Evolving Culture of Science Engagement | Home

A picture of a dress set the Internet ablaze last week. The photo’s ambiguous light source creates a powerful visual illusion: to some viewers, the dress looks black and blue; to others it’s plainly white and gold. Social media users around the world latched on, and the science behind the illusion became a major part of the conversation. You can’t buy this kind of popular attention to a scientific question. But you can learn from it. How can science communicators get better at igniting this type of widespread, passionate, educational, and fun conversation online? What are some of the key lessons we can draw from the phenomenon of the black and blue dress (I swear, it is black and blue).

Even with a recent decline in religious affiliation, around 9 out of every 10 Americans consider themselves either religious or spiritual. This poses a curious puzzle for science engagement. At the Evolving Culture of Science Engagement meeting in Cambridge, we discussed emotion, subjectivity and mystery, but we pretty much steered clear of religion or even spirituality. We bemoaned the lack of racial and socioeconomic diversity both among practitioners and audiences, yet during the event no one even commented on the absence of religion or spirituality in our discourse...

Research is already “out there” about several of the ways science engagement is changing today, but it's often hidden in disparate disciplines where the relevant papers aren’t easy for a science communicator or educator to find. I'd like to offer up some work that kept ringing in my ears while I was reading the Evolving Culture report. More theoretical than empirical, this thinking comes out of Science & Technology Studies, specifically from Sarah Davies, a colleague of mine at the University of Copenhagen...