science communication studies

After more than half a year of budget negotations, Medical Museion is now officially part of the EC 7th FWP programme-financed project StudioLab. Inspired by the merging of the artists studio with the research lab to create a hybrid creative space, STUDIOLAB proposes the creation of a new European platform for creative interactions between art and science. […]

A quick quote from Isabelle Stengers interesting book Cosmopolitics I (published in the series Posthumanities), which I feel sums up some of what we try to do at the Museion when we integrate aesthetics, politics, science communication and material culture: “The sciences, as they are taught, that is, as they are presented once their results […]

A few weeks ago, Paul Ginsparg, founder of the immensely popular (among physicists) preprint publication archive ArXiv, reflected on the future of scholarly communication (Nature vol. 476, pp. 145-147, 11 August 2011). He wrote what many of my generation colleagues in the medical faculty consider outlandish, but which is self-evident to everyone who has some experience in online […]

Here’s my abstract for a panel on the role of the humanities in science communication that Joan Leach in the Science Communication programme, U Queensland, is putting together for the PCST-12 meeting in Florence next spring: Mundane Design vs. Fine Sci-Art: Two Realms of Aesthetic Practice in Science Communication Sci-art has become an increasingly important dimension of […]

Even more thoughts after reading How We Became Posthuman (other posts are here and here). I think part of my fascination with the book is that it inadvertently articulates what I see to be a watershed change that has happened in the past ten years or so – the change from an informational paradigm to […]

Sometimes conference announcements only become interesting in the very last sentence. Like this one for “Frenemies: The love-hate relationsship between science and society”, taking place at Universiteit Twente on 14 September. Science is put in the dock, so it seems. Experts are under attack, there is public agitation on the internet. Yet we cherish expertise as never […]

My impression of the first and only Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST) conference I’ve attended (Malmö in 2008) was quite mixed. The academic quality wasn’t particularly high, there were pretty few theoretically interesting talks, not much surprising stuff, almost no nerds around, no sudden bursts of creativity — and new media were (with […]

“Why Proteins Have to Die So That We May Live”. This was the title of the talk given by Nobel Laureate Dr. Aaron Ciechanover at the international symposium entitled Protein Chemistry: Applications to Combat Diseases held at the University of Copenhagen earlier this week. Three days packed with talks from the world’s leading protein chemists and […]

Score one for the usefulness of facebook in science. In January and February, a group of scientists, led by Dr. Brian Sidlauskas, assistant professor of fisheries at Oregon State University (OSU), had been conducting the first ichthyological survey on Guyana’s Cuyuni River. The purpose of the study was to find out which species of fish […]

The announced talk by Andy Williams (Cardiff) about “A crisis of science journalism?” at the next London Public Understanding of Science seminar, made me think about why science journalism actually is declining in quality — and not only in the UK, but also here in the Scandinavian countries. Based on internet surveys and interviews, Williams suggests (in his abstract distributed on the […]

Today’s good news from the science communication world is that the editors of the Journal of Science Communication are inviting papers for a special issue on the future of science journalism, knowledge and power. As the editors point out, the consequence of the internet is that today “science journalism finds itself in the middle of a deep cultural, economic […]

Like biography, autobiography has always been an important genre for science communication — like Francis Crick’s autobiography What Mad Pursuit (1988). A couple of decades ago, only a tiny scientific elite had, in practice, access to present themselves autobiographically in the form of book-length memoirs and interviews in newspaper and magazines. Science communication through self-presentation was thus largely restricted to […]