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The reflexive scientist: an approach to transforming public engagement

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Abstract

Calls for greater public engagement with science (PES) are widespread, but there appears to be little agreement on the meaning and purpose of engagement across the various actors calling for it. This reflects a persistent gulf between PES scholars and scientists communicating with the public. We argue that direct engagement between PES scholars and scientist-communicators could, by facilitating greater reflexivity, lead to a step-change in the calibre and clarity of activities that are designed to support enhanced public engagement with science and technology. In this paper, we, as authors beginning from different perspectives, explore the potential of, and barriers to, a conversation between critical social scientists and members of the science community about public engagement. We demonstrate how and why the PES literature does not “speak for itself” to scientists but provides a starting point for conversation rather than a substitute for it. We then explore what reflexivity might mean for PES and argue for three important foci: political-economic context or politics of the field; institutional context; and personal assumptions. We then discuss barriers to, as well as strategies for, fostering such reflexivity, concluding that new models of authorship and publication are needed if this promise is to be fulfilled.

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Notes

  1. The concept of co-production has at least two different meanings. What Jasanoff has termed ‘the idiom of co-production’ refers to the ways in which natural and social orders are ‘produced together’: ‘[w]hat we know about the world is intimately linked to our sense of what we can do about it, as well as to the felt legitimacy of specific actors, instruments and courses of action’ (2004: p. 14). Research utilising this meaning of co-production looks to make explicit the generally obscured relationship between what we take to be the (given) natural world, on the one hand, and the social world of humanly created institutions and power relations, on the other. In transdisciplinary research, co-production refers to a deliberately interactive and collaborative process involving both academic (certified “expert”) and non-academic actors, with their different types of knowledge (Gibbons et al. 1994; Mobjörk 2010; Pohl et al. 2010). We are using co-production in this latter sense.

  2. The extent to which the terminology of “dialogue” and “engagement” has been embraced while various “deficit” explanations for public opposition to particular techno-scientific projects are reformulated in slightly different guise is a relevant but separate issue, which we do not explore here. See, for example, Wynne (2006).

  3. These activities are a sub-set of the full spectrum of professional and voluntary “science communication” activities that are carried out not only by scientists but also professional science media and educators.

  4. See Wynne (2014) on the lack of attention to “science” within the literature on “public understanding of science”.

  5. Related papers can be found in the Special Issue of Public Understanding of Science on “Mobilization of scientists for public engagement activities” introduced by Bauer and Jensen (2011)

  6. While these ambitious and potentially naïve goals were not realised, this project did lead—somewhat unexpectedly—to an ongoing research collaboration and the exploration of reflexivity documented in this paper.

  7. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this term

  8. N. Jeremijenko 2014, personal communication

  9. For a detailed discussion of the role of reflexivity in transdisciplinary research, see Popa et al. (2015)

  10. We interviewed these geologists as part of a project titled “Science communication and public engagement: what are we trying to achieve?”

  11. While he works part-time for a museum, looking after their collections, he does not do public engagement on behalf of the museum although he might respond to occasional geology-related enquiries from the public.

  12. This is not to say that recent developments have put an end to some golden age of independent science. As Pestre (Pestre 2003, p247) has pointed out, “for at least the last five centuries, knowledge—be it ‘pure’ or applied, elaborated in universities or in other places—has been of crucial interest to power”. Over time, there have been a number of different “regimes of knowledge production”, varying in terms of “where knowledge has been produced and with which particular interests in mind” (ibid.).

  13. The online survey received 384 responses. See http://www.scientists.org.nz/blog/2014/survey-on-the-proposed-code-of-public-engagement

  14. All comments from http://www.scientists.org.nz/blog/2014/survey-on-the-proposed-code-of-public-engagement

  15. This holds despite evidence demonstrating a positive relationship between academic achievement by scientists and their level of engagement with outreach activities (Jensen et al. 2008; Bentley and Kyvik 2011).

  16. There are no standardised definitions in this area. Here we take interdisciplinary research to mean research involving multiple academic disciplines and requiring some degree of interaction (not simply separate, parallel tracks) among them. In contrast, transdisciplinary research not only involves multiple academic disciplines, including social as well as biophysical scientists, but also non-academic collaborators, and requires communication and even integration across different types of knowledge and epistemological approaches.

  17. For examples of such activities see: http://capefarewell.com/; http://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2014/anthropozaen_curriculum/anthropozaen_curriculum_1.php; http://blogs.plos.org/citizensci/2015/01/21/propose-join-citizen-science-hackfest-project/; http://www.macdiarmid.ac.nz/event/pounamu/ [all accessed February 23, 2015]

  18. http://www.frontiersin.org/ [accessed February 23, 2015]

  19. As an example, the process of interviewing the geologists for this study, and sending them our final submitted text, triggered substantial conversations with two of them (separately) about these issues. One geologist later shared that the process had given him cause to reflect more on why he does outreach and whether there were any political motivations associated with his outreach efforts.

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the Faculty of Science, Victoria University of Wellington, for funding support.

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  1. Science in Society group, Faculty of Science, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington, 6140, New Zealand

    Rhian A. Salmon & Rebecca K. Priestley

  2. Kukupa Research Ltd, Pigeon Bay, 7583, New Zealand

    Joanna Goven

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This paper is for the special issue on “Public Engagement for Environmental Sustainability in a Technological Age” edited by Priya Kurian and Debashish Munshi.

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Salmon, R.A., Priestley, R.K. & Goven, J. The reflexive scientist: an approach to transforming public engagement. J Environ Stud Sci 7, 53–68 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-015-0274-4

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