March 2011

Jan Cherlet, a PhD student at the Dept of Philosophy at the University of Bologna and the Dept of Third World Studies at Gent University, asks the best question to the science studies community I’ve seen for a long time:

Dear colleagues
Which “social study of science” publication would convince scientists
themselves?
I seek a recent publication that describes the various ideas of the
“social study of science”, that adduces a good amount of convincing
evidence, that is easily accessible, and that would be accepted by
practising scientists themselves.
Thanks for your recommendations!
Jan

(from yesterday’s EASST Eurograd mailing list).

Jan’s question is an acid test for STS. Science managers and science bureaucrats probably get a lot out of reading social studies of science publications — but do scientists? Is the conceptual world of STS of use and interest to scientists? Can it help scientists formulate alternative research strategies? Help postdocs survive in the job race? Make science labs a more interesting place to work? Induce new and interesting ideas and experiments? Or even make this world a better place to better?

The announced talk by Andy Williams (Cardiff) about “A crisis of science journalism?” at the next London Public Understanding of Science seminar, made me think about why science journalism actually is declining in quality — and not only in the UK, but also here in the Scandinavian countries.

Based on internet surveys and interviews, Williams suggests (in his abstract distributed on the Mersenne list) that the current decline in science news journalism is due to staff cutting and rising workloads and concludes that “As long as science reporters’ everyday routines leave ever-diminished time and space for finding their own news stories and writing them rigorously, the prospects for high quality, independent, science news in national mainstream media are diminished”.

The economic situation for science journalists is surely one of the reasons for the decline. There still exist some excellent science journalists, who combine knowledge about science with critical acumen. But their numbers are shrinking when ressources and work conditions deteriorate. Only very large newspapers can afford having high quality science journalists on their payroll.

One shouldn’t underestimate the ongoing moral  and cultural decline in science journalism, however. Uncritical journalism and snippety stories are not the inevitable results of a bad economic situation in mainstream media; it’s also a question of deteriorating professional norms. This became embarassingly obvious in the uncritical way most mainstream media handled the Mono Lake arsenic life story last December. The NASA bait was swallowed quite uncritically. It was bloggers, not professional journalists, who most fiercely exposed the weaknesses of the story.

Andy Willams opens his abstract with the obvious statement that “Science news is not formed in a social, economic, or cultural vacuum”. The consequences of this commendable contextual analytical credo is to bring the total moral economy of science communication into the picture — both paper and electronic media, both journalist-based media and scientist-driven social media:

• Which media do members of the public choose to consult when they want to learn more about what goes on in science?
• Which media attract young critical minds?
• Which media give science communicators the best tools for expressing their skills?
• Which media will scientists prefer to engage with?

I would like to see the answers to these and similar questions in order to better understand the shifting trends in different science communication platforms.

(The seminar takes place on Wed 23 February in room S314, third floor of St. Clements building on the London School of Economics campus, which can be accessed through the entrance on Houghton Street)

Cannot understand why I haven’t come across The Neuro Times blog — a historical blog dedicated to neurology and the neurosciences — before. Full of good stuff and a good example to follow.

My old interest in biomedical identity, individuality and personality was stimulated by an opinion piece on Buddhism and the brain by physician David Weisman in last week’s online Seed.

Weisman discusses the apparent similarities between some of Buddhism’s core ideas and the alleged findings of neurology and neuroscience with respect to the non-existence of a unified ‘self’.

On this convergent view, the ‘self’ is fragmented and impermanent; what ‘exist’ are constantly changing emotions, perceptions and thoughts. The idea of a permanent, constant ‘self’ behind it is an illusion.

It struck me that this is not an uncommon view among humanities and social science scholars today. And that several influential Western philosophers — Hume, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Anscombe and Daniel Dennett — can actually be mobilised to support it. For example, Nietzsche denied the existence of a ‘self’ in On the Genealogy of Morals: “There is no ‘being’ behind doing … The ‘doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed””.

A more recent argument against a unified ‘self’ is Derek Parfit’s suggestion, in Reasons and Persons (1984), that a stream of psychophysical events is all there is and that it is therefore unnecessary to introduce a person that has this stream of consciousness.

The views of Nietzsche, Parfit and Buddhists evidently contradict the everyday notion of a ‘self’ (or an ‘I’, a ‘he’ or a ‘she’) lying behind ‘our’ emotions, sensations, perceptions and thoughts (‘our’ is here put in inverted commas, of course, because on this view there are no ‘we’ who ‘have’ these mental events).

But is this attack on the everyday notion of ‘self’ sustainable? Is the notion of a fragmented stream of mental events something we can actually live by? Or is the mundane notion the basis of our existance as humans?

