Bruce Lewenstein: ‘Our work is critical for the issues of the day.. we must engage’

Bruce Lewenstein is Professor of Science Communication in the Department of Science and Technology studies and the Department of Communication at Cornell University. Editor of Public Understanding of Science from 1998 to 2003, Lewenstein looks back at his tenure in the following interview, highlighting the debate he prompted early on in the journal’s pages about science centers, but also regretting not devoting more space to constructing bridges between science communication and science education. As a scholarly field, says Lewenstein, public understanding of science is vibrantly diverse and should remain so as it derives strength from this diversity. The journal can be a space to showcase and celebrate these different perspectives, but also to offer synthesis and reviews that can identify more general perspectives. Over the past 30 years, models of science communication, as with so many attempts at producing such synthesis, have flourished. Lewenstein himself proposed one, the famous Web model of science communication. None of these models, he concludes, are right or wrong. All are heuristic tools that help us think problems through

Experts in the wild natural history film-making as a culture of knowledge-production

This thesis is about natural history film-making and how it relates to the public understanding of science. The word 'public' in the phrase is taken to designate in the first place the film-makers. The study is thus one which investigates how natural history film-makers negotiate their identity and situate their knowledge with relation to sciences. Drawing on an examination of the history of the development of natural history film-making in Britain, and on two case studies of contemporary examples of natural history films, this thesis first suggests that the culture of natural history film-making should be regarded as an offshoot of the Victorian culture of amateur natural history, thus as a form of knowledge production in its own right, instead of a form of popularisation of science. In this perspective, natural history film-makers appear as spokespersons for nature and not for science. Their relationship to scientific practitioners would be aptly described as one of co-existence on either side of a border, peopled with such objects as animals, plants, and the motion-picture camera. Natural history film-makers' cognitive authority stems from their status as amateurs naturalists-deriving their knowledge of the natural world from their capacity to engage intimately with it-as well as from their ability to use the film-making apparatus convincingly. The types of evidences supporting the claims to trustworthiness to be observed in natural history films do not appear to relate to the values and beliefs of professional science but to the culture of amateur natural history and to the conventions of the film medium. In order to account for the type of authority to speak for nature embodied in the culture of natural history film-making, this thesis proposes to use the word "telenaturalist"

Making science at home: visual displays of space science and nuclear physics at the Science Museum and on television in postwar Britain

The public presentation of science and technology in postwar Britain remains a field open to exploration. Current scholarship on the topic is growing but still tends to concentrate on the written word, thus making theorizing, at this stage, difficult. This paper is an attempt to expand the literature through two case studies that compare and synthesize displays of scientific and technological knowledge in two visual media, the Science Museum and television, in the 1950s and 1960s. The topics of these case studies are space exploration and nuclear energy. The thesis this paper explores is that both media fleshed out strategies of displays based on the use of categories from everyday life. As a result, outcomes of large-scale public scientific and technological undertakings were interwoven within audiences’ daily life experiences, thus appearing ordinary rather than extraordinary. This use of symbols and values drawn from private life worked to alleviate fears of risk associated with these new fields of technological exploration and at the same time give them widespread currency in the public sphere

‘Something simple and striking, if not amusing’ – the Freedom 7 special exhibition at the Science Museum, 1965

From October 1965 to May 1966, the Science Museum in London displayed the American spacecraft Freedom 7, the first capsule in NASA’s Mercury programme to take a human on a suborbital flight. Archival records concerning this temporary display are extensive and contain photographic sources as well as written ones. This case therefore lends itself to a study aimed at evaluating the comparative merits of these two types of records, for understanding the logic at play in the display, and for retrieving at least part of the visitors’ experience. Visual sources emerge from this comparison as invaluable records for accessing the materiality of this temporary exhibition. They demonstrate that the Freedom 7 special exhibition was a key moment in the establishment of a space science and technology section at the Science Museum, as it enabled the Museum to begin historicising what was then a new field of scientific and technological enquiry. The exhibition follows a logic of display theorised in 1950 by Henry Calvert, a senior curator, in a note recently discovered in the Science Museum’s archives. It is based on the display of a star object that draws visitors’ attention towards less charismatic exhibits