Significant change has taken place in the UK and abroad in how academic knowledge is communicated, accessed and written, but persistent stereotypes of the unengaged, obscure professor are still widespread, evidenced most recently by last week’s New York Times article by … Continue reading →
Category: Public Engagement
Male, Mad and Muddleheaded: The portrayal of academics in children’s books is shockingly narrow.
Academics in children’s picture books tend to be elderly, old men, who work in science, called Professor SomethingDumb. Why does this matter? Melissa Terras presents the findings from her two-year search on the representation of academics and argues these portrayals should be … Continue reading →
Five minutes with Nikolas Rose: “The imperative to make exaggerated promises about impact is damaging to the science itself”
Chris Gilson, Managing Editor of our sister blog USApp, recently interviewed Nikolas Rose, Head of the Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine at King’s College London and one of the principal investigators of the interdisciplinary, European Commission-funded Human Brain … Continue reading →
The deliberate quest for causal explanations will reinvigorate social science’s relevance in mass media and policy
Daily news reports and journalistic coverage highlight the powerful traction of causality for our everyday understanding of events and phenomena. From the 2011 UK riots to traffic accidents, Kamila Pieczara argues social scientists offer a competitive advantage when it comes to … Continue reading →
The Impact of the Social Sciences research book is out this week! Browse the living bibliography, data visualisations and other resources.
The Impact of the Social Sciences: How Academics and Their Research Make a Difference by Simon Bastow, Patrick Dunleavy, and Jane Tinkler. The three-year Impact of Social Sciences Project has culminated in a monograph published by SAGE. The book presents thorough … Continue reading →
The contemporary social sciences are now converging strongly with STEM disciplines in the study of ‘human-dominated systems’ and ‘human-influenced systems’
Much less is known about the development of the social sciences as a complete discipline group than about the previously dominant STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) discipline group. Patrick Dunleavy, Simon Bastow and Jane Tinkler set out some key … Continue reading →
Maximising luck: Six steps to getting your research noticed by journalists.
Stuart Fox traces the encounters and conversations which led to his research eventually being featured in a high-profile newspaper. He highlights here the lessons he learned about getting his research noticed by journalists and politicians. There is no simple, straight-forward … Continue reading →
A more inclusive approach to citizen engagement methods will strengthen policy-making and its underpinning evidence.
For just under a decade, a significant experiment in citizen participation in government has been taking place in the shape of Sciencewise. In recent years, the agency has not only survived a change of Government, but – according to Helen Pallett … Continue reading →