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We use 12 years of holistic research performance scores for each academic in all New Zealand universities to ask whether gendered gaps in pay, age, research performance score, and performance-adjusted pay are narrowing with time. We find that the gender gaps in age and research performance score narrowed from 2006 to 2018, but the gender gaps in pay and performance-adjusted pay did not. Controlling for research performance score, age, and field, women's odds of advancement to high ranks converged to around two-thirds of men's advancement odds. Similarly, the lifetime performance-adjusted gender pay gap has converged to around one-third the price of an average home. Trends suggest that, no matter how much women improve their research scores and "lean-in" for promotions, the performance-adjusted pay gap has plateaued to an equilibrium. Data from an entire national workforce fail to support the most common explanations for academic gender pay gaps--child-bearing and demographic inertia. But results are consistent with a systemic dynamic in which double-binds and double-whammies create a sticky floor that starts women at lower pay and impedes their advancement over time. We conclude with some suggested remedies from the literature of behavioral science. Without concerted efforts to change the structures of hiring and promotion, the gender pay gap in universities will not disappear of its own inertia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research on the relationship between scientists' normative beliefs about public engagement in the context of willingness to engage could prove misleading if respondents do not consider the impacts of engagement activities when responding to survey questions. This study asks scientists to report normative beliefs in the context of engagement impacts and explores correlations between these responses and engagement willingness. Results suggest mentioning positive societal impact positively affects normative beliefs, while mentioning lost research time negatively affects normative beliefs. However, changing the measurement context does not affect the non-relationship between normative beliefs and engagement willingness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applying the risk information seeking and processing (RISP) model, this study investigates the sociopsychological factors associated with systematic processing. Results reveal interesting moderating effects for relevant channel beliefs and perceived information gathering capacity. These findings suggest that science communication surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic needs to attend to the target audience's beliefs about specific information channels, as well as their ability to process relevant information. However, the unsupported hypotheses also call for scholarly attention on the applicability of the RISP model to non-Western cultural contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates place-making—a process involving appeals to embodiment, materiality, and spatial arrangement—as a means for building communicative relationships between technical scientific communities and lay publics. Drawing from discourses related to the National Historic Chemical Landmark Program's 89 landmarks, we illustrate how the National Historic Chemical Landmark Program builds different types of relationships with nonexperts via the utilization of place as (a) narrative framing device, (b) proprietor, and (c) gatekeeper. These findings reveal the ways in which specific strategic place-making gestures can support more or less public engagement in the processes of scientific work and outreach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores intertextuality, research questions, and arguments scientists use to articulate the legitimacy of geoengineering practices as "good science." I employ critical discourse analysis to draw out patterns in articles from an invited special forum about the validity of geoengineering technology as a solution to climate change. Articulation theory guides my study of how scientists define what counts as "good science" by analyzing how geoengineering scientists legitimize their research as methodologically strong and beneficial to society. This project serves as a first step in clarifying how scientific debate influences broader circles and the potential social impacts of these debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autism is one of the twenty-first century's most contested illnesses. Early controversies around vaccine harm have irrevocably structured the field of autism science. Despite incredible investment in genetic research on autism over the past 30 years, scientists have failed to identify a set of "genes for" autism, and genomic causality has become more complex. Yet, orthodox genetic explanations for autism have retained dominance over a vociferous field of heterodox experts pointing to a series of environmental insults (vaccines, heavy metal exposure, overuse of antibiotics, toxic pollution) as the main causes of autism. To make sense of this puzzling trend, we develop a novel theoretical synthesis combining a Bourdieusian field analysis with a Gramscian conception of hegemony, centered around the concept of "subsumptive orthodoxy." Analyzing multiple years of archival data from the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, we argue that when faced with heterodox challenges, dominant members of the field shore up hegemony by incorporating environmental causal factors into the genome, thus engaging in subsumptive orthodoxy. This move gives rhetorical space to environmental explanations without providing them substantive causal weight, which renders particular environmental causes (like vaccines) impossible. This article traces the strategies dominant members of the field use to retain control over the definition and etiology of autism. We develop the broader implications of the study within autism science and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on what could be learned about statuses and status groups from the work of Randall Collins in the 1980s, and in particular from Weberian Sociological Theory (1986). I mention how I myself found this book useful at that time to further my own work in the sociology of science and in sociological