science communication studies

Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein’s presentation at the conference on “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums” in Copenhagen last month was about the politics of knowledge production, with medical museums as a case study. One of Roger’s arguments was that the museums, by placing their historical objects in new, global contexts, […]

“How do we display artifacts which are neither sexy nor beautiful?” asked Yves Thomas in his presentation at last month’s conference in Copenhagen. His own answer to the question was to bring a human dimension to these objects by adding virtual elements such as interviews with the researchers or video clips of the object in […]

Another theme at the “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums”-conference was ‘investigating museum visitors’. Can visitors’ experiences help us make our museums better? Should an exhibition be guided by what the curator is passionate about or by what she thinks the visitor might find interesting? Or should we simply ask visitors to […]

Martin Robbins of The Lay Scientist has posted this scathing and completely brilliant look at what most science journalism looks like. It is funny because it is true, as they say. Be sure to read the comments as well, some of them are comedy gold.

Writing on a blog about the benefits of blogging might seem a bit superfluous, but here is a nice reminder of the possibilities that the social web can open. The philosopher Levi Bryant, one of the central figures in Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), recently wrote this blogpost on chance encounters and why blogging can be a […]

The RSA – the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce – have a wonderful series of animated lectures which are worth checking out. One of them is based on the American writer Daniel Pink’s work on motivation. [biomed]u6XAPnuFjJc[/biomed] The video seems to me to raise a fundamental issue in science communication, […]

Today, Ken Arnold is starting his temporary appointment as Visiting Professor in Medical Science Communication and Museology at Medical Museion. When he is not visiting Medical Museion, Ken Arnold heads the Public Programmes team at the Wellcome Trust, where his role is to creatively direct Wellcome Collection — a very successful public venue in London that […]

It is difficult to believe, but when Gustav Holmberg, Malin Sandström and I organised a session on science communication and social web media at the 10th conference of The International Network on Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST-10) two years ago, ours was the only session which discussed social web media (especially blogging) in relation to […]

I just read a short article by Marion Maria Ruisinger (curator of the medical collections at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) in the UMAC Journal — and was struck by the fact that she declares, without much ado, that “three-dimensional objects … have an immense potential for the communication of science”. I agree, intuitively. I’ve used the same argument in applications for […]

We have just started a search for 1-2 positions at the level of Associate Professor (alternatively Assistant Professor). As readers of this blog probably knows, Medical Museion is an integrated research and museum unit for promoting medical science communication based on the material and visual medical heritage. The research profile is centered around the contemporary history of […]