It’s not just about knowledge, says Roland Jackson

Peter Broks (2006): Understanding Popular Science, Oxford University Press

As a practitioner, or perhaps more accurately a bureaucrat, of public engagement with science, the immediate day-to-day reality and urgency of projects often leaves little time for perspective. This book is a good antidote, since it teases out thoughtfully and well the various historical contingencies and assumptions about the purposes and means of ‘popularising’ science.

The historical analysis supports three phases of popularising science by scientists. First, up to the mid-nineteenth century, the importance of science as useful knowledge.

Second, from the 1840s to 1870s, challenging the cultural dominance of the clergy. Finally, from 1875 onwards, state service and what we would now define as the modernist agenda, with science communicators increasingly taking over the process, alongside some scientists themselves.

At the core of the book is the continuing tension between science as a body of knowledge and practice owned and controlled by an expert community, and science as a wholly shared social enterprise in a democratic society. To maintain its authority, science needs to be set apart from the general public, but to maintain its legitimacy and trust it needs to be accessible. In practice this is not entirely an ‘either/or’ but heat is generated as ‘fundamentalist’ scientists emphasise the former and pressure groups and left-leaning think tanks the latter.

Making meanings
The author develops what he terms a ‘critical understanding of science’. This sees science as multi-directional and contextualised, with a broad notion of expertise and concerned with meaning, not simply with knowledge. I can sense the hackles of some scientists rising as I write that, but Broks clearly shows how popular science generates different meanings, which may change over time, and that these meanings can be linked to political and social struggles. Examples include the impact of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the eugenic agendas of Julian Huxley, Haldane and Hogben.

Broks sees the move to dialogue and ‘public engagement’, following the House of Lords report, as problematic, since it does not give enough attention to meaning-making. Indeed, it is often characterised as the deficit approach to the problem of lack of trust, rather than lack of knowledge.

Broks then follows an interesting spatial metaphor of popular science as a forum where what is popular meets what is scientific, which begs the questions of how and where we draw the line between what is science and what is not. This leads to the issue of access to spaces for exchange of ideas, knowledge and meaning, and the dilemma for scientists in that the desire to make science more public may conflict with an equally strong desire to control the meanings the public constructs. He then explores the uneasy relationship of science with democracy, with the view that increasing contextualisation demands we rethink science as it moves from the production of reliable knowledge to the production of knowledge which is agreed and understood as relevant, appropriate and trusted, and shared within society. 
 
Involvement in wider debate and discussion is not seen as a fundamental part of being a scientist

I was surprised that the book ended with this vision of sharing knowledge rather than the more substantive aim of sharing meaning, which might be a fruitful idea to explore. But also, as a practitioner I asked myself what his analysis, if one accepts it, implies for practice.

Scientists need to engage
Perhaps its is rare for any book to confound one’s prejudices, and this one confirmed my own that the place to focus our efforts in bringing science harmoniously into society lies more within the culture of the scientific community than with the public. That is not to be critical of scientists, because such a view can often be characterised as unsupportive of scientists or even ‘anti-science’. However, despite a widespread involvement by practising scientists in public engagement, involvement in wider debate and discussion is not seen as a fundamental part of being a scientist.

The research and the logic of scientific discovery comes first, teaching comes second, knowledge transfer gets an increasing look-in, but public engagement is clearly the poor relation, and this is despite some notable leadership within the scientific profession and some very committed communicators.

The Beacons for Public Engagement initiative is an interesting step in this direction. Let us hope that it does go far beyond the design of more and different public engagement initiatives, for whatever instrumental objectives (and they mostly are for instrumental objectives) to really changing the way in which scientists think about being scientists in today’s society.

So I hope scientists will read this book, and not just science communicators or theorists of science communication.
 
Dr Roland Jackson is the Chief Executive of the BA (British Assocation for the Advancement of Science)