theory, and emphasise its value in appreciating the fundamental and irremediable deficiencies of individualistic rational choice theory in both contexts. I go on to note how Collins, a 'macro' sociologist in the 1980s, was nonetheless well aware of the indispensable role of micro-sociology in advancing the fundamental understanding of the field as a whole, and his singling out of Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel as primus inter pares for their special theoretical importance at this time. I say a little about why these two did indeed have much to contribute to an understanding of statuses and of status groups and still do even today, and end by noting how effectively Collins has used and built upon the work of Goffman in particular since the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay situates Weber's 1917 lecture Science as a Vocation in relevant historical contexts. The first context is thought about the changing nature of the scientific role and its place in institutions of higher education, and attention is drawn to broadly similar sentiments expressed by Thorstein Veblen. The second context is that of scientific naturalism and materialism and related sentiments about the "conflicts" between natural science and religion. Finally, there is the context of Weber's lecture as a performance played out before a specific academic audience at the University of Munich, and the essay suggests the pertinence of that performance to an appreciation of the lecture's meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If it was indeed the fate of scientific work to become obsolete within 10–15 years, as Max Weber contended in Science as a Vocation, why does the Journal of Classical Sociology publish this article a century after publication of his famous lecture? Departing from anthropological fieldwork on the revival of psychedelic science since the 1990s, the author gives two answers. First, Weber provided a historically and culturally situated ideal type of vocational science with which we can compare and contrast the ethos of early twenty-first century scientists. The Swiss neuroscientist Franz X. Vollenweider, for example, defied the stern Protestantism of Weber's vocational humanity and inferred from an amalgamation of psychedelic experiences and Hindu philosophemes a conception of science as play. Second, Weber not only contributed to the historical sociology of science an empirical description and conceptual analysis of turn-of-the-century scientific life in Germany and the United States but also unleashed a polemic against the confusion of facts and values. At a time when science studies and cognate fields of social research have formed a widespread consensus regarding the inseparability of description and prescription, Science as a Vocation has become a classic that offers orientation to opponents and supporters of value freedom alike. The article concludes with a plea to scholars in the nascent psychedelic humanities, which could easily be extended to anyone working between the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities, to cultivate value freedom as part of an epistemic virtue ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares Weber's argument in "Science as a vocation," with Physicist Alvin Weinberg's discussion of the distinction between science and "trans-science," as two contrasting blueprints for boundary-work. It argues that Weber's empirical reasons for separating the scientific discussion of means and the extra-scientific discussion of ends – namely, the thesis of "disenchantment" – no longer serves as a useful approach to understanding the growth of "trans-science" or "expertise" over the last century. It advances an understanding of the latter as an intermediary sphere wherein facts and values, means and ends, are necessarily entangled because expertise is crucial to the production of legitimacy in liberal-democratic societies. The paper concludes by asking what is the responsibility of the scientist as trans-scientist or expert and what institutions would best embody and support this vocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition to serving as an introduction to the subject, this paper suggests a conceptual framework for the investigation of issues of classification and quantification related to migration and the ethnically and religiously diverse societies in Europe. Nationality, ethnicity and religion are situational, contextual and dynamic social phenomena which tend to defy rigid classification, making it especially difficult to capture and quantify these entities in order to organize and represent them in an intelligible manner in official statistics (e.g. censuses), institutional governing practices or in academic survey research. By drawing on previous work by demographers and social researchers, we suggest a typological classification of ways in which diverse populations become statistically visible or invisible. We show that the rationale for creating classifications and particular sets of categories changes, depending on the political field in which data are used in the governance of populations and migration. A science studies perspective can make these diverse taxonomies the object of studies to understand how they are embedded within, and how they sustain, power relations. By focusing on practices of classification as instruments of research and governance, this special issue contributes to a reflection on the conditions and effects of quantifying practices in culturally diverse and constantly changing societies, in which the line between government and academia, between power and knowledge, is frequently indistinct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ukrainian science and its terminology in the nineteenth century experienced a number of twists and turns. Divided between two empires, it lacked institutions, scholars pursuing it, and a unified literary language. One could even say that until the late nineteenth century there was a possibility for two communities with two literary languages to emerge – Ruthenian (Habsburg Empire) and Ukrainian (Russian Empire). Eventually, both communities and languages merged. This article tracks the meanderings of this process, arguing that scholarly publications played a crucial role in shaping the standard for the scientific language. The