Why should we promote public engagement with science?

Jack Stilgoe,Simon J Lock,James Wilsdon

doi:10.1177/0963662513518154

Jack Stilgoe, Simon J Lock + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662513518154

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Abstract

This introductory essay looks back on the two decades since the journal Public Understanding of Science was launched. Drawing on the invited commentaries in this special issue, we can see narratives of continuity and change around the practice and politics of public engagement with science. Public engagement would seem to be a necessary but insufficient part of opening up science and its governance. Those of us who have been involved in advocating, conducting and evaluating public engagement practice could be accused of over-promising. If we, as social scientists, are going to continue a normative commitment to the idea of public engagement, we should therefore develop new lines of argument and analysis. Our support for the idea of public engagement needs qualifying, as part of a broader, more ambitious interest in the idea of publicly engaged science.

Highlights

In an influential 1987 article, Thomas and Durant asked a question that remains pertinent today: why should we promote the public understanding of science? (Thomas and Durant, 1987)
As Richard Jones argues in his essay, public engagement has become proceduralised and we have at times lost sight of the problems to which it is offered as a solution
Both Burgess and Guston offer an optimistic account of public engagement, suggesting that, if decision-makers are themselves enrolled in dialogue, and if connections are made to politics, these processes can succeed in their own terms, but generate further conversations and capacities that move us some way towards what Guston describes as “a revival of how we conceive of science in our politics”

Summary

Introduction

In an influential 1987 article, Thomas and Durant asked a question that remains pertinent today: why should we promote the public understanding of science? (Thomas and Durant, 1987). The journal Public Understanding of Science (PUS) was launched as a forum for debating this question as it grew in policy and practical significance. This journal has steadily described and mapped the gradual and incomplete shift from ‘understanding’ to ‘engagement’, and the flowering of policies, initiatives and practical experiments that has accompanied this. The journal’s launch twenty years ago was motivated primarily by ends-based debates about the governance and political legitimacy of science and technology. Our conclusion is that support for the idea of public engagement needs qualifying, as part of a broader, more ambitious interest in the idea of publicly engaged science

Continuity and change

Imagining the public

Where next?

Conclusion