Clare Wilkinson from the Science Communication group at UWE is putting together a collection of short commentary articles for the open-access journal JCOM (https://jcom.sissa.it/), and is keen to hear from anyone who has research, or a strong practitioner perspective they’d be prepared to write up, on the theme of science communication/public engagement in everyday and unexpected settings.
If you’re interested, please get in touch with Clare directly at Clare.Wilkinson@uwe.ac.uk .
Details of the call are below. I think she’s looking for pieces of around 3000 to 4000 words, but this may be negotiable.
Commentaries: Neglected Spaces in Science Communication
Many of the earliest drivers for improved scientific literacy and understanding were based on the assumption that science and technology is all around us. This ethos that science is part of our world, is also apparent in countless communication efforts today and is a clear justification for public inclusion in engagement, and yet as science communicators it is often easy to focus on the most popular subject matter, or activities and events which generate the greatest obvious attention. As a community we therefore know a huge amount about subjects such as immunisation, GM, nuclear power and other timely topics, as well as the activities of the mass media, and science centres and museums, but we perhaps focus less on the equally important but less visible spaces in which science communication can be happening in peoples’ daily lives. This series of commentaries will focus on the ways in which people might encounter science communication beyond its most typical settings. It will invite contributions from authors working in areas such as public health, the arts, protest, emerging digital spaces, and the boundaries between science and education.
The commentaries are likely to be published July-Sept, so I will most likely be looking for submissions to be made in May, though I’m still firming up the specifics. At this point, if anyone is interested, they are welcome to let me know via email and I will then send the specifics to them, when I put out the wider information.
Posted on behalf of James Sumner, Lecturer in History Of Technology, The University of Manchester