article follows the biography of the naturalist Ivan Verhrats'kyi (1846–1919), the author of the first dictionaries of naturalist terminology in Ruthenian in 1860, a translator and author of textbooks, and the head of the Mathematical–Naturalist–Medical Section of the Shevchenko Society in L'viv. He thus shaped many Ruthenian, and then Ruthenian–Ukrainian scholarly projects. Initially successful with his approach to making the Ruthenian scientific language vernacular, in the 1890s his approach was losing ground to the internationalization of vocabulary and to the growing pressure toward the unification of Ruthenian and Ukrainian. Finally, in the beginning of the twentieth century, Verhrats'kyi became marginalized within the Ukrainian scholarly community. By discussing the history of a minority language within imperial structures, I argue that the media in which scholarly work was published requires special attention. In the Ruthenin–Ukrainian case, they determined the standard for scientific language. Lacking professional journals, Ruthenian scholars published in the 1860s–late 1880s in popular newspapers and in school textbooks, requiring them to use a language that was near to the spoken tongue of the Habsburg province. Once the political situation changed, favoring Ruthenian–Ukrainian unification, and scholarly journals appeared and transgressed the imperial boundary, the favored language had to be transimperial, ousting out the vernacular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A set of parallel surveys of scientists from multiple scientific societies finds that the most consistent predictors of willingness to take part in engagement activities with the public are a belief that she or he will enjoy the experience (attitude), make a difference through engagement (response efficacy), and has the time to engage. Age, sex, scientific field, what a scientist thinks about the public, perceived personal engagement skill (self-efficacy), and what a scientist thinks about her or his colleagues (normative beliefs) are inconsistent predictors. Research may be needed to find how to shape scientists’ engagement views in ways that are both effective and acceptable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ‘liberal’ feminist perspective on science problematises the presence of fewer women than men in science and believes that increasing their number would qualify as social change. On the other hand, ‘radical’ critics of modern science argue that science has been deeply involved in the creation, strengthening and subversion of gender inequalities. The liberal strand is much more amenable to direct interventions and aligns well with current educational reforms. But the fundamental questions about science and science education that are raised by the radical strand not just evade agreement, but they also do not lead easily to direct educational implications. In this article, I show that an engagement with these perspectives offers us a chance to reflect on our society, on the place of science in it, and on the role of science education in mediating between science and society. This reflection further encourages us to rethink and reorganise science and science education so that they are more mindful of the gender and other kinds of power dynamics in our society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While research has shown that scientists use Wikipedia and that scientific content on Wikipedia ramifies back into scientific literature, many questions remain on how the two sides interact and through what paradigm this dynamic may be best understood. Using the circadian clock field as a case study, we discuss this scientific field’s representation on Wikipedia. We traced the changes made to the articles for “Circadian clock” and “Circadian rhythm” and reviewed the debates that informed them over a span of a decade, using Wikipedia’s native and third-party tools. Specifically, we focused on how groundbreaking research pertaining to the function of biological oscillators was integrated into the articles to reflect a wider paradigmatic shift within the field. We also identified the articles’ main editors to detail the dynamic collective editorial process that took place during a time that saw the field undergo a fundamental change. We discuss the different concerns the academic community has with Wikipedia—specifically regarding its content and its contributors—to ask whether the online encyclopedia’s open model is inherently at odds with scientific culture or whether the model could reflect science or even expand on its core values and practices such as peer review and the idea of communicating science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even with widespread interest, public perceptions of science remain understudied and poorly theorized by social scientists. A central issue has been the persistent assumption that publics require a base of scientific knowledge for science to have broad cultural meaning. Yet, recent advances in cultural and cognitive sociology point to alternative research programs seeking to identify how publics come to understand complex and uncertain issues, when information is incomplete and asymmetric. We use this approach to analyze data on public perceptions of how scientific different fields are from the 2006 and 2012 National Science Foundation's Science and Technology Survey. Our multivariate analyses allow us to approximate how mass publics map the social space of scientific professions, while accounting for individuals' social location and cultural identity (e.g., race, class, gender, age, scientific sophistication, and political ideology). We then focus our attention on public perceptions of sociology and economics. Overall, we find that public perceptions, rather than being disorganized, map onto recognizable dimensions indicating how publics distinguish between scientific professions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Retractions of scientific articles are becoming the most relevant institution for making sense of scientific misconduct. An increasing number of retracted articles, mainly attributed to misconduct, is currently providing a new empirical basis for research about scientific misconduct. This article reviews the relevant research literature from an interdisciplinary context. Furthermore, the results from