scholarly journals After the fact(s): Communicating scientific complexity, risk, and uncertainty in Aotearoa

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Matthew Soar
Keyword(s):  
Public Engagement ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Cultural Barriers ◽  
Public Confidence ◽  
Risk And Uncertainty ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Scientific Authority ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production ◽  
Complex Picture

<p>This thesis draws on social constructivist theories of scientific knowledge to analyse the public engagement practices of a cohort of scientist-communicators in Aotearoa as they represent scientific complexity, risk, and uncertainty in public. Through semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis, this thesis demonstrates that participants think defensively about the publics they communicate to, drawing boundaries between science and publics that minimise exposure of the elements of scientific knowledge they perceive might undermine scientific authority. Such boundary-work often demarcates public engagement from scientific knowledge production, constructing public engagement as a subjective process applied to scientific knowledge after the fact. These science-communicators also work to overcome these very same boundaries by making science more accessible and democratic. Such tensions suggest that participants not only socially construct science, but also contribute to the social construction of public engagement with science as they work to transform systemic and cultural barriers acting to entrench science as an inaccessible, exclusive, and unilateral arbiter of knowledge. In doing so, participants found that presenting a more accurate, complex picture of science—with all its uncertainties and failures—had not undermined public confidence in science. Instead, complexity, risk and uncertainty could become transparent elements of scientific knowledge production, thereby open to public scrutiny and definition. Participants’ representations of complexity, risk, and uncertainty were influenced by accessible, local publications, and economic and institutional conditions, but rarely by established public engagement scholarship.</p>

scholarly journals After the fact(s): Communicating scientific complexity, risk, and uncertainty in Aotearoa

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Matthew Soar
Keyword(s):  
Public Engagement ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Cultural Barriers ◽  
Public Confidence ◽  
Risk And Uncertainty ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Scientific Authority ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production ◽  
Complex Picture

<p>This thesis draws on social constructivist theories of scientific knowledge to analyse the public engagement practices of a cohort of scientist-communicators in Aotearoa as they represent scientific complexity, risk, and uncertainty in public. Through semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis, this thesis demonstrates that participants think defensively about the publics they communicate to, drawing boundaries between science and publics that minimise exposure of the elements of scientific knowledge they perceive might undermine scientific authority. Such boundary-work often demarcates public engagement from scientific knowledge production, constructing public engagement as a subjective process applied to scientific knowledge after the fact. These science-communicators also work to overcome these very same boundaries by making science more accessible and democratic. Such tensions suggest that participants not only socially construct science, but also contribute to the social construction of public engagement with science as they work to transform systemic and cultural barriers acting to entrench science as an inaccessible, exclusive, and unilateral arbiter of knowledge. In doing so, participants found that presenting a more accurate, complex picture of science—with all its uncertainties and failures—had not undermined public confidence in science. Instead, complexity, risk and uncertainty could become transparent elements of scientific knowledge production, thereby open to public scrutiny and definition. Participants’ representations of complexity, risk, and uncertainty were influenced by accessible, local publications, and economic and institutional conditions, but rarely by established public engagement scholarship.</p>

Scientific Knowledge Production Processes

2004 ◽  
pp. 136-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Boden ◽  
Deborah Cox ◽  
Maria Nedeva ◽  
Katharine Barker
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Production Processes ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production

scholarly journals Known unknowns: Filling the gaps in scientific knowledge production in the Caatinga

PLoS ONE ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (7) ◽  
pp. e0219359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thainá Lessa ◽  
Janisson W. dos Santos ◽  
Ricardo A. Correia ◽  
Richard J. Ladle ◽  
Ana C. M. Malhado
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production ◽  
Known Unknowns

scholarly journals How Does Indonesian Scientific Production on Renewable Energy Successfully Support the Policy Design? A Journey Towards Sustainable Energy Transition

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-52
Author(s):  
Iqbal Akbar ◽  
◽  
Dhandy Arisaktiwardhana ◽  
Prima Naomi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Energy Policy ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Policy Design ◽  
Sustainable Energy ◽  
Energy Transition ◽  
Scientific Publication ◽  
Scientific Production ◽  
Basic Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production

