505509 2014

PUS23110.1177/0963662513505509Public Understanding of ScienceJasanoff

Special Issue: Public Engagement in Science

A mirror for science

P  U  S Public Understanding of Science 2014, Vol. 23(1) 21­–26 © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0963662513505509 pus.sagepub.com

Sheila Jasanoff Harvard University, USA

Abstract Early conceptions of the public understanding of science suffered from a narrow framing of what science means and a presumption that science is divided from its publics by walls of ignorance and indifference. Those assumptions amplified misunderstanding and led to faulty policies. It is time to reopen each element in the term “public understanding of science” to renewed reflection. This journal can advance that goal by encouraging research on actual rather than imagined public responses to science, on representations of science in the public sphere, and on interactions between science, technology and society.

Keywords public understanding of science, representations of science

1. Prelude: 1992 Though not officially history, twenty-year-old documents offer sobering glimpses into the passage of time. The lead article in this journal’s first issue provides a nice example of how issue framings emerge out of particular historical and cultural circumstances, why they need to be revisited, and why they must periodically be replaced by new understandings (Bodmer and Wilkins, 1992). The authors, Sir Walter Bodmer and Janice Wilkins, set out to identify a set of research needs to improve programs for the public understanding of science (PUS). Bodmer at the time was a giant of British science policy, Director of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund and President of the International Human Genome Organization (HUGO); Wilkins was a public relations specialist. Yet being plugged into the institutional heartland of British biomedicine did not keep these authors from embracing the one-way model of science communication and the associated deficit model of the public that PUS research has done so much to dismantle, before and since. Most telling was the authors’ seamless shift from calling for research on PUS to calling for better ways to sell science to audiences deemed most in need—thus begging the very questions this journal was launched to address. Identifying British working class women as knowing less about science than other demographic groups, the authors proposed that “these women” should be targeted through what they watched (“game and chat shows, comedy series and soap operas”) and what they read (“tabloid newspapers”). The authors imagined a “fascinating soap opera … built Corresponding author: Sheila Jasanoff, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University, 79 John F. Kennedy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Email: [email protected]

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around a team of scientists who, after all, spend their days doing what might be described as a kind of detective work, and who have private lives as varied and interesting as any other section of the community” (Bodmer and Wilkins, 1992: 7–8). A little plaintively, they observed that scientists might not wish to be portrayed in this way. Still, they recommended that the public understanding of science, like any other goods or services, should be the object of a concerted, professional, marketing campaign.

2. Intermezzo: 2012 The YouTube video springs into life. Three female figures in dark silhouette advance from the back of the screen, heels clicking to a nervous background beat. Their walk resolves into a purposeful strut. Three young women, in the briefest of skirts, burst into color and strike a provocative catwalk pose. An intent young man in a lab coat lifts his gaze from his microscope and quizzically puts on his glasses to take a closer look. Scenes cut quickly back and forth between seductive images of the women, glamorized images of lab equipment, and tantalizing images of make-up, stiletto-heeled shoes, and sunglasses. The women preen, pose, hug and giggle. They play with model molecules and scatter the balls. One blows an air kiss while another wantonly scrawls scientific graffiti on a transparent surface. In between, retorts and funnels bubble, colors drip, a coil heats, liquid in beakers lets off clouds of steam, a computer screen flashes, the word hydrogen appears below a large H. The women reappear and line up arms akimbo, holding sunglasses. One pair of sunglasses morphs into lab safety glasses inscribed with the word “science”—the “i” a pink lipstick. The girls reappear, now wearing safety glasses, and a voice raps in time to the music, “Science: it’s a girl thing.” The words appear on the closing screen, the “i” of science again a lipstick. A mini soap opera, the sequence takes just 53 seconds.1 It is June 2012, and the European Commission in its zeal to lure more teenage girls into science has apparently lifted a page from Bodmer and Wilkins’ 1992 playbook. Its campaign to nudge this under-represented population toward scientific careers promises that girls need not give up high fashion to become scientists. The promotional teaser, produced by a marketing agency, is professional, sexy, slick, cool. The trouble is that it says little about what science is, nothing about what makes it worth doing, and a lot about what people think of young women. Instead of breaking stereotypes of male scientists, critics fire back, it simply re-stereotypes young women in retrograde ways. Indeed, the only serious-looking scientist on display is a man. Overwhelmed by Twitter floods of derision and outrage, an embarrassed Commission pulls the offending video from public view within days.2

3. Development Why is it so easy to end up wrong-footed, and clumsily at that, when addressing the public understanding of science? And what can a journal with that very name hope to accomplish in the next twenty years to avoid the missteps of the last twenty? Could it be that scientists and decisionmakers are part of the audience whose understanding of science, and more specifically of science in society, needs updating? There is good reason to think so. The overwhelming conclusion from two decades of PUS research, including much work published in this journal, is that PUS as originally conceived framed its object of inquiry too narrowly. It accepted “science” as a world apart, whether as a body of knowledge or as work in stylized laboratory settings; it imagined a phantom public ignorant of basic factual knowledge and detached from science in its everyday doings; and it sought to bridge the perceived gap between the two with

