science communication studies

Medical Museion has launched a new seminar series: The MUSE seminars. The idea of the seminars is to explore questions in science communication and museum practices especially where they relate to modern biomedicine. We define science communication very broadly and speakers will come from a range of backgrounds including history of science, science communication, medical […]

The gaming industry is monstrously big business. But it is also infested with much love and enthusiasm, both by those in the industry itself, and from those who use its products. One example of this is an interesting venture by the established gaming developer Double Fine Productions. The company started this drive on the innovation/crowdsourcing […]

A luminous, fabric-draped box containing ten audience members clutching ten life-like baby dolls. An accompanying host of doll-figures in various states of sartorial and bodily undress, creepily moving (or moved) around the space. Two performers giddily flying through a fragmented set of scenes that invite the audience to sit with the tensions of being a […]

I’ve been invited by the philosophy of science group in Gothenburg to give a talk to their Theory of Science seminar group on Friday, 3 February — titled ”Mundane Design vs. Fine Sci-Art: Two Realms of Aesthetic Practice in Science Communication”. Here’s the abstract: Sci-art has become an increasingly important dimension of science communication through printed […]

Two of our staff members — Nina Bjerglund, who’s working on social media for public health communication (read her posts here) and Daniel Noesgaard, who has created our web universe — are now on their way to Raleigh, North Carolina, to take part in the ScienceOnline 2012 conference. I’m going to have the #scio12 hashtag window on Twitter open 24/7 […]

Could Public Health research findings, public health messages or social aspects of health care be communicated through comics? Would it only be relevant if you want to target children? If you lived in Japan you would be very likely to answer no to that question. Manga, a Japanese form of comic, is an integrated part […]

I recently gave a small talk on aesthetics in didactic contexts at the Department for Science Education. As part of the research for the talk, I spent some time reading up on the history of aesthetic philosophy and particularly on the contribution of the founder of the discipline, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. Being interested in new […]

If you are speaking French, this bilingual meeting, titled Science Communication: International Perspectives, Issues and Strategies, to be held in Nancy, 4-7 September, could be very relevant for university museum people: Universities and research organisations are vibrant communities fully engaged in science communication. Their actions are all the more important because the relationship between science, technology […]

I came to think about the role of narrativity in museum exhibitions when I saw the programme for the The Swedish National Exhibition Agency’s annual meeting in Visby last week. The aim of the Agency (Riksutställningar in Swedish) is to promote exhibition development. And since Sweden has a pretty strong, and internationally oriented, tradition for exhibition making, these meetings are a […]

It’s easy to become so enthusiastic about the power of web-based media for science communication that one sometimes forgets that science could actually, in some mysterious ways, be communicated even in the age before World Wide Web, blogs and Twitter. Overly enthusiasm calls for historical reflection — which is exactly what the organisers of the second annual Anglo-French Conference on Scientific Communication and its […]

“Wish I were in London!”. This is one of my recurrent phrases on this blog — because so much interesting intellectually in the field of science communication, material culture studies and museums studies happens in London these days. Like on Wednesday 30th November, when Beverley Gibbs, a PhD-candidate from the Institute for Science and Society at the University […]

As readers of this blog have probably noticed by now, I don’t support the simplistic but widespread idea that museums of science, technology and medicine are primarily informal learning institutions. But even if explanations aren’t the primary goal of our kind of museums, we cannot entirely escape the problem of how to explain scientific ideas, methods and findings to our visitors. […]