The aim to achieve the target of a 23% share of sustainable energies in the total Indonesia’s primary energy supply requires enormous amounts of works. Indonesia’s scientific knowledge production can support a successful transition to renewables. However, policy makers struggle to determine how the transition benefits from the scientific production on renewable. A bibliometric study using scientific publication data from the Web of Science (WoS) is used to probe how Indonesian scientific knowledge production can support the policy design for transition to sustainable energy. The seven focused disciplines are geothermal, solar, wind, hydro, bio, hybrid, and energy policy and economics. Based on the data from the above-listed disciplines, a deeper analysis is conducted, and implications to the policy design are constructed. The study reveals that bio energy is the focus of the research topics produced in Indonesia, followed by solar and hydro energy. Most RE research is related to the applied sciences. The innovation capability in the form of technology modifiers and technology adapters supports the transition to sustainable energy in Indonesia. The research on bio energy, however, is characterized by higher basic knowledge than research on solar and hydro energy. This suggests low barriers to the access to the resources and to the completion of bio research in Indonesia. Designing Indonesian energy policy by comprising discriminatively specific sustainable energy sources in the main policy instruments can therefore accelerate the sustainable transition and development.

scholarly journals Ontological Opportunism

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-51
Author(s):  
Anne Dippel
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
High Energy Physics ◽  
High Energy ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Discursive Practice ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production ◽  
Energy Physics

Understanding inanimate ‘nature-as-such’ is traditionally considered the object of physics in Europe. The discipline acts as exemplary discursive practice of scientific knowledge production. However, as my ethnographic investigation of doing and communicating high energy physics demonstrates, animist conceptions seep into the ontological understanding of physics’ ‘objects’, resonating with contemporary concepts of new materialism, new animism and feminist science and technology studies, signifying an atmospheric shift in the understanding of ‘nature’. Drawing on my fieldwork at CERN, I argue that scientists take an opportunist stance to animate concepts of ‘nature’, depending on whom they’re talking to. I am showing how the inanimate in physics is reanimated especially in scientific outreach activities and how the universalist scientific cosmology overlaps with indigenous cosmologies, as for example the Lakota ones.

scholarly journals Configuring Devices for Phenomena in-the-Making

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena Karasti ◽  
Andrea Botero ◽  
Joanna Saad-Sulonen ◽  
Karen S. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Collaborative Research ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production ◽  
Research Infrastructures ◽  
Complex Phenomena ◽  
Study Participants

STS scholars are engaging in collaborative research in order to study extended socio-technical phenomena. This article participates in discussions on methodography and inventive methods by reflecting on visualizations used both internally by a team of researchers and together with study participants. We describe how these devices for generating and transforming data were brought to our ethnographic inquiry into the formation of research infrastructures which we found to be unwieldy and evolving phenomena. The visualizations are partial renderings of the object of inquiry, crafted and informed by ‘configuration’ as a method of assemblage that supports ethnographic study of contemporary socio-technical phenomena. We scrutinize our interdisciplinary bringing together of visualizing devices - timelines, collages, and sketches - and position them in the STS methods toolbox for inquiry and invention. These devices are key to investigating and engaging with the dynamics of configuring infrastructures intended to support scientific knowledge production. We conclude by observing how our three kinds of visualizing devices provide flexibility, comprehension and in(ter)ventive opportunities for study of and engagement with complex phenomena in-the-making.

scholarly journals Preface

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. vi-x
Author(s):  
Geni Chaves Fernandes
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Triple Helix ◽  
Production Systems ◽  
Actor Network ◽  
Stability Indicating ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production

Studies are pointing to changes in scientific knowledge production systems regarding different models (mode2, triple helix, actor-network, post-academic etc.), emphasizing its interdisciplinary, multiplayer and multiplace characteristics. When seeking an explanation of reality, models create interpretive images that interfere in the reality, as they operate offering parameters to actions. The differences and implicit forecasts they present point not only to local, cultural or ideological burdens in its construction, but especially that the different intervening forces have not yet found stability, indicating that we are still going through a time of transition.

Performing ‘the authoritative account’: How the BBC’s Horizon produces epistemic authority

2020 ◽  
pp. 030631272094718
Author(s):  
Brian James Kantor
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Epistemic Authority ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production ◽  
Experimental Trials

Viewers have often looked upon the BBC’s science documentary strand, Horizon, as an authoritative source for scientific knowledge. Through interviews with the series’ producers, this article examines the practices its producers perform to buttress their authority and generate the view that this show is itself a producer of knowledge, even while it is also televising and mediating science. Of particular note are references to science fiction to police boundaries between science and pseudoscience, and the use of original experimental trials to generate witnesses. These position Horizon as at least a node in the network of scientific knowledge production.

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