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an oversimplified, even cartoonish, notion of “understanding” that misconceived both what publics know and what they are capable of grasping. The truth is that we children of modernity are enmeshed in science and technology all the time and few would have it otherwise. People may not understand the insides of the machinery of contemporary living: electric lights, running water, packaged foods, cars, refrigerators, laptops, cell phones, their own genomes. Yet most are well enough equipped to realize when things are not working as they should, and to seek professional help in getting them fixed. Moreover, understanding science for most adults is a process, not a steady state. Scientific expertise is often acquired when it is needed, but then comprehensively. Patient groups, environmental organizations, and communities at risk from hazardous enterprises have shown that—when the stakes are high—they can learn intricate technical details about the nature of their problems and act knowledgeably to solve them.3 It is clear too that, contrary to some apocalyptic visions, support for science and technology is not generally under threat in modern societies (see, e.g., NSF, 2012). No democratic publics reject point blank the acquisition of new knowledge or the development of technologies that might make their lives longer, easier or more secure. Science brings hope to most and it fascinates many. Biomedical research, in particular, draws consistently strong support worldwide, and even abstruse advances in particle physics, such as the possible discovery of the elusive Higgs boson at CERN in the summer of 2012, capture the public imagination and justify large investments in basic research.4 Why then the continuing misrepresentation of science as an unloved and undersold commodity (Pinker, 2013)? A few iconic cases of unexpected public disaffection—with technology, not with science—are repeatedly used as data points from which to extrapolate a specter of pervasive public disenchantment. These include the long-running support for Creationism and more recent denial of anthropogenic climate change in the United States and the rejection of the MMR vaccine and genetically modified foods in Europe. But each example can be traced back to imbalances of power and breakdowns in trust, with resulting “civic dislocations” (Jasanoff, 1997) that have little to do with skepticism toward science in general: for instance, worries about the health of fragile children in the case of the MMR vaccine (Leach and Fairhead, 2007), neglected concerns about the benefits of new technology in the case of GM crops (Marris et al., 2001), or the cooptation of debate by powerful interest groups in the case of climate change (Oreskes and Conway, 2009). Attributing all these cases to a single cause, namely public scientific illiteracy, is neither warranted nor scientific. In Brian Wynne’s (1996) terms, these are “misunderstood misunderstandings.” Misunderstandings persist, however, and the challenge for scholarship is to find ways round them. This journal is well positioned to reframe the debate, but only if it reopens each element in the term “public understanding of science” to renewed reflection and redefinition. In what ways, though? First, PUS research should promote a more robust conception of publics—not treating them as natural collectives (e.g., housewives or teenage women) but as dynamically constituted by changes in social contexts. It is widely accepted by now that publics organize around threatening technoscientific objects and “matters of concern” (see, e.g., De Vries, 2007; Latour, 2007; Jasanoff, 2005: 84–89). These issue-oriented publics enter the political arena and participate in imagining scientific and technological futures as knowledgeable (indeed “knowledge-able,” Jasanoff, 2011) actors—that is, as actors who either know a great deal about science or acquire relevant expertise along the way. Such mini-publics can spur the production of new knowledge that more established interests may have blocked or backgrounded (Stern and Fineberg, 1996). Publics, moreover, are not all alike but are guided by culturally conditioned “civic epistemologies” (Jasanoff, 2005: 247–

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271). The knowledge-forcing activities of such engaged citizens demand systematic attention, offsetting the historically one-sided focus on apathetic and ignorant publics. Second, PUS research should switch gears from the understanding of science to the representation of science. The word “understanding” in PUS helps perpetuate a static and parochial view of science that is far from reality. As the European Commission’s misguided video comically demonstrates, science itself is an object of representation, and mis-representation, in a wide variety of settings. Understanding how particular representations arise, and the constellations of power and capital that produce them, is key to recalibrating the relations between science and its multiple publics in mutually beneficial ways. How scientists represent science, and why they sometimes do so in defiance of social scientific knowledge, then become important questions, as important as willful misrepresentations of science by the politically powerful. In short, interrogating scientists’ (and their political sponsors’) ways of characterizing science, possibly for instrumental gain, has to be part of the agenda of PUS. Third, PUS research should expand its focus from science pure and simple to science (and technology) in society. People in the twenty-first century certainly need to understand many basics of science, but what they need to understand more urgently is when to accept scientific consensus, when to trust experts, and when to assert values that seem contrary to those held by scientists. This journal can advance that larger purpose by sweeping away simplistic theoretical models of science–society relations that impede robust public engagement (e.g., technological determinism, “junk science,” the “law lag” (Jasanoff, 2007), the linear model of science policy). In their place, a re-energized PUS can showcase research from a wide array of disciplines concerned with the complex ethical, legal, social, political and economic relationships that govern the functioning of science and technology as institutions deeply enmeshed in society.

