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After the fact(s): Communicating scientific complexity, risk, and uncertainty in Aotearoa

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thesis
posted on 2023-09-26, 23:59 authored by Matthew SoarMatthew Soar

This thesis draws on social constructivist theories of scientific knowledge to analyse the public engagement practices of a cohort of scientist-communicators in Aotearoa as they represent scientific complexity, risk, and uncertainty in public. Through semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis, this thesis demonstrates that participants think defensively about the publics they communicate to, drawing boundaries between science and publics that minimise exposure of the elements of scientific knowledge they perceive might undermine scientific authority. Such boundary-work often demarcates public engagement from scientific knowledge production, constructing public engagement as a subjective process applied to scientific knowledge after the fact. These science-communicators also work to overcome these very same boundaries by making science more accessible and democratic. Such tensions suggest that participants not only socially construct science, but also contribute to the social construction of public engagement with science as they work to transform systemic and cultural barriers acting to entrench science as an inaccessible, exclusive, and unilateral arbiter of knowledge. In doing so, participants found that presenting a more accurate, complex picture of science—with all its uncertainties and failures—had not undermined public confidence in science. Instead, complexity, risk and uncertainty could become transparent elements of scientific knowledge production, thereby open to public scrutiny and definition. Participants’ representations of complexity, risk, and uncertainty were influenced by accessible, local publications, and economic and institutional conditions, but rarely by established public engagement scholarship.

History

Copyright Date

2020-01-01

Date of Award

2020-01-01

Publisher

Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington

Rights License

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Degree Discipline

Science in Society

Degree Grantor

Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington

Degree Level

Masters

Degree Name

Master of Science

ANZSRC Type Of Activity code

950299 Communication not elsewhere classified

Victoria University of Wellington Item Type

Awarded Research Masters Thesis

Language

en_NZ

Victoria University of Wellington School

Centre for Science in Society

Advisors

Priestley, Rebecca; Appleton, Nayantara