these studies are contextualized sociologically by asking how scientific misconduct is made visible through retractions. This study treats retractions as an emerging institution that renders scientific misconduct visible, thus, following up on the sociology of deviance and its focus on visibility. The article shows that retractions, by highlighting individual cases of misconduct and general policies for preventing misconduct while obscuring the actors and processes through which retractions are effected, produce highly fragmented patterns of visibility. These patterns resemble the bifurcation in current justice systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientists’ risk perceptions play a critical role in determining the risks that they are willing to accept in their work. This study investigates academic bioscientists’ risk perceptions by examining the judgments working scientists employ in day-to-day research decisions. The study draws from theoretical and methodological underpinnings of Sociology of Science and Risk Analysis. Using data gathered from 694 survey responses of bioscientists at a land grant research university in the U.S. Midwest, this study identifies four dimensions of perceived risk (i.e., intellectual challenges, competition, career risks, and societal risks) and demonstrates how these dimensions are associated with a series of demographic, life-course, and contextual factors. Findings indicate that university bioscientists’ subjective risk judgments are shaped by their professional experience, sources of funding, research orientation, professional networks, and perceived significance of research, which in turn may affect their research decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the growing popularity of online methods for researchers and the increasing awareness of the levels of harassment and abuse directed at women online-especially women expressing feminist views-it is critical that we address the implications of online abuse for feminist researchers. Focussing on an often hidden yet significant part of our methodological decisions and recruitment, this paper details the online abuse levelled by men's rights activists against a research project on women's experiences of men's stranger intrusions in public space. It argues for the need to locate such experiences within a violence-against-women frame, extending the concept of a continuum of sexual violence. Such an extension renders visible the added labour of 'safety work', which forms an invisible backdrop to the methodological decisions of many feminist researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What could a social-justice oriented, feminist data studies look like? The current datalogical turn foregrounds the digital datafication of everyday life, increasing algorithmic processing and data as an emergent regime of power/knowledge. Scholars celebrate the politics of big data knowledge production for its omnipotent objectivity or dismiss it outright as data fundamentalism that may lead to methodological genocide. In this feminist and postcolonial intervention into gender-, race- and geography-blind 'big data' ideologies, I call for ethical, anti-oppressive digital data-driven research in the social sciences and humanities. I argue that a reflexive data scholarship can emerge from the reintegration of feminist and postcolonial science studies and ethics of care ideals. Although it is not a panacea for all ails of data mining, I offer a road map for an alternative data-analysis practice that is more power-sensitive and accountable. By incorporating a people-centric and context-aware perspective that acknowledges relationships of dependency, reflects on temptations, and scrutinises benefits and harm, an 'asymmetrically reciprocal' (Young, 1997) research encounter may be achieved. I bring this perspective to bear on experiences of a two-year research project with eighty-four young Londoners on digital identities and living in a highly diverse city. I align awareness of uneven relations of power and knowledge with the messy relation of dependency between human and non-human actors in data analysis. This framework productively recognises that digital data cannot be expected to speak for itself, that data do not emerge from a vacuum, and that isolated data patterns cannot be the end-goal of a situated and reflexive research endeavor. Data-driven research, in turn, shows the urgency for renewed feminist ethical reflection on how digital mediation impacts upon responsibility, intersectional power relations, human subjectivity and the autonomy of research participants over their own data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes a programmatic effort in teacher education, “The Community Teaching Strand” (CTS), to engage local community members as mentors of teacher candidates (TCs) in two postgraduate teacher preparation programs in a large research university. Three different conceptions of the nature and purpose of teacher–family–community relations frame the analysis: involving families and communities, engaging families and communities, and working in solidarity with families and communities. Three primary research questions are explored in this article: What do TCs learn through their participation in the CTS? To what extent and how do TCs bring community teaching into their classrooms during the program and as first-year teachers? What programmatic features encouraged and/or constrained TC learning from the community mentors? After describing Mountain City’s “Community Teaching Strand,” the article identifies a set of TC learning and practice outcomes as well as a number of tensions that arose in the programs in the attempt to implement engagement and solidarity approaches to working with families and communities. Finally, the implications of this work for teacher education are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the importance of research in teacher education. Globally and from a cultural and historical standpoint, teacher education has often involved the resolution of contradictions created by questioning, implementing, and reflecting on the system. It states that because different communities operate using different rules to achieve intended goals, a persistent problem with respect to teacher education policy and practice is a lack of coherence.

