Misinformation has been a prominent paradigm in the explanation of social, political, and more recently epidemiological phenomena since the middle of the last decade. However, Daniel Williams argues that a focus on misinformation is limiting when used …
Category: research communication
Tell me what you read (or watch) and I will tell you what you research: The two-way street between science and literature
Literature and in particular science fiction is often seen as being prefigurative to the development of science and technology. Whilst this can on occasion be the case, drawing on a study of AI researchers and their reading and viewing material, Sarah …
UK in a Changing Europe: injecting social science into a polarised political debate
Reflecting on seven years of UK in a Changing Europe, Anand Menon and Jill Rutter discuss how the project has brought social science insights into the mainstream of a polarised public debate. Highlighting how this mode of engagement falls outside of or…
Fun(ny) facts: Humour as a research communication strategy
If you have read any research produced by universities, civil society organisations or think tanks, you will most likely have struggled to find any good jokes. However, throughout history, humour has played an important role in critiquing society and r…
We need better AI imagery for better science communication
Current images of AI – widely used and available in stock libraries – are dominated by tropes such as white humanoid robots, blue backgrounds, glowing brains and science fiction imagery. Research into narratives as forms of sense-making AI …
Finding your niche in the four styles of research communication
Research communication can often seem like a monolith, if you want to take your research beyond the walls of the university then do x-y-z. As Andy Tattersall describes, there are in fact many hands and styles of work that contribute to effective resear…
Book Review: Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation by Carolyn Pedwell
In Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation, Carolyn Pedwell examines how social change can be enacted through everyday habits and routinised practices, arguing that such ‘minor’ gestures may be just as transformative as major events…
Narratives and Evidence – Which stories about COVID-19 did we believe and why?
Rigorous empirical evidence is often presumed to be the most persuasive, notably in fields such as healthcare and medicine, where there are established frameworks for assessing the quality of evidence. In this post, Eivind Engebretsen and Mona Baker ar…
Descriptive statistics are essential to making complex analyses useful.
In response to the ever-growing volume of data, quantitative social research has become increasingly dependent on complex inferential methods. In this post, Kevin R. Murphy argues that whilst these methods can provide insights, they should not detract …
Podcast: Do we need the arts to change the world?
The latest episode episode of the LSE IQ podcast asks: Do we need the arts to change the world? As the UK government looks to recover from the costs of the pandemic its decision to cut funding for creative higher education courses could be seen as a pr…