Keynotes

Michel Dubois is a sociologist of science and technology, CNRS Senior Research Fellow. He is the current director of the Gemass Lab (Groupe d'Etude des Méthodes de l'Analyse Sociologique de la Sorbonne - CNRS - Sorbonne Université) and director of the French Sociological Review (Presses de SciencesPo). His most recent work in the field of the study of science involves the development of environmental epigenetics for the scientific study of neurodegenerative diseases, the transformations in the modes of evaluation of scientific work, the impact of the covid19 crisis on research ethics and public attitudes towards the scientific community.

Michel Dubois, PhD CNRS, michel.dubois@cnrs.fr

Gene editing, CRISPR-Cas9, environmental epigenetics, sociogenomics: these terms, which have been doing the rounds among the general public since the early years of the 21st century, point to new horizons of control and empowerment. “Why Your DNA Isn't Your Destiny” read a Times headline in 2010… Apparently announcing the end of the era of biological heredity inherited from the 19th century, those terms give rise to enthusiasm and disquiet turn and turn about. They are the subject of numerous forms of reappropriation, social, economic and political alike.

In his contribution, Michel Dubois, sociologist of science at the CNRS, will be taking another look at the way in which the social sciences pick up on the latest genomic and post-genomic advances made by the life sciences (Dubois, Guaspare, Louvel, 2018). Returning to the study of social perceptions of science, he will be making an assessment of our current attitudes towards biotechnologies, genetic engineering and epigenetics. The hitherto unpublished results of the The French and Science 2020 survey will be presented and put into perspective in relation to the various waves of surveys available in France since the 1970s, as well as the most recent major international surveys.

In discussing the main results of a series of surveys devoted to epigenetics and behavioural genetics (Dubois et al., 2019; Dubois, Guaspare, 2020; Dubois, Guaspare, Vilain, 2021), he will be taking another look at the variety of mechanisms associated with scientific communication in the field of life sciences. For example, do specific modes of circulation of scientific knowledge among the general public exist? Why does epigenetics seem so appealing? Is it possible to identify certain “knowledge claims” in public discourse and, if so, given the current state of knowledge, how accurate are they? More generally, what problems are researchers faced with when they want to communicate in “socially responsible” fashion?

Gordon Gauchat PhD is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His research focuses public perceptions of science at the intersection of political and cultural polarization in the US and Europe. He has published research in American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Nature Climate Change, Climatic Change, Gender and Society and Public Understanding of Science. He is currently working on his first book, Why People Deny Science, which will offer a synthesis of cognitive and cultural explanations of public engagement with scientific knowledge. His interests extend to broader societal questions about the relationship between human cognition, rapid cultural change to the dissemination of knowledge, and the formation of political identity. The horizon of this research is a social scientific model that addresses “advances” in information technology and its effects on the ways human beings cognitively map their world.

In 1937, Merton addressed the American Sociological Society about the cultural, political, and economic threats to the scientific community. Nazism and the rising tide of authoritarianism provided a stark and urgent backdrop to the talk. Merton stressed that the production of scientific knowledge was dependent on broader cultural and institutional forces and the unique social conditions found in democratic societies. More than seven decades later, we again confront the fragility of scientific truth and endemic politicization. Our current crisis follows a punctuated set of cascading institutional shocks, shaking public faith in science and expertise around the world. These include the 2001 terrorist attacks and violent aftermath, the 2008 global financial crisis, the 2016 electoral upheavals in Brexit and Donald Trump’s victory, and the current pandemic. There is also the looming threat of climate change and the ineffectual policy response. The purpose of this talk is to revisit Merton’s observations while addressing the contemporary challenges to science’s legitimacy and the parallel crisis of truth. The enduring appeal of Merton’s institutional model is that it circumscribes the object of study, the scientific community: 1) the organized professional network that produces scientific knowledge; and 2) the delicate social and cultural environment that maintains it. Often discounted but equally central is science’s cultural meaning because this provides an accessible approximation of the congruence between the scientific community and its institutional environment. Advances in public opinion research over the last two decades finally allow social scientists to fully realize Merton’s institutional model—where the goal is to demarcate the social locations likely to challenge science, for various reasons particular to those locations, and to empirically track when these threats are heightened.

Doctor of Political Science, University of Tours/PRIM. For more than 10 years, Julien Giry’s research has largely focused on the study of the various aspects (political, historical, sociotechnical, in popular culture, etc.) of conspiracy theorists, their social actors (conspiracy theory leaders, citizen investigators, scapegoats, “anti-conspiracist” activists, etc.), and such related phenomena as rumours, urban legends and fake news. He is also interested in the study of populist and extreme right movements in the United States and Europe. More recently, he has turned his attention to radicalisation phenomena and “alterscience”, in its claim to dispute established scientific knowledge, in particular with regard to vaccination and vaccines, to the point of becoming a genuine political resource for marginal actors in the field of power.