Girls lose interest in science by age 9, and researchers have attributed this finding to misrepresentations of female scientists in the media. While television, film, the Internet, textbooks, and biographies have been analyzed for such representations, this study examines the extent to which females and minorities are portrayed over time in science sections of a popular children’s magazine, Highlights for Children. Results indicate that, while males and Whites have outnumbered females and minorities in depictions of science, Highlights has consistently exceeded the number of females and minorities actually employed in scientific fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of the existence of two opposed cultures, one literary and one scientific, has a long pedigree going back to nineteenth century. However, it was C.P. Snow's formulation of the idea in 1959 and F.R. Leavis's 1962 critique, which brought it to the fore in cultural discourse, where it has more or less remained ever since. The papers in this special double issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews examine the debate and its legacies from a variety of perspectives, while this introduction seeks to contextualise the issues raised and draw some contemporary lessons. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How do neuroscientists “make sense” of public visibility in the context of their scientific work? Hierarchical cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling analyses of 24 in-depth interviews with U.S. neuroscientists produced word groups and concept maps related to possible “medialization” processes. Findings suggest that scientists are factoring new communication channels into their public visibility calculus, although one legacy medium, The New York Times, remains the holy grail of medialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this commentary, we explore the factors that contributed to festival goers’ choice to attend science-based events at a summer cultural festival. We evaluated the impact of such events on the audiences: their levels of engagement, reasons for participation, and their views on and reactions to the events. Presented with a variety of cultural events, attendances at science-based events were strong, with high levels of enjoyment and engagement with scientists and other speakers. Moreover, audiences saw science not as something distinct from “cultural” events but as just another option: Science was culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What factors affect a scientist’s choice of research problem? Qualitative research in the history and sociology of science suggests that this choice is patterned by an “essential tension” between productive tradition and risky innovation. We examine this tension through Bourdieu’s field theory of science, and we explore it empirically by analyzing millions of biomedical abstracts from MEDLINE. We represent the evolving state of chemical knowledge with networks extracted from these abstracts. We then develop a typology of research strategies on these networks. Scientists can introduce novel chemicals and chemical relationships (innovation) or delve deeper into known ones (tradition). They can consolidate knowledge clusters or bridge them. The aggregate distribution of published strategies remains remarkably stable. High-risk innovation strategies are rare and reflect a growing focus on established knowledge. An innovative publication is more likely to achieve high impact than a conservative one, but the additional reward does not compensate for the risk of failing to publish. By studying prizewinners in biomedicine and chemistry, we show that occasional gambles for extraordinary impact are a compelling explanation for observed levels of risky innovation. Our analysis of the essential tension identifies institutional forces that sustain tradition and suggests policy interventions to foster innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the intersections of science and publics has led to research on how diverse publics interpret scientific information and form positions on science-related issues. Research demonstrates that attitudes toward science, political and religious orientation, and other social factors affect adult interactions with science, which has implications for how adults influence K-12 STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education. Based on a statewide survey of adults in Idaho (n = 407), a politically and religiously conservative western state, we demonstrate how attitudes toward science, measured through a composite measure “orientation toward science,” and other social factors are correlated with support for STEM education. Results show that “orientation toward science,” along with political orientation and respondents’ perceptions of feeling informed about science, predicts behavior intentions to support STEM education. Our findings suggest that a nuanced and localized approach to fostering support for K-12 STEM education would resonate with populations regardless of political orientation, and they illuminate new ways of thinking about how political orientation more generally impacts thinking about science in the context of complicated “socio-scientific relations.” In exploring how people think about science in a politically and religiously conservative state, we provide insights on potential outcomes in other states, should conservative ideology spread. We argue that the publics’ relationship with science and, by extension, support for science education, is more fluid, as many of us suspect, than ideological polemics suggest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognition, or