WEEKEND READING: Opening up research: the diverse and creative possibilities of public engagement
This blog was kindly authored by Charlotte Fawcett, PhD Student in Genomic Epidemiology and Public Health Genomics at the University of Leicester and HEPI Intern.
This is a special blog to mark British Science Week (6th-15th March).
Public engagement with academic research is extremely important. Sharing ongoing research with the public allows the public to participate in the research process. This is important for public trust and understanding. Diverse groups are also better at problem-solving, so speaking with more people may give researchers new ideas on how to consider an issue. However, a lack of recognition from institutions and funders, combined with a necessary focus on academic publishing, has resulted in barriers to public engagement for researchers. On top of this, researchers who do seek to engage with the public who have faced barriers in reaching some communities – from confusion around the research process; to the direct (for example, transportation) and indirect (for example, missing work) costs of engaging.
Despite these difficulties, promoting public engagement has been of increasing interest to the research community. This deepening awareness has resulted in its inclusion in REF 2029, with 20 per cent of weighting going to engagement and impact. A consequence of this increasing interest is the development of many new and creative public engagement methods.
One of the most well-known methods for public engagement with research is Three Minute Thesis (3MT). 3MT is an academic competition developed in Australia in 2008. Competitors are asked to explain their research to a non-specialist audience in only three minutes. Today, 3MT takes place at over 900 universities in more than 85 countries around the world. As a PhD student, I participated in a 3MT competition, finding it useful to consider what the key messages of my research were and how to communicate these clearly to a lay audience.
Science has been a particular area of interest for public engagement. This has led to the creation of events such as British Science Week, the Cheltenham Science Festival and the British Science Festival. The latter, which dates all the way back to 1831, was where the term ‘scientist’ was first coined. Now, these events are increasingly designed to attract members of the public, with events such as FameLab, a science-specific competition similar to 3MT, and activities aimed at children.
For science-based researchers, Dance your PhD has been running since 2008, encouraging PhD researchers to share their research through interpretative dance. Another international scheme is Pint of Science, launched in 2013. This opens spaces for researchers and the public to come together and share their research in public spaces away from academic institutions. During my PhD I was both an organiser and speaker for Pint of Science. It was a great opportunity to talk with members of the public about my research in an accessible way. STEM for Britain is an annual competition where researchers in science, engineering, technology and maths share their research with a lay audience, including policymakers, at Westminster. In 2024, the University of Leicester launched Science Kitchen, with the Great British Bake Off finalist Josh Smalley. This is designed for food-focused science communication, including live events and in-person workshops, showing the educational aspects of chemistry through cooking.
Outside of science, the humanities-based Being Human festival has taken place annually since 2014, whilst the ESRC Festival of Social Science has taken place since 2002. The New Generation Thinkers scheme, funded by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council allows researchers to work with creatives behind BBC Radio 4. Researchers will appear in radio episodes and shadow the production process to understand how ideas get on air, furthering their public engagement skills.
In both scientific and non-scientific fields, people have used other media such as theatre, comedy, baking and photography to share their research with the general public. The University of Surrey has conducted the Your Project as a Poem competition since 2021, utilising their Poets-in-residence as judges and allowing researchers from all disciplines to transform their research into poetry. These are just some examples of the range of creative approaches taken to supporting public engagement, with the goal of reaching a wider and more diverse audience. This is important. Reaching a wider audience allows research to become more inclusive and can provide new opportunities for people to engage. In addition to improving public trust and understanding, public engagement can also show how researchers use public money. There are also benefits to researchers themselves in developing their communication and public speaking skills, which are useful regardless of what they go on to do. It can also remind them of the key takeaways from their research – and who it is for.
Comments
Jonathan Alltimes says:
Why are we here? We could think it is because of the 1985 report by the Royal Society, ‘The Public Understanding of Science’, which referred back to a 1982 Royal Society report on 11-18 education. Science education was made a legal curriculum requirement in 1988. As with so much of political disagreement in Britain, official reports from institutions rarely refer directly to the historical causes for the report, preferring to address the elephants in the room obliquely. So it is with 1985 Royal Society report in which general historical examples are described. The real nub of the argument in the 1985 report is paragraph 6.1 on the media, “Scientists must learn to communicate better with all segments of the public, especially the media.” So we could retitle the report, ‘The media understanding of science’. There were three science scandals in the early 1980s, infected blood, BSE, and salmonella in eggs (global warming was only just emerging, as were genetically manipulated organisms). Arguably, public information campaigns about the HIV pandemic also made the public aware of the use of scientific knowledge. The infected blood scandal is still a contemporary subject of media reports and a public inquiry.
Another historical cause which worked alongside these scandals and their effect on the public and media were cuts to government funding for research projects, which resulted in the 1986 Research Assessment Exercise. Two political campaigns organized by scientists emerged from these historical causes, Save British Science and the Campaign for Science and Engineering, both founded in 1986. But it was not hostility from the media and public which caused cuts to government-funded science, it was the milieu of ideas swirling around prime minister Thatcher for keeping down public expenditure and how to respond to deindustrialization, in particular ideas about markets originating from Adam Smith, Hayek, and public choice theory at the Institute for Economic Affairs and elsewhere. In these campaigns, science faired better than engineering because of the Royal Society and Thatcher’s advisers.
For where the UK began to go wrong, see the House of Lords Sessional Papers, Volume X, Science and Technology Committee, 1st Report: Civil Research and Development, 1986-87 (0104001879 and ISBN 011500145X). The Japanese, German and American experience shows that the knowledge of firms matters most in exchange and what they require are multidisciplinary knowledge organizations where they can offset the costs and risks of maintaining in-house research and training capabilities. Firms are not concerned about statistical definitions about kinds of research.
Being skint, I watched a lot of science TV and I liked the Christmas lectures.
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