Whatever scientific, religious and philosophical arguments can be levelled against the notion of a unified ‘self’, I believe the mundane understanding of ‘self’ is the only viable possibility.

Imagine a social world in which personal pronouns are made meaningless, a world in which it doesn’t  make sense to think in terms of ‘I believe this’ or ‘you are entitled to your opinion”. A social world in which we aren’t able to think about ‘his feelings’ or about ‘her appreciation of music’. A world in which human agency, ethical responsibility, mutual trust and responsibility are all meaningless notions because there is no ‘self’ behind the stream of consciousness and gestures.

One contemporary philosopher, who systematically argues against the notion of the fragmented ‘self’ and for a more mundane understanding of ‘self’, based on close readings of ancient philosophers, is Richard Sorabji . In Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life and Death (Chicago UP 2006), Sorabji claims that the ‘self’ is not an undetectable soul or ego, “but an embodied individual whose existence is plain to see”. The ‘self’ is “something that owns not only a consciousness but also a body”.

The point here is that the understanding of the notion of ‘self’ changes when we think of it in terms of the embodied individual. And I think this might give a clue to how the contemporary understanding of the ‘self’ based in recent neuroscientific findings can be interpreted in terms of a unified ‘self’ — namely that from a materialist point of view it doesn’t make sense to think in terms of a fragmented and impermanent ‘self simply because the material basis of the neuroscientific ‘self’ is a series of signalling processes among a permanent set of interconnected neurons.

Has any readers of this blog seen Harvard University’s exhibit ‘Tangible Things’, which “brings together 200 objects from the back rooms and Z-closets of Harvard’s museums and libraries”?

The idea behind the exhibit is the contemporary-traditional critical view of the ordering and categorisation of things:

Questioning the modern Western intellectual categories that distinguish art from artifact, specimen from tool, and the historical from the anthropological, Tangible Things brings together materials from Harvard’s museum and archival collections. Beginning in the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, the exhibition introduces visitors to established ways of organizing things and challenges them to classify an assortment of objects according to these conventions. Where in the university do items like John Singer Sargent’s palette or the beads and dress of a Camp Fire Girl belong? Why? Armed with these questions, visitors are invited to discover the many guest objects carefully inserted into exhibitions of Harvard’s public museums.

(are we supposed to read Foucault between the lines here?)

The exhibit, which opened in late January and is running until 29 May, is organized by Harvard’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments and forms the basis for the university’s general education course ‘Tangible Things: Harvard Collections in World History’.

More here and here. If someone would like to write a review, please let us know.

My curiosity was just raised by a mail inquiry by Stuart Tallack, who’s asking members of the UK Medical Collections Group for help to clarify a memory from the late 1950s:

I visited a company that prepared and articulated skeletons. A room at the back of the premises contained two tanks, one of caustic solution and the other of plain water. Both had gas flames beneath and were used to clean the skeletons of earth and tissue. I do not remember the room where they were articulated with springs and wires but I do recall the office and its cabinet of older and more interesting specimens. I seem to remember shaking the hand of a seven foot Russian, long dead, but still impressive.

The company must have been near University College Hospital as I went via Goodge Street station and crossed to the Gower Street side of Tottenham Court Road. For personal reasons, I would like to find out who the company was and where it was located. My visit would have been in about 1957.

I’m sure Stuart would appreciate some additional help from readers of this blog as well. And maybe others have similar experiences.

But more interestingly — how common were such companies preparing and articulating skeletons? They were producing for school and med school purposes, I presume? Was there one company delivering throughout Europe, or many regional/local companies delivering to local schools?

Where did they get the bodies from? And when did this practice end (i.e., when did plastic skeletons take over)? Topic for a Master’s thesis?

Årets indtil videre mærkligste idé på forskningskommunikationsområdet kom i fredags: Berlingskes USA-korrespondent og politiske blogger Poul Høi foreslår at forskere skal tvinges til at blogge om deres forskning:

Jeg foreslår, at alle, der er fastansatte på højere læreanstalter, kontraktforpligtes til at skrive en blog, og at bloggen skal udstyres med et kommentarfelt, og at den pågældende skal skrive til bloggen med en vis regelmæssighed. Ikke bare vil det åbne de lukkede haller, men det vil også skabe en tiltrængt dialog, og lur mig om ikke, den også kan bruges den anden vej, og efter som bloggen er en kontraktforpligtelse skal alle – også de, der siger at masseskriveri ikke er god tone – skrive den.

Høi har ret i at forskerverden stort set ikke er interesserret i forskningsformidling og at de færreste bruger sociale webmedier. Han har sandsynligvis også ret i, at et mere udvidet brug af sociale webmedier ville styrke forskningsformidlingen.

