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Public engagement with science and technology, or PEST, is a field of growing practice and study. There remain, however, notable gaps in our understanding of the attitudes of researchers towards public communication of science itself, particularly from fields of fundamental research that continue to be under-represented in our literature. The attitudes towards public engagement within the particle-physics community have been investigated in the doctoral research project described here. The community under study is represented by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaboration at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, sometimes known as the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. The collaboration takes its name from the CMS experiment, a particle detector it operates at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. CERN estimates that around half of the global community of particle physicists conduct their research at CERN.The attitudes were explored through a mixed-methods approach grounded in pragmatism, with a collaboration-wide web-based survey, yielding 391 valid responses, followed by 19 personal interviews chosen by purposive sampling and conducted either in person or over a video call. The majority of the survey respondents showed favourable attitudes towards public engagement, sometimes also known as "outreach", with scientists seeing participation as a duty and participating in public engagement without being required to. Belonging to a large research collaboration was also seen as advantageous for the purposes of outreach participation, partly because a sizeable group of researchers has a sense of shared responsibility towards a specific area of science, allowing resources to be shared and dedicated communications professionals to be hired. There was a strong pedagogical bent to the types of public engagement scientists seek to participate in, with participatory paradigms ruled out by the majority of both survey respondents and interviewees. The practice of fundamental research was also framed by the interviewees as a cultural practice, taking physics back to its roots in "natural philosophy".The thesis concludes by recommending that evaluation of public engagement with science and technology consider the relative "relevance-distance" - the degree to which the field of research in question holds relevance to everyday human life - in determining what modes of engagement are suitable for a given field of research, so as not to paint fundamental sciences with a brush more suitable to applied fields of research. Further, as science-in-society research has made the case for there not being a single, homogeneous "public" but many self-identifying publics, depending on context, interest and relative levels of expertise, the fields studying the interplay between science and society need to think of PEST as public engagement with sciences and technologies, that is, in the plural, and resist the temptation to make sweeping generalisations about the applicability of our research findings and policy recommendations to a single, monolithic, uniform "science".

Science communication addresses some of the contemporary world's most challenging and intractable problems. Whether climate change or the recent coronavirus pandemic, science communication has an important role to play in these urgent issues. Concurrently, language around 'transformation' is increasingly used to suggest the kinds of profound changes to individuals and society needed to address contemporary problems. Science communication practice strongly values changing its publics in one way or another, be that their attitudes, values, or behaviour. But the language of transformation suggests a more profound change; what does it mean to be transformed? Taking a new exhibition, Invisible Worlds, at the Eden Project, a visitor attraction in South West of England, as an example, this thesis examines how we might conceptualise transformation in a science communication context. By combining action research and grounded theory methodologies, it has been possible to gain an understanding of both the exhibition's development, as well as the transformative experience of visitors. Interviews, observation and reflective discussion with staff, alongside documentary evidence, traced the development of the exhibition while photo-elicitation interviews with visitors gave insight into their embodied experience. Two central theoretical categories were developed from the grounded theory analysis. Firstly, negotiating ambition describes a process of institutional maintenance which frames science communication projects as highly ambitious. Within this context, transformation can be interpreted as a discourse used to maintain an ambitious framing. Secondly, serendipitous wandering is the process through which visitors to Invisible Worlds attempted to build an understanding of the exhibition. In some cases of this serendipitous and embodied process, visitors were able to make deeper meaning, which supported and was integrated into existing life developments. The findings of this thesis suggest need to re-think transformation as both a discourse and phenomenon in science communication. Rather than provoking transformative change, it is suggested that science communication might be well-positioned to support publics through life in a changing world.