scientific knowledge, is the fulcrum of Gellner’s philosophy of history. Science, for Gellner, is central to understanding the rise of the West and also to his defence of Enlightenment rationality against postmodernism and other forms of relativism. This way of thinking has recently been challenged, first, by global historians who locate the ‘great divergence’ in the 19th century rather than earlier, and second, by those who assign to the Enlightenment a pernicious role and argue that rationality and scientific knowledge are inextricably bound to particular social contexts, for good or ill. Gellner’s ideas can be defended against these challenges, but this requires, first, distinguishing between rationality and science and, second, tracing the course of science and technology outside of the West. Once this defence is in place, Gellner’s ideas about the relation between cognition on one side and production and coercion can also be re-examined: here, too, his account requires revision since the idea that rationality ‘trumps’ the other two orders needs to be specified on the ground: in everyday life, for example, scientific knowledge is rather remote, and so often does not supersede other social dynamics. This also relates to other tensions in the relation between science, technology and everyday life: as Gellner noted, technology yields rubber as well as iron cages, but consumer technologies are now in some respects on a path towards unsustainable growth. Separating this problem from cognition is a further task. These refinements to Gellner’s ideas provide a basis for rethinking the connection he makes between liberalism and modern cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this case study, we analyze the discourse, practices and representations of a group of scientists who issued public statements about the French shale gas controversy. The reasons they gave for engaging in this process of communication focused on their social responsibility, their collective ad hoc expertise and the neutrality of their position. We also investigated how these scientists actually produced their communications, despite the tensions between individual and collective positions. We discuss how this experience led them to reflect both individually and collectively on their representations of science in society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Creative Geographies, methods of experimental ‘art-full’ research that have creative practices at their heart, have become increasingly vibrant of late. These research strategies, which see geographers working as and in collaboration with a range of arts practitioners, re-cast geography’s interdisciplinary relationship with arts and humanities subjects and practices as well as its own intradisciplinary relations. Amidst the vibrancy of this creative ‘re-turn’, a series of important questions are cohering around how exactly, and for whom, these methods are creative and critical. If the potential of creative methods for both researching and living differently is to be achieved then it is important we spend time reflecting on these and other questions. To begin these reflections this article tells three stories of creative doings that concern knowing, representing and intervening in place. These creative doings came about in the course of ethnographic work with the participatory arts project Caravanserai led by artist Annie Lovejoy, and among other outputs resulted in the collaborative artists’ book insites (2010). From a focus on these three sets of creative doings come larger concerns, principally around how the materialities, technologies and aesthetics of different art forms might enable various ways of knowing and conceptual experiments, as well as concerns around skill and expertise. These latter query what it is that geographers do and what it is that visual artists do, seeking to appreciate the expert as well as the amateur and what might be gained through learning to practice – in other words, how our creative methods might not only focus on finished products but also what can be learned in the processes of creative doings. Drawing the article together is a concern to understand better the work creative methods can do in the world in terms of enabling us to research and to live differently. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Peer review guides the intensive reworking of research reports, a key mechanism in the construction of social scientific knowledge and one that gives substantial creative agency to journal editors and reviewers. We conceptualize this process in terms of two types of challenges: evidentiary challenges that question a study’s methodology and interpretive challenges that question a study’s theoretical framing. A survey of authors recently published in Administrative Science Quarterly finds that their peer review experience was dominated by interpretive challenges: extensive criticisms, suggestions, and subsequent revision concerning conceptual and theoretical issues but limited attention to methodological and empirical aspects of the work. Salient differences between original submissions and published papers include intensive reworking of theory and discussion sections as well as growth and turnover in citations and hypotheses. We consider implications of the dominance of interpretive challenges in successful revision and possible sources of variation across scholarly fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including a study on the science, technology and society (STS) by social scientists, development of the global South and technoscience in shaping the places and people.

