Presenting science is not easy. It is a practice involving people, materials, ideas etc. There cannot be a single way of doing it, and here is my observation of some presentations of science at museums.
A few days ago, I visited the natural history museum and the science museum in London. The two museums are located next to each other in South Kensington museum area and both of them was packed with families and tourists. So, the question is what makes these museums so attractive?
Presentations of science are updated with constant investment and seem to be becoming interactive more and more. The new building in the science museums contains so many screens that you touch and play. They not only tell you what scientists think but also ask you what you think. Hence, you are invited to engage with the knowledge. But of course there are differences between those receive investment and those do not. The topics that appear to be important was 'Life', 'Energy', and 'Environment' and in both museums these topics are displayed in style. So, inevitably, the displays appear to me more about the interaction between science and society than about science itself.
This observation made me very interested in Cocoon in the natural history museum. This is a new building actually shaped like a cocoon containing both specimen collections and the display about practices around them. Although unfortunately I was not able to see it, there are windows which show you 'scientists in action'. They are also fitted with microphones which allow you to talk to scientists in display. This surely is another approach to an interactive presentation of science.
Presentation is about visibility. You need to make science visible. You may do it with historical objects, with high-tech illustrations, with words and graphs etc. Museum displays have to speak to a wide range of visitors. There is of course no single way of doing it.
5 Mar 2013
14 Dec 2012
Lessons for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy
The Program of 'Science for Re-designing Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (SciREX)' in Japan hosted an international symposium 'Past, Present and Future of Science, Technology and Innovation Research Policy' today. Unfortunately, I was not able to physically attend it but managed to watched part of it through live streaming on its website.
The part I watched was the second session comprised of talks from Prof. Andrew Stirling from SPRU and Dr. Robert Doubleday from CSaP. Their talks suggested that making robust and accountable STI policy has been recognized a challenge in UK (as much as other places in the world, I suppose), and that it necessarily involves integrating and incorporating different kinds of knowledge. The critical question obviously is how one can achieve that...
They have illustrated some possibilities based on their UK experience, but having know UK and Japanese contexts both I would here present two significant challenges in Japanese context.
1) many potential ways of achieving the robust and accountable STI policy are likely to be messy, and this messiness is not happily accepted in any places. In the Japanese context, the government and many other scholars working for them is willing to develop an approach and to implement it, and this entails simplification, standardization and so on, all of which works to reduce the messiness. The social acceptance of messiness really is a challenge.
2) integrating and incorporating different kinds of knowledge, values and visions are also crucial part of achieving the robust and accountable STI policy, and this requires involvement / engagement of various stakeholders. However, the problem of involvement and engagement is often reduced to that of literacy and capability. This does not explain why scientists, who are members of civil society as much as those of scientific community, have been unable to engage with other value systems. Expanding the scope by talking about incentives and motivations as well as literacy and capability is another challenge ahead.
I don't know how successful people think UK has been in this area but I believe that simply mocking its approaches is very unlikely to work in Japan.
The part I watched was the second session comprised of talks from Prof. Andrew Stirling from SPRU and Dr. Robert Doubleday from CSaP. Their talks suggested that making robust and accountable STI policy has been recognized a challenge in UK (as much as other places in the world, I suppose), and that it necessarily involves integrating and incorporating different kinds of knowledge. The critical question obviously is how one can achieve that...
They have illustrated some possibilities based on their UK experience, but having know UK and Japanese contexts both I would here present two significant challenges in Japanese context.
1) many potential ways of achieving the robust and accountable STI policy are likely to be messy, and this messiness is not happily accepted in any places. In the Japanese context, the government and many other scholars working for them is willing to develop an approach and to implement it, and this entails simplification, standardization and so on, all of which works to reduce the messiness. The social acceptance of messiness really is a challenge.
2) integrating and incorporating different kinds of knowledge, values and visions are also crucial part of achieving the robust and accountable STI policy, and this requires involvement / engagement of various stakeholders. However, the problem of involvement and engagement is often reduced to that of literacy and capability. This does not explain why scientists, who are members of civil society as much as those of scientific community, have been unable to engage with other value systems. Expanding the scope by talking about incentives and motivations as well as literacy and capability is another challenge ahead.
I don't know how successful people think UK has been in this area but I believe that simply mocking its approaches is very unlikely to work in Japan.
20 Nov 2012
JSSTS Annual Meeting
The Japanese Society for Science and Technology Studies 11th Annual Meeting was held last weekend at Hayama. It is not as big as 4S Annual Meetings, but there were 4 or 5 parallel sessions and well-over 100 people attended. Being an organizing committee member, I was not able to attend as many sessions as I wanted but here I would like to report two events that we organized.