4. Coda President Barack Obama’s inaugural address on January 21, 2009 marked an extraordinary moment of hope in a time of inconclusive wars and economic crises, but the chord that resonated most with American scientists was the President’s promise: “We’ll restore science to its rightful place” (Obama, 2009). This was a breath of fresh air after eight suffocating years of apparent White House complicity in ignoring, rewriting and subverting science on issues as diverse as contraception, pesticide pollution and climate change. It reaffirmed the historically close alliance between science, the American state, and indeed the majority of Americans. It restored the proper order of things. But the optimism of that moment foundered against the hard rocks of political reality. Science could not overcome international dissension at the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, defend the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2011 plan to tighten its ground-level ozone standard, prevent Republican candidates from running on openly anti-science platforms in the 2012 U.S. presidential primaries, or keep the House of Representatives from voting in May 2012 to defund political science research. These episodes indicate that science’s “rightful place” cannot be claimed as a matter of entitlement. Still less can it be procured through an arrogant framing of PUS that depreciates the very publics whose assent is vital to the functioning of both science and democracy. Publics, after all, elect politicians, and the anti-scientific turn in Republican politics signals that a great many Americans feel disenfranchised by the visions of the future held out by scientists and their progressive allies in the Democratic Party. Those anxieties need to be understood and addressed respectfully. Reason and persuasion work better in democracies than ex cathedra pronouncements by scientists or politicians. Former President Bill Clinton brilliantly demonstrated this point in 2012 when, at the Democratic National

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Convention, he charged the Republican Party with ignoring the rules of arithmetic in its economic policies.5 We can disagree about other things, Clinton argued, but we can all add; when it comes to arithmetic, we are all in the same boat. This journal can similarly advance the cause of public reason, the lifeblood of democracies, by ensuring that science, its representations and its roles in society are accounted for in ways that satisfy not only our collective intelligence but also our collective desire to govern the futures enabled by science and technology. Acknowledgement I would like to thank Emma Frow and Alan Irwin for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes 1. I am indebted to my colleague Margaret Curnutte for calling my attention to this video. 2. Mark Peplow, “Hey girl! Science wants YOU—but don’t forget the lipstick,” Nature News Blog, June 22 and June 25, 2012, http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/06/hey-girl-science-wants-you-but-dont-forgetthe-lipstick.html. Commentary on the video did not highlight the stereotyping of race, but this is one of the production’s most astonishing aspects. 3. There is a large literature on these subjects. The following works are illustrative: Callon et al. (2009); Corburn (2005); Epstein (1996); Jasanoff (1995). 4. Overbye (2012). In the week from July 4 to July 11, 2012, Google registered about 23.9 million hits for “Higgs boson.” 5. President Clinton’s speech, delivered at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina on September 5, 2012, was hailed as a masterpiece of political oratory that assumed people were intelligent enough to follow, and absorb, technical arguments about public policy.

References Bodmer W and Wilkins J (1992) Research to improve public understanding programmes. Public Understanding of Science 1(1): 7–9. Callon M, Lascoumes P and Barthe Y (2009) Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Corburn J (2005) Street Science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. De Vries G (2007) What is political in sub-politics? How Aristotle might help STS. Social Studies of Science 37(5): 781–809. Epstein S (1996) Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jasanoff S (1995) Science at the Bar: Law, Science and Technology in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jasanoff S (1997) Civilization and madness: The great BSE scare of 1996. Public Understanding of Science 6(3): 221–232. Jasanoff S (2005) Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jasanoff S (2007) Making order: Law and science in action. In: Hackett E, Amsterdamska O, Lynch M, and Wajcman J (eds) Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 3rd edn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 761–786.

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Jasanoff S (2011) The politics of public reason. In: Dominguez Rubio F and Baert P (eds) The Politics of Knowledge. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 25–30. Latour B (2007) Turning around politics: A note on Gerard de Vries’ paper. Social Studies of Science 37(5): 811–820. Leach M and Fairhead J (2007) Vaccine Anxieties: Global Science, Child Health and Society. London: Earthscan. Marris C, Wynne B, Simmons P and Weldon S (2001) Public Perceptions of Agricultural Biotechnologies in Europe. Final report of the PABE research project. Lancaster, UK: Lancaster University. National Science Foundation (NSF) (2012) Science and technology: Public attitudes and understanding. In: Science and Engineering Indicators 2012. Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation, Chapter 7. Available at: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/c7/c7h.htm Obama B (2009) Inaugural address. January 21. Available at: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index. php?pid=44#axzz1zb5OGNCV Oreskes N and Conway EM (2009) Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury Press. Overbye D (2012) Physicists find elusive particle seen as key to the universe. New York Times, July 4. Pinker S (2013) Science is not your enemy. New Republic, August 6. Stern PC and Fineberg HV (eds) (1996) Understanding Risk: Informing Decisions in a Democratic Society. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Wynne B (1996) Misunderstood misunderstandings: Social identities and the public uptake of science. In: Irwin A and Wynne B (eds) Misunderstanding Science? The Public Reconstruction of Science and Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 19–46.

Author biography Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Her research centers on the production and use of science in legal and political decision-making. Her books include The Fifth Branch, Science at the Bar, and Designs on Nature.

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A mirror for science.

Early conceptions of the public understanding of science suffered from a narrow framing of what science means and a presumption that science is divide...
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