‘Like asking a child to drive a bus …’: on seeing the publics of public engagement as citizens, not children
Beverley Gibbs, University of Nottingham and University College London
Last Monday (13.1.14), I joined the Open University’s ‘Engaging Research’ seminar series to share some research I’ve been doing on Scotland’s transition to a low-carbon society. Energy has always been a hugely important part of Scotland’s identity, and is set to continue to be a key part of the debates in advance of the Referendum for Scottish Independence in September 2014.
My particular interests lie in what the public engagement landscape has to say about, or how it contributes to, this ambitious transition. Fairly quickly, we can identify a disjunction between public policy priorities and the public engagement taking place from universities and the science communication infrastructure (by which I mean science centres, science festivals and informal science engagement practice). This gap is really interesting when you think about it, and in the discussion at the end of the talk we explored it a little further.