Men gør man det ved at indføre en “kontraktsforpligtelse”? Manden må have spist blogs. USA-korrespondentens tvangsvision udmøntet i praksis vil være titusindevis af dårlige, pligtopfyldende forskerblogs, der bliver opdateret så sjældent som kontrakten tillader. Korte, uforpligtende, udvandende, passionsløse nyhedsbulletiner. Aftaler á la “om du kommenterer på min, så skal jeg nok kommentere på din”. Og hvem skal tvinges til at læse lortet?

Her om noget gælder maksimet at gulerod og lyst er bedre end pisk og tvang. God forskningsformidling vokser ud af lyst at fortælle andre om det man går og laver. Lyst til at blive set og læst. lyst til at prale lidt.

Af samme grund som det er lysten, der er det vigtigste styreinstrumentet inden for forskning. Danske universitetsforskere er godt nok kontraktsforpligtet til at publicere deres forskning. Man skal have publiceret en mindstemål af artikler for at blive ved med at være ansat.

Men det er ikke pisken over nulforskerne der resulterer i forskningspublikationer. Kontraktforpligtelsen er for de fleste ikke særligt svær at opfylde.

Langt de fleste forskningspublikationer er resultat af lyst: at få lov at fordybe sig i noget svært, at få lov at løse problemer, at finde ud af noget man ikke vidste tidligere, at formulere en idé for første gang.

Kan Poul Høi give nogle eksempler på fremragende forskning, der er opstået som resultat af “kontraktsforpligtelse”? (Og ikke bare de få undtagelser tak, men et antal eksempler som viser på en trend). Kan han finde en eneste Nobelpristager som publicerede, fordi han/hun var nødt til det?

Hvis ikke, hvorfor skulle så forskningskommunikation blive bedre ved hjælp af tvang?

Hørt på gangen på Panum i dag:
“Min veninde har lige ringet og spurgt om hun må låne en small-size laboratoriekittel til fastelavn her i weekenden. Datteren vil være Milena Penkowa — med tilbagestrøget hår, to mørke streger over øjnene og tillidsvækkende smil. Der mangler kun den hvide kittel, så er den hjemme”

Mikael Thorsted and Martha Fleming working on our Container Wall installation

Shall museum exhibitions exude labour or grace?

That is, shall they reveal the hard work gone into producing them?

Or shall they appear effortless and graceful, concealing the many hours of curatorial work?

Just a decade ago, museums tried to hide the curators’ efforts; what mattered was the final product as the audience saw the show.

Today’s trend is to show the hard labour behind the scenes, even invite the visitors into the production line (museum 2.0).

I was induced to think about the shifting relationships between the notions of grace and labour when I read the announcement to a lecture by italianist Ita Mac Carthy (Birmingham) on the interconnections that characterise the literature and visual arts of the Italian Renaissance:

For Castiglione and Raphael

grace is a classically-inspired nonchalance, a certain ease and confidence that should accompany everything the ideal Renaissance citizen says and does. It is the art of concealing labour, of coaxing the public into thinking that what they see springs from nature not nurture.

For Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna, by contrast

one achieves grace by revealing — not concealing — the hard work that goes into art. This grace resists humanist connotations, criticises courtly abuses of the term and promotes a more Christian vision of the artist as the receiver rather than the giver of what is essentially God’s gift.

The lecture takes place on Wednesday 16 March @ 3.15pm in the Royal Library, Copenhagen — if you wish to attend, please write to atof@kb.dk two days before.

Today’s good news from the science communication world is that the editors of the Journal of Science Communication are inviting papers for a special issue on the future of science journalism, knowledge and power.

As the editors point out, the consequence of the internet is that today “science journalism finds itself in the middle of a deep cultural, economic and political change in which technological evolution has a prominent role”. Traditional journalism is threatened and the social and professional roles of communicators need to be re-defined “in order to avoid a loss of the journalism’s democratic, social and cultural function”.

The aim of the planned special issue is to investigate how knowledge and power are being re-distributed among different communication actors, for example, how participatory practices of the Web 2.0 are changing science communication and how these practices are “re-orienting social, cultural, political and economic powers”. More here.

This is an exciting initiative, which means that the Journal of Science Communication is eventually bringing the social web into focus. They are also to be applauded for bringing issues of knowledge and power into the discussion.

My only caveat at the moment is the editors’ peculiar use of the metaphor “new ecosystem of information”. What does the notion of ‘ecosystem’, borrowed from systems ecology, actually add to the analysis of the new consequences of the internet and the new communication order, compared to the plethora of other macrosocial concepts on the concept market?  

That said, if someone is interested, you should submit an extended abstract of 1000 words to jcom-eo@jcom.sissa.it by 31 March 2011.