Recent years have seen a major expansion of the position of neuroscience in the mass media, public policy, and legal dialogue. Drawing on interviews with 48 London residents, this article examines how people with no prior involvement with neuroscience make sense of the concept of “brain research.” Thematic analysis of the data furnished little evidence that neuroscience has meaningfully infiltrated lay thinking. Respondents consigned brain knowledge to the “other world” of science, which was seen as a decidedly separate social milieu. They envisioned that the only route by which they might become alert to brain information would be if they developed a neurological illness. This article considers the social and psychological dynamics that shape neuroscience’s dissipation into public consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Fuller describes the place of intellectuals in the modern world -- as researchers, teachers, academics, and citizens. Their job is that of developing and promoting ideas. He explains their failure to perform well and offers advice: say what you think you should say, not necessarily what you think. The advice is unsuitable; it is aimed at advisers and expert witnesses, not at intellectuals. Also, his analysis invites proposals for social reforms aimed at lowering traditional expectations of intellectuals and toward presenting them with clearer and fairer job descriptions instead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with issues of hype in science and science journalism. It examines two cases of 'hype', one surrounding the discovery that neutrinos travel faster than light, or not; the other surrounding the discovery that the earth is warming, or not. These two cases are compared and contrasted, especially with a focus on discovering some of the pitfalls of 'making science public' in an era of hype. The analysis is carried out against the backdrop of an emerging 'post-normal science', the increasing pressure to make science public at an ever-faster pace, as well as the impact agenda in the UK. The paper shows that with relation to hype in science and science journalism, it might be useful to distinguish between honest hype and what one might call politicized hype. Using honest hype to make science public may be an option in fields of science that are relatively a-political, such as particle physics, an option that is probably unavailable in a highly politicized science, such as climate science. In this context, moderation seems as impossible as modesty on the part of the scientists involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By analyzing the contests that appeared in Popular Science Monthly from 1918 to 1938, this article discusses the rhetoric of public engagement with technological innovation, and the magazine’s construction of a readership community. A close analysis of these contests reveals a burgeoning participatory culture within the context of the popularization of science and technology in the mass-circulation press of early twentieth-century America. Significantly, the contests frame their public as an active participant in the development of science and technology, in sharp contrast to the passive, diffusionist model of science popularization that dominated the interwar period in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Increasing public knowledge of science is a widely recognized goal, but what that knowledge might consist of is rarely unpacked. Existing measures of science literacy tend to focus on textbook knowledge of science. Yet constructing a meaningful list of facts, even facts in application, is not only difficult but less than satisfying as an indicator of what people actually know—or need to know—as citizens. Revisiting this concept from a more sociological perspective yields a rather different concept that is here termed “critical science literacy.” The implications of this reconsideration for thinking about citizen perspectives, for the work of science journalists and other professional interpreters, and for the design and evaluation of new approaches to science communication are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers how nineteenth-century science embraced new ways of forwarding scientific disputes and controversies as the period was marked by the professionalisation of science and the rise of national science societies in Europe. It focuses particularly on how such changing rules were communicated in science literature in Germany and Great Britain. Topics considered include truth, secularism, popular science, and manners and etiquette among scientists. Notable people discussed include Scottish mathematician Dugald Stewart, English mathematician Charles Babbage, German philosopher Immanuel Kant, and German naturalist Lorenz Oken.

