Научная коммуникация и общественное восприятие науки

Aspect of education and communication

Public awareness of science (PAwS) is everything relating to the awareness, attitudes, behaviors, opinions, and activities that comprise the relations between the general public or lay society as a whole to scientific knowledge and organization. This concept is also known as public understanding of science (PUS), or more recently, public engagement with science and technology (PEST). It is a comparatively new approach to the task of exploring the multitude of relations and linkages science, technology, and innovation have among the general public. While early work in the discipline focused on increasing or augmenting the public's knowledge of scientific topics, in line with the information deficit model of science communication, the deficit model has largely been abandoned by science communication researchers. Instead, there is an increasing emphasis on understanding how the public chooses to use scientific knowledge and on the development of interfaces to mediate between expert and lay understandings of an issue. Newer frameworks of communicating science include the dialogue and the participation models. The dialogue model aims to create spaces for conversations between scientists and non scientists to occur while the participation model aims to include non scientists in the process of science.

The publication of the Royal Society's' report The Public Understanding of Science (or Bodmer Report) in 1985 is widely held to be the birth of the Public Understanding of Science movement in Britain. The report led to the foundation of the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science and a cultural change in the attitude of scientists to outreach activities.

In the 1990s, a new perspective emerged in the field with the classic study of Cumbrian Sheep Farmers' interaction with the Nuclear scientists in England. Brian Wynne demonstrated how the experts were ignorant or disinterested in taking into account the lay knowledge of the sheep farmers while conducting field experiments on the impact of the Chernobyl nuclear fallout on the sheep in the region. Because of this shortcoming from the side of the scientists, local farmers lost their trust in them. The experts were unaware of the local environmental conditions and the behaviour of sheep and this has eventually led to the failure of their experimental models. Following this study, scholars have studies similar micro sociological contexts of expert lay interaction and proposed that the context of knowledge communication is important to understand public engagement with science. Instead of large scale public opinion surveys, researchers proposed studies informed by sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). The contextualist model focuses on the social impediments in the bidirectional flow of scientific knowledge between experts and laypersons/communities.

Scholars like Sheila Jasanoff have advanced the debate around public engagement with science by leveraging the theory of deliberative democracy to analyze the public deliberation of and participation in science through various institutional forms. Proponents of greater public deliberation argue it is a basic condition for decision making in democratic societies, even on science and technology issues. There are also attempts to develop more inclusive participatory models of technological governance in the form of consensus conferences, citizen juries, extended peer reviews, and deliberative mapping.

While some studies purport that factual and perceived knowledge can be viewed as the same construct, a 2012 study investigating public knowledge of nanotechnology supports separating their use in communications research, as they "do not reflect the same underlying knowledge structures". The Vega Science Trust was set up in 1994 to promote science through the media of television and the internet with the aim of giving scientists a platform from which to communicate to the general public. The Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science chair at The University of Oxford was established in 1995 for the ethologist Richard Dawkins by an endowment from Charles Simonyi. Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy has held the chair since Dawkins' retirement in 2008. Similar professorships have since been created at other British universities. Professorships in the field have been held by well known academics including Richard Fortey and Kathy Sykes at the University of Bristol, Brian Cox at Manchester University, Tanya Byron at Edge Hill University, Jim Al Khalili at the University of Surrey, and Alice Roberts at the University of Birmingham.