• “Les fake news comme concept de sciences sociales. Essai de cadrage à partir de quelques notions connexes : rumeurs, théories du complot, propagande et désinformation”, Questions de communication, no.38, 2021.
• “Conspiracism. Archaeology and Morphology of a Political Myth”, Diogenes, Sage vol.62, no.3-4, 2020.
• With Pranvera Tika, “Conspiracy Theories in Political Science and Political Theory. An Introduction” in Peter Knight, Michael Butter (eds.), The Routledge Handbook on Conspiracy Theories, London: Routledge Publishers, 2020.
• With Dogan Grüpinar, “Functions and Uses of Conspiracy Theories in Authoritarian Regimes” in Peter Knight, Michael Butter (eds.), The Routledge Handbook on Conspiracy Theories, London: Routledge Publishers, 2020.

From the French Revolution to the contemporary Covid-19 pandemic, via interethnic violence in India and such sectarian movements as the People’s Temple, this paper will aim to show how conspiracy theories, defined as “the conviction that a secret and omnipotent group or individual, operating on the margins of society, secretly controls the political and social order, either partially or entirely” (Fenster), contribute to defiance of the political, media and scientific authorities as well as fulfilling a function of mobilising a community which, either justifiably or otherwise, feels itself threatened socially or symbolically. As a form of proto-politicisation and “stigmatised knowledge” (Barkun), conspiracy theories, in competition with or for lack of official or scientific discourse, provide symbolically reassuring alternative explanations insofar as they give meaning to unstructured situations and social uncertainties.

Mehita Iqani is a Professor in the Media Studies department at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Her research is interdisciplinary, spanning the politics of waste, consumption and inequality, cultural theory, critical discourse analysis, and strategic communications. She is the author of three monographs, most recently Garbage in Popular Culture: Consumption and the Aesthetics of Waste (2020, SUNY Press). She is the co-editor of four collections, most recently Media Studies: Critical African and Decolonial Approaches (2019, OUP) and African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics (2019, Intellect and University of Chicago Press). She has also published widely in and reviews for key international journals, is Associate Editor of Consumption Markets and Culture, and is on the board of International Journal of Cultural Studies and Communication Theory. Her PhD is in Media and Communications from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

How might it be possible to integrate popular communications with science communication in novel and productive ways, and in explicit service of a social justice and development agenda? In the context of the huge inequality and social suffering in South Africa, science cannot be treated as an abstract feature of society but should instead be demonstrated as relevant to multiple aspects of everyday life and opportunities for improving its conditions. While there is merit in deepening understandings about how science is engaged with and understood by ordinary citizens (the ‘public understanding of science’ framework (Bucchi and Trench, 2014; Metcalfe and Riedlinger, 2019), in the face of the multiple challenges most ordinary South Africans face in their lives, they are likely to support and care about science that has to do with issues that they perceive as directly affecting their wellbeing. As such, issues-driven research, rooted in social and political context, is still much-needed, so as to move from “‘deficit’ to ‘dialogue’” by bringing relevant, issues-driven science into “greater proximity to the public” through a “democratised relationship” (Weingart et al., 2020: 4). Such an approach is crucial if we are to find ways to bridge science innovation with public opinion and policy and rise to meet the massive challenges that will shape research and lived experience in South Africa, Africa and the global south in the 21st century. These challenges can be grouped into three broad categories: climate change, quality of life, and equity. To illustrate these challenges, as well as some of the communicative opportunities they present, I explore one key example of a new form of science-driven ecological urban regeneration in South Africa’s economic hub and biggest city, Johannesburg. The Upper Jukskei Rejuvenation project is working to detoxify and re-green Johannesburg’s only perennial river, which springs from underneath the city and which is extremely toxic, affecting communities and environments on the banks all the way through to where it meets the Indian Ocean in Mozambique. The activists driving this project have had to innovate in creating strategies that creatively and boldly integrate scientific data collection, public art, public relations and community engagement. This case study offers some reference points for considering how natural sciences knowledge and scientific innovation is included in media coverage, and how popular communications about urban sustainability can serve as creative science education tools.

Kyoko Sato is Associate Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University. Her research examines technoscientific governance in Japan and the United States. She is currently co-editing a collective volume (with Soraya Boudia and Bernadette Bensaude Vincent), Living in a Nuclear World: From Fukushima to Hiroshima, an interdisciplinary post-Fukushima reflection on the development of the global nuclear order. She is also part of Comparative Covid Response, a study on the pandemic response of 16 countries (led by Steve Hilgartner and Sheila Jasanoff). Her previous work examined interdisciplinary knowledge production and the politics of genetically modified food in France, Japan, and the United States. She worked as a journalist in Tokyo before receiving her PhD in sociology from Princeton University.

