Public Engagement, Scientific Citizenship, Citizen Science

The historical development of science communication in the past two decades reflects the tensions and subsequent negotiations between science, politics and citizens. The more citizens rejected the notion that scientific evidence was necessarily an ‘objective truth’, the more policy-makers advocated participatory means of communication in order to balance expert knowledge with laypeople’s experiences, expectations, and anxieties.

It is exactly this democratization of policy-making for science-related issues which is changing science communication fundamentally, leading from “Public Understanding” to “Public Engagement”.

In this course we are analysing the expectations and realities for having more participation, accountability and transparency in science communication. Students understand the pros and cons of different forms of public engagement, and apply these prototypically in concepts and role plays.

Considering that certain stakeholders are increasingly trying to exploit the idea of “engagement” for their own particular interests, the students are encouraged to reflect very critically that there is also a flip side: obvious opportunities of cultivating trust have to be balanced with the risk of reducing the ‘quality’ of scientific expertise, delaying critical political decisions, and failing to legitimise pseudo-democratic ‘downstream’ engagement campaigns.

At this Science-Society interface, the course also addresses new approaches for improving the knowledge creation process by involving laypeople directly in scientific practice, namely Citizen Science. The ethical, legal and social implications of such initiatives, for instance the issue of quality assurance for ‘crowd-sourced’ knowledge creation, are also dealt with in class.

The course furthermore introduces the students to the ‘democratic’ dimension of a mission-oriented science communication, such as aligning research agendas to societal ‘grand challenges’, and making science policy more transparent, leading to discussions about ideals and paradigms such as ‘Open Science’ and ‘Scientific Citizenship’ compared to the out-dated concept of “Science Literacy”.

The intensity which science policy-makers, funding agencies and (maybe most of all) pressure-groups have displayed by increasingly calling for Engagement in recent years, shows how important it is that the course compares both the expectations and the refined strategies of this ‘discursive’ form of communicating science to former stages of development in science communication, especially PUSH.

Students will train to conceptualise, plan and practice specific PEST formats and campaigns, such as public debates as well as Citizen Science initiatives, also by means of role plays and in group projects.

Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:

1. assess the opportunities, challenges, and risks of public engagement initiatives and apply the most common tools and methods, dialogue formats and campaigns
2. critically reflect potential exploitations of engagement formats and the limitations of “evidence-based” decision-making
3. understand the objectives and consequences of newly-designed knowledge creation processes such as through ‘Open Science’ and ‘Scientific Citizenship’
4. understand the role of CSOs in transparency issues and as advocates for societal ‘grand challenges’
5. understand the frameworks of deliberation / consultation processes
6. responsibly apply the above mentioned concepts, cases, and tools to Public Engagement  and Citizen Science projects