This study examines the rhetorical aspects of social contestation of climate change in reader comments published in the Daily Mail, subsequent to climategate. The following themes are reported: (1) denigration of climate scientists to contest hegemonic representations, (2) delegitimization of pro–climate change individuals by disassociation from science, and (3) outright denial: rejecting hegemonic social representations of climate change. The study outlines the discursive strategies employed in order to construct social representations of climate change, to contest alternative representations, and to convince others of the validity of these representations. It examines how social representations of science are formed, maintained, and disseminated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines the influence of media messages about paranormal investigators on perceptions of how scientific and credible such investigators are, as well as on beliefs about paranormal phenomena such as ghosts and haunted houses. The analyses use experimental data to test the effects of three different versions of a news story about paranormal investigators: one version presenting them with “trappings of science” such as technology and jargon, another presenting them in terms of traditional supernaturalism, and yet another debunking them as unscientific. The analyses also test whether various forms of media use predict perceptions regarding paranormal investigators and phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article contributes to a more reflexive mode of research on public engagement with science-related issues through presenting an in-depth qualitative study of the actors that mediate science-society interactions, their roles and relationships, and the nature of learning and reflexivity in relation to public dialogue. A mapping framework is developed to describe the roles and relations of actors mediating public dialogue on science and technology in Britain. Learning within public dialogue networks is shown to be instrumental only, crowding out potentials for reflexive and relational learning. This calls for renewed critical social science research alongside more deliberately reflexive learning relating to participatory governance of science and technology that is situated, interactive, public, and anticipatory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Based on findings from ethnographic analysis of U.S. climate scientists, this article identifies largely unrecognized sociocultural dimensions underpinning differences in scientists’ perceptions of anthropogenic climate change. It argues that culturally laden tensions among scientists have influenced some to engage with the antienvironmental movement and, as such, influence U.S. climate science politics. The tensions are rooted in broad-based and ongoing changes within U.S. science and society since the 1960s and propelled by specific scientific subgroups’ negative experiences of the rise of environmentalism and of climate modeling, in particular.   Attending to these and other experience-based cultural dynamics can help refine cultural theory and enhance understanding of the deeper battles of meaning that propel climate science politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay considers the twentieth century historiography of science, dividing the century at 1945, the year the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan to end World War II. It considers the influence of a November 2, 1945 lecture delivered by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer on the history of science. Other topics include the theories of relativity and quantum physics, the Cold War, and interrelationship between science, culture, and society.

For the past three decades or so, the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) has shed light on the interrelationship between modern science and technology, on one side, and contemporary society, on the other. A majority of this knowledge and insights are situated in the context of Western societies, or more precisely, in economically and technologically advanced societies in Western Europe and North America. However, STS has much to offer to the discourse of science and technology in the Global South, a territory characterized by developmental processes. Insights from different schools of thoughts in STS are arguably not only relevant but also applicable to unveil the root cause of problems that many developing societies are facing today. To make this possible, an STS-informed framework is developed to replace the Triple Helix model, which is currently a dominant perspective that prompts how science, technology, and innovation are structurally organized in the developing world. Two steps are taken in this agenda. First, limitations of the Triple Helix are exposed, and second, a new approach drawing on STS concepts is offered as an alternative model that takes into account structural, cultural, and epistemological features of technoscience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyzes the varied niches of an emerging academic field, Science and Technology Studies (STS), as a means of understanding intellectual and professional development. As a new, upstart entity in the established and inertial field of academia, STS has carved out a successful and expanding niche in the ecology of higher education via a variety of unique intellectual and institutional strategies. By adapting and reconfiguring organizational and professional structures of traditional liberal arts, the case of STS exposes three main themes in the organization of knowledge and higher education: reinvention, accounting, and professionalism. STS scholars endeavor to reorganize the distribution and organization of knowledge turfs, which often involve idiosyncratic, symbiotic, or competitive relationships with sciences, social sciences, and/or humanities. This often creates dilemmas regarding how to account for scholarly work using new, divergent, or incommensurable merit criteria or professional values. The article concludes with empirical analyses of the emergence and content of STS departments throughout the world and of Social Studies of Science, the flagship journal of the field. Data and evidence were gleaned from a variety of semistructured interviews with STS scholars, archival sources, and detailed citation records. As STS continues to grow and develop with its diffuse and eclectic foci, this raises questions of whether and how the field should or will be coordinated intellectually or professionally. These multivalent professional logics and values are sources of both vitality and tension in STS and illuminate larger issues of professional and intellectual organizational strategy in developing fields and realms of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]