The Royal Society has advertised for a professorship in public engagement with science; 'a well-established scientist with exceptional scientific communication skills and media experience to support the Society's public engagement work.' There are two problems with this.
Firstly, they seem to want someone to do PR, not public engagement. These are different, and it's an important distinction. As the bullet points of the job description outline, they want someone to help increase the public understanding of science, and are quite open that the role is designed to help increase public support for science. But public engagement is about more than such advertising. It's about building space for discussion and involvement, not publicity. An engagement approach also acknowledges that attempts by the scientific community to get everyone to like them rarely works as a system for building trust, and isn't really that useful anyway. At its most simple, engagement is two-way, not top-down. But part of the point is that science in society shouldn't be managed as rigidly as any such simple model can describe. Rather, engagement is about opening up science for a larger, unruly conversation as opposed to simply offering a series of patriarchs to talk down to us. None of this is new, it's been enshrined in UK science policy for nearly fifteen years.
The second problem is that a professor-based model of science communication is, at best, a bit ham-fisted. Professorships in public engagement with/ understanding of science sometimes offer a way around internal problems in the management of science which denies the role of public engagement in scientific work. Anyone awake in the academy in the last 25 years knows science is more than just research, and that there is a lot more expertise in a university than just academics. However, sadly our systems for career progression are stuck in deeply weird publications-metrics mud, and too many academics will ignore their colleagues in press offices or engagement offices but magically listen up when the title Prof is applied. So, such professorship roles work for a few universities, but it shouldn't, because it makes a mockery of both science and science communication expertise. The Royal Society should know better.
We need institutions, cultural change and professional support to improve science's relationships with the public. We very badly need these. But professorships are easier and cheaper (profs cost money, but still less than the larger infrastructure we need). They also offer a chance to give a pat on the back and more secure post for an individual you know won't really disrupt the deeply hierarchical natures of science itself and its role in society. Above all, especially in the PR mode of this post, they keep the scientific establishment at the top of the whole process. The most visionary public engagement work unseats Professorships, it doesn't replicate them. It's time the Royal Society woke up to this.
I hope I'm wrong, but this advert stinks of jobs for the boys, and I worry it's designed with someone in particular in mind. What I am sure of is that anyone who accepts this post and doesn't immediately disband it to re-distribute the resources to grassroots activities will simply be demonstrating how unqualified they are for such work.
Alice Bell is a freelance writer. She has a PhD in science communication and worked for over a decade in the field, including lecturing in public engagement, science journalism and science policy at Imperial, Sussex, UCL and City. Entities 0 Name: Royal Society Count: 2 1 Name: City Count: 1 2 Name: UCL Count: 1 3 Name: Public Understanding of Science Count: 1 4 Name: Sussex Count: 1 5 Name: University of Oxford Count: 1 6 Name: Alice Bell Count: 1 7 Name: UK Count: 1 8 Name: The Royal Society Count: 1 9 Name: Richard Dawkins Count: 1 Related Keywords 0 Name: science Score: 68 1 Name: engagement Score: 52 2 Name: professorships Score: 50 3 Name: public Score: 34 4 Name: society Score: 25 5 Name: scientific Score: 19 6 Name: communication Score: 17 7 Name: worked Score: 15 8 Name: royal Score: 14 9 Name: role Score: 13 authors 0 Name: Alice Bell Url: http://ift.tt/1d8tUuZ Media Images 0
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