The significance of a shift from a “deficit” model to two-way dialogues has long been a key theme in science communication and technoscience governance. The idea that the public should be engaged in issues related to science and technology, rather than simply receiving top-down information, has gone beyond academic debates to become prevalent in policy practices in many countries. However, as it has been repeatedly pointed out, the deficit model persists. Furthermore, different cultural contexts pose different challenges: Engagement can have different cultural meanings and take different forms to be effective, and the public and their relationship to technical expertise exist in widely divergent manners across societies. In thinking about the future of effective science communication, I first revisit a few key insights from science and technology studies (STS), a field that has played a role in the “deficit to dialogue” shift, in order to highlight why dialogue and engagement are productive, promising, and preferrable. I then proceed to discuss different challenges in enacting such a shift that I have observed in my research on Covid-19 responses and nuclear governance in Japan and the United States. Much of the initial intellectual debate on dialogue and engagement came out of the Western contexts, and their implementation presents different kinds of difficulties in non-Western contexts, in addition to familiar ones. For instance, in Japan, where technocracy has long been embraced, the idea of “citizens” as active agents in collective decision-making – a basic tenet of democracy – is not always wholeheartedly welcomed in practice. Some even consider dialogic activities as experts and officials not doing their job, rather than as democratic opportunities, especially in times of a crisis such as the Covid-19 pandemic. At the same time, productive expert-citizen collaboration and communication exist, and I will discuss such examples in the nuclear politics of both countries and their implications. From early on, the rationale for citizen participation in science and technology was multifold: for instance, normative, instrumental, and substantive (Fiorino 1990). Empirically, this is still the case (Weingart et al. 2021). STS researchers have contributed to a shift towards engagement by showing how social and political factors shape science and technology, as well as their fundamentally constitutive role in society. Empirically and theoretically, they have problematized scientism, technological determinism, and essentialized views of technoscience in general, and showed that technoscience and society are mutually constitutive, or co-produced (Jasanoff 2004). These insights have raised an important question about decision-making: If the trajectory of science and technology is not pre-determined, and if they constitute and mediate every sphere of our social life, then shouldn’t decisions about them be more open to the public’s critical scrutiny and democratic input, rather than being left to technical experts, corporate leaders and political elites? Through numerous case studies, STS researchers have also demonstrated how lay citizens are capable not only of grasping technical matters that deeply affect them, but also of contributing input (e.g., local and embodied knowledge) that improves the effectiveness of policy-relevant knowledge (e.g., Epstein 1996; Wynne 1996; Callon et al. 2009). The views of science-society relations anchored in these insights acknowledge that making of technoscience is making of society and its future. They call for reflexivity and democratic engagement from a variety of actors, from lay citizens to journalists and teachers to experts and policymakers. In these views, effective science communication can not only help make technoscience more socially relevant and aligned with the public’s needs, but also potentially revitalize democratic deliberation and action themselves. To pursue such lofty goals, an understanding of political culture is crucial, and comparative analysis is a helpful tool for the purpose.

Prof. Dr. Peter Weingart is Professor emeritus of Sociology, Sociology of Science and Science Policy at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. After his retirement in 2009 he was appointed to the SARChi Chair for Science Communication at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. He was the director of the Institute of Science and Technology Studies (IWT) 1993 - 2009 and of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (Zif), both Bielefeld University, 1989 – 1994. He is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) since 1996, and of the Academy of Engineering Science (acatech) since 2008. Since 2007 he is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Minerva. His current research interests are science advice to politics, science – media interrelation, science communication. He is also interested in communication patterns in the media and in science. 

The quest for public attention by economic and political organizations emerged in the 1950s and has intensified ever since. For science, i.e. universities and research centers it was triggered with new public management and the creation of artificial markets for higher education institutions (HEIs). Its impact is now evident in the growth of communication units whose mission goes beyond the announcement of press releases. However, for these institutions the practice of persuasive communication (marketing, branding, public relations) conflicts potentially but increasingly also in reality with the autonomy of science (and the freedom of science as guaranteed in some countries’ constitution), with rules of good scientific practice and with orienting values of science such as ‘organized skepticism’.

While it has to be acknowledged that universities and individual scientists have to adapt to new environments to compete for and legitimate public funds that does not mean that it has to be done with the same means used by commercial and political organizations. Mostly the publics to which their communications are addressed are imagined, the effects are rarely evaluated seriously. Thus the effort remains self-referential.

But that does not mean that it remains without side-effects. The overall phenomenon is one of the medialization of science. Some collateral damage has become visible, for example, with the discussion over communication guidelines by the University of Bern or, more dramatically, with the scandal caused by the premature announcement of a blood-test by the University of Heidelberg.

It is attempted to indicate some solutions to the problem.