CHED Public Seminar: ''Knowledge Stories: Narratives of Popular Science after WWII'
Event Details
- Date:
- Thursday, 07 May 2015
- Time:
- 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
- Room:
- CCCS Seminar Room, Level 4
- Location:
- Forgan Smith Tower
- UQ Location:
- Forgan Smith Building (St Lucia)
- URL:
- http://www.ched.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=220516&pid=170139
- Event category(s):
Event Contact
- Name:
- Ms Narelle Jones
- Phone:
- 69492
- Email:
- narelle.jones@uq.edu.au
- Org. Unit:
- History of European Discourses
Event Description
- Full Description:
- How can the history of science accommodate the civic successes and failures of science in the post-war period? This paper tackles that question by examining the purported roles of popular science during the ‘long 1960s’. By revisiting both examples of popular science and critical attitudes to it, stories emerge about how knowledge travels among sciences and their publics. I call these ‘knowledge stories’ and, as a form of popular epistemology, they have retained a
rhetorical grip on scholarly, policy-oriented and popular audiences alike. Knowledge stories help make sense of the range of views about science that circulated in the 1960s and the lines of argument that remain with us still. Dystopian rhetorics of science and technology in the 1960s sat uneasily alongside optimistic accounts of nuclear power, the possibility of a trip to the moon, and generalized accounts of scientific progress. The heterogeneity of attitudes to science and
technology is even apparent among scientific insiders and scholarly critics—this is the decade of Derek de Solla Price’s Big Science, Little Science (1963), Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), and, at a stretch, C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures (1959). I argue that the 1960s is a crucial decade for generating resilient attitudes to science and technology. This was achieved at least partly by generating knowledge stories in which to understand the popular science of the period.
Joan Leach (BA hons, BSc, MA, PhD) convenes the Science Communication Program at the University of Queensland and is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Deputy Head of the School of Communication and Arts. Her research centers on public engagement with science and technology, both currently and historically, and she has been active in the Australian government’s recent initiatives toward “Inspiring Australia.” She is currently researching the role of popular science in the globalization of science since the 1960s, a project funded by the Australian Research Council. She has published extensively about science communication, including a 2011 book Rhetorical Questions of Health and Medicine. She was editor of the International journal, Social Epistemology from 1997-2010 and is now an executive editor at the journal. Joan has won numerous academic awards for her research and community engagement, including being a Science Journalism Laureate at Purdue University (USA). While remaining transfixed by science, she advocates for better science communication which critically examines science within historical and philosophical frameworks.
Directions to UQ
- Google Map:
-
- Directions:
- St Lucia Campus | Gatton campus.
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