A New Direction For Public Understanding Of Science

A New Direction for Public Understanding of Science

Engaging the public with science is not an easy task. When presented with scientific findings, public health recommendations, and other scientific information, people filter them through their personal values, beliefs, and biases. Science communicators must contend with these issues in order to be effective in cultivating a public understanding of science. Given the importance of scientific understanding for living well in a complex world, increasing science understanding through science engagement is imperative. The field of public engagement with science is dichotomized by a public information deficit approach and a contextualist approach. This book proposes a new approach; the participant-centered model of science engagement, incorporating the factual content of science and its epistemic authority, but in a way that is sensitive to context. It argues for a deliberative democratic approach to public engagement with science, and articulates a model inspired by learner-centered approaches to teaching in the formal education literature. The field of public understanding of science is interdisciplinary, with contributing disciplines from communication, psychology/cognitive science, philosophy, and the sciences themselves. The book will make an excellent reader in graduate-level public engagement with science, or science, technology, and society courses.

New Directions in Science and Environmental Communication: Understanding the Role of Online Video-Sharing and Online Video-Sharing Platforms for Science and Research Communication

New Directions in Surveillance and Privacy

The field of surveillance studies is developing at a rapid rate, fuelled by a deep unease about the future of individual privacy and growing interest in a number of questions that lie at the heart of the discipline. What information is held about us? To what extent is that information secure? How should new technologies be regulated? How will developments in surveillance affect our ordinary and everyday lives? Deliberately multi-disciplinary in character, New Directions in Surveillance and Privacy examines these questions from a range of different perspectives, and includes contributions from leading academics in sociology, law, management studies, literary analysis and Internet studies. As privacy comes under increasing threat and surveillance extends into more and more areas of our daily lives, surveillance studies needs to develop in new directions, form new perspectives, and gain new insights. In keeping with this aim, the chapters of this book consider how individuals, organisations, and states gather, analyse, and share ever-increasing amounts of our personal and private information. Divided into three sections, this book contains chapters touching on issues of legal regulation, changes in the technology of surveillance, and on the future of privacy and surveillance. In so doing, this new collection provides a unique and eclectic insight into the question of how the spread of surveillance is changing our lives and the societies in which we live.