[Reader-list] on the politics of Popularisation of Science

[Shiju Sam Varughese]

Dear friends,

My second posting is on the politics of science popularisation and the
emergence of
Public Understanding of Science (PUS) as a specialised area of
investigation within
Social Studies of Science (SSS).

The popularisation of science became an important agenda in the post world war
period. The turning point was a report named 'Science: The Endless
Frontier' produced
by Vannevar Bush, President Roosvelt's policy maker in 1945, where he advocated
autonomy for scientists from the political, economic and social
realms. The report
placed the public at the receiving end in contrast to the pre-war
period in which
science activism was a major trend in many countries. Such a change in
approach to
science popularisation enhanced the view that the scientific community had the
authority over scientific knowledge, and the priorities of scientific
research or
technological policy are produced through negotiation between the state and the
scientific community. Thus science gets assimilated into the hegemonic
ideology of
the modern nation state. Here the public is assumed as ignorant and needs to be
educated by scientists with the aid of the state. According to the
proponents of this
model of science popularisation, the life of citizens is impoverished
by an exclusion
from scientific thought and it was assumed that a wider exposure to scientific
thinking would lead to greater acceptance and support for science and
technology.
Through such construction of a homogenous, inert and ignorant public,
the positivist
image of science as monolithic and disembodied knowledge with a distinct and
impeccable method of investigation acquired acceptability. This
framework is also
successful in distancing science from public scrutiny and places the
scientist at a safe
position beyond public criticism. It legitimates further public
expenditure on science
through popularisation programmes and pays no heed to the public
response. The fact
that science could be problematic for society is ignored and thereby
the model rejects
the multitude of responses from the public as 'anti science'.

However, a new 'social constructivist' approach was proposed in the
late 1980s when
sociology of scientific knowledge turned to be a major trend within
SSS. The newly
proposed constructivist model, which is also known as the
'contextualist' model,
suggested a new perspective on the engagement of the public with
science. The main
proponents of this approach are Brian Wynne and Alan Irwin, and they
developed this
new model based on micro sociological studies, which depicted the
active role of local
communities in negotiating the meanings of science in their daily
life. In their
studies, science appears as a subculture with a diffuse collection of
institutions and
areas of special knowledge and theoretical interpretations whose forms and
boundaries are open to negotiation with other social institutions and forms of
knowledge.

The classic case study of the Cumbrian hill sheep farmers' encounter
with science,
done by Brian Wynne ('Sheep Farming after Chernobyl: A Case Study in
Communicating Scientific Information'. Environment Magazine, 31/2:
10-15, 33-39,
1989) shows how scientists and sheep farmers are different social
groups attempting
to express and defend their distinct social identities. The sheep
farmers of the Lake
District of northern England claimed that the radioactive fall-out
from the Chernobyl
accident had contaminated their sheep flocks and upland pastures. The
farmers found
their social and cultural identities as threatened by the form of
scientific interventions
since the scientists were not willing to take into consideration the
farmers' expertise
on the local environment and the social practices and relationships.
The farmers had
expressed specialist knowledge for the conduct and development of
science, but this
was ignored by scientists in their experiments in the field. The
scientists' ignorance,
lack of interest in local realities, and imposition of false
assumption about the agency
of local people ended up in a loss of trust among the farmers and the
consecutive
failure of scientific experiments and predictions. The expertise of
the farmers was
based on a deep cultural outlook, and which was incompatible with the
scientific-bureaucratic cultural idiom of standardization, formal and
inflexible methods
and procedures, and prediction and control, the study pointed out.

Unlike the former science popularisation model that undertook
large-scale public
surveys with the help of quantitative methods, the constructivist
model provided a
wide range of qualitative analytical tools and variables that made it
a most useful
framework. New areas of investigations have contributed to further
development of
the framework such as the study of scientific controversies, case
studies on science
movements and 'anti-science' movements, historical analysis of the encounter of
different communities with modern science in colonial backgrounds as well as
representations of science in popular culture. Thus the constructivist model
successfully problematises science and the practices of science
communication, and
its emphasis is on understanding how the public understands science. While the
former model blamed the public for lack of appreciation of science, the later
established the agency of the public and demanded scientists to be
more reflexive in
doing science. My study for SARAI draws theoretical tools from the latter.

with regards,

Shiju Sam Varughese,
JNU, NEW DELHI