problem, what makes a good decision?
- This is something Dietz talks about in the article assigned for this week.
Characteristics of good decisions: there has to be thought of all stakeholders; based on
accurate information; more pros than cons; it should take long-term benefit into
consideration not only short-term benefits; it should be a legitimate decision when everyone
understands the process why this decision is made; transparency.
Technocracy and science communication
- Rule by the skilled (teche-kratia in Greek) or rule by the public (dimo-kratia)
- Rational-choice (best decision based on technical knowledge; technocratic
approach) vs. fairness and equality (more democratic approach)
- The idea that citizens cannot, or unwilling to, gain the knowledge necessary to make
the right policy decisions. As a result:
- Solutions to issues should be decided by experts.
- The knowledge gap between ‘experts’ and the public should be narrowed
- In this context, the deficit model in communication science is basically ‘the
missionary wing’ of technocracy
Dialogue: technocracy in disguise?
- Dialogue and participatory processes can sometimes be conduits for technocratic
decision-making. (to make public aboard about what experts wants to do)
- Overweighting of hard impacts, underweighting of soft impacts
- Diffusion of responsibility?
- Dialogue and participatory models can be disempowering if they are merely
consultation in practice, so that scientific experts are the real decision-makers
- We can imagine contexts in which technocracy is a process we are willing to accept,
but we should not veil in participatory processes
What can we do?
- Bring values and deliberation to science communication.
- ‘I may assume that the values I hold are universal, and thus the only
reason people will disagree with me is that they have different
beliefs about the facts. This is a comfortable view. We can avoid the
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