Theobroma cacao (cocoa) is one of the most studied commodities around the world and the source of one of the world's most consumed and familiar products, chocolate. The multibillion-pound industry has changed to a higher demand for sustainably certified cacao (Rainforest Alliance, UTZ, and Fair Trade) and closer attention is being paid to how this such cacao can be traced. The present work describes a new concept, "From Shelf to Farm & Cooperative", a study to identify the geographical origin of the fermented cacao beans used to manufacture premium and bulk chocolate products. The research sought to assess how DNA based approaches for traceability of food products can be utilised within the supply chain of cacao and chocolate. To identify the factors that influence cacao traceability and the importance of assessing it in different supply chain systems, multi-disciplinary stakeholders from policy makers, small-scale farmers in South and Central America, to the biggest cacao and chocolate manufacturers in Europe were interviewed. Two stages in chocolate production were identified as key to be screened for tracking implementation: The farm (Stage 1) to identify cacao trees genotype composition and the cooperative (Stage 2) where fermentation of cacao beans occur. A reliable modified cacao DNA extraction protocol was developed using the DNeasy mericon Food Kit which enable higher DNA yield from a range of chocolate products including, for the first time, 'cocoa butter'. DNA markers characterising the chloroplast genome of T. cacao were assessed to trace back the chocolate to Stage 1 (farm). Reference genotypes from the International Cocoa Quarantine Centre at the University of Reading were screened with 25 chloroplast single sequence repeat (cpSSR) markers revealing a level of DNA polymorphism sufficient to reliably identify lineages below the species level to characterise farms. Allelic proportions for nine cpSSR were quantified and compared in DNA extracted from 116 chocolate samples revealing distinct clustering in single-origin chocolate produced from beans harvested in Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Trinidad and Madagascar. In contrast, no differentiation was observed for bulk chocolate samples (Mars, Nestle) and beans originating from Côte d'Ivoire farms thus reflecting the lack of allelic diversity found in cultivars in West Africa. To identify unique biomarkers for Stage 2 (cooperative), the fermentation microbiome was assessed by performing amplicon Illumina sequencing on 47 single origin chocolate using the universal 16S v3-v4 ribosomal region and three housekeeping genes from Acetobacter pasteurianus. Variation in microbiome diversity was characterised with unique Amplicon Sequence Variants (ASV) identified per continent, country and fermentation location for which signature bacterial profile was found to be conserved across years. Markers identified in Stage 1 and Stage 2 can be used for tracking cocoa beans origin. To make these biomarkers applicable in industrial scenarios, it will be essential to create a machine learning model that could recognize the specific markers from multiple regions.

Vaccines are considered one of the most effective public health interventions, but they have been subject to opposition since they were first proposed. Anti-vaccine activists disseminate and sensationalise objections to vaccinations through various channels, including the internet and social media outlets, such as Twitter. These means allow them to reach the public directly and potentially influence their intention to vaccinate. Twitter allows users to share short textual messages and images. Although, images have strong communicative power, there is a lack of research on the networks and actors sharing vaccine images. Moreover, there are no studies on the meaning and messages of these images. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the dissemination, content, and meaning of anti- and pro-vaccine images in relation to their respective Twitter networks. A mixed methods approach was used to address the research aims, comprising social network analysis, visual content analysis, semiotics and visual social semiotics analyses. Anti-vaccine users re-shared images with each other; they provided support and strengthened their anti-vaccination beliefs. Some key actors, primarily activists and parents, influenced the information flow within the community. Anti-vaccine images claimed that vaccines are not safe, advocated against mandatory vaccinations and promoted vaccine conspiracy theories. They also provided alternative sources of information or pseudoscientific evidence supporting their messages while increasing distrust in traditional experts. The pro-vaccine users form loose connections that favour the dissemination of new vaccine information and networking. In this network, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and public health organisations influenced the dissemination of images, and the images mostly featured NGO campaigns and achievements in developing countries or promoted the flu vaccine in Western countries. In conclusion, anti- and pro-vaccine networks are insular and share different images in different ways; they use different visual communication strategies to reach their audiences. This resulted in a lack of a middle ground in visual communication of vaccines on Twitter. Addressing this gap could be an opportunity for future immunisation campaigns.