On 16th, we organized a 'night' session 'the diversity in STS and the future direction of Japanese STS'. The purpose of the session was to build a platform for ongoing discussions on various issues around STS scholarship: what does STS mean? who are STSers? what roles STS should play? how can we educate new STSers? etc. We invited five speakers to present their own takes of Japanese STS. For me there were two important topics in the session: one of them is 'what expertise does STS have (if any)'; the other is 'what is the relationship between STS and the disciplines around it, such as sociology, history, philosophy and anthropology'. Of course these topics have been discussed in other places too. So, I would like to add them the question of 'is there any benefit of discussing these topics specifically in the Japanese context'. I really love to see the discussions get going.
On 18th, we offered a book reading seminar. It was supposed to be very introductory one explaining what kinds of journals and books are there to be explored by STS scholars. We made the lists of journals, like Science, Technology & Human Values, Social Studies of Science, Science as Culture, and so on, and then some textbooks, such as An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies by Sergio Sismondo and The Science Studies Reader by Mario Biagioli as well as the STS Handbooks. The purpose of the seminar was to give new students some ideas about where to start. But it was also attended by some people who are working on practical issues and looking for theoretical and conceptual frameworks to tackle them. It will be interesting to see whether they will come back to say 'yeah some of them were useful' or not.
Reflexive nature of STS scholarship sometimes makes STS itself difficult thing to do, but I really hope the future annual meetings to be the place we come together, have constructive interactions and be ready for personal and disciplinary struggle until the next one.
先週末に葉山までいらっしゃった皆様、お疲れさまでした。少しでも有意義なお時間をお過ごしいただけたのであれば幸いです。不手際などがありご不便ご迷惑をおかけした点もあるかと思いますが、今後ともご指導ご鞭撻のほどよろしくお願いいたします。
On 16th, we organized a 'night' session 'the diversity in STS and the future direction of Japanese STS'. The purpose of the session was to build a platform for ongoing discussions on various issues around STS scholarship: what does STS mean? who are STSers? what roles STS should play? how can we educate new STSers? etc. We invited five speakers to present their own takes of Japanese STS. For me there were two important topics in the session: one of them is 'what expertise does STS have (if any)'; the other is 'what is the relationship between STS and the disciplines around it, such as sociology, history, philosophy and anthropology'. Of course these topics have been discussed in other places too. So, I would like to add them the question of 'is there any benefit of discussing these topics specifically in the Japanese context'. I really love to see the discussions get going.
On 18th, we offered a book reading seminar. It was supposed to be very introductory one explaining what kinds of journals and books are there to be explored by STS scholars. We made the lists of journals, like Science, Technology & Human Values, Social Studies of Science, Science as Culture, and so on, and then some textbooks, such as An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies by Sergio Sismondo and The Science Studies Reader by Mario Biagioli as well as the STS Handbooks. The purpose of the seminar was to give new students some ideas about where to start. But it was also attended by some people who are working on practical issues and looking for theoretical and conceptual frameworks to tackle them. It will be interesting to see whether they will come back to say 'yeah some of them were useful' or not.
Reflexive nature of STS scholarship sometimes makes STS itself difficult thing to do, but I really hope the future annual meetings to be the place we come together, have constructive interactions and be ready for personal and disciplinary struggle until the next one.
先週末に葉山までいらっしゃった皆様、お疲れさまでした。少しでも有意義なお時間をお過ごしいただけたのであれば幸いです。不手際などがありご不便ご迷惑をおかけした点もあるかと思いますが、今後ともご指導ご鞭撻のほどよろしくお願いいたします。
22 Oct 2012
4S/EASST in Copenhagen
This year’s 4S/EASST Annual Meeting was
held at Copenhagen Business School between 17th and 20th
October. I had a personal trouble on the day I arrived in the city of
Copenhagen, and was not able to enjoy the conference as much as I could have
done otherwise. This is nothing to do with the conference itself and it was
well-organized and as inspirational as the 4S meetings in the past were if not
more.
I gave my presentation in the first of the
series of organized sessions on the theme of bio-object and
bio-objectification. The sessions were organized by some of the scholars
involved in the ongoing Europe-based research project called Bio-objects, and
they included a wide variety of presentations around the theme. It is not that
they have the concrete theory of bio-object or of bio-objectification, but it
is rather that these scholars are examining the potential ways in which such
concepts can open up interesting discussions and observations in studying life
sciences and biotechnologies in the modern society. I find the concepts useful
in clarifying my thoughts as we as facilitating debates and discussions across
diverse issues in social studies of life science, and it would be great if I
could make some contribution to their attempt through my own research.
I also attended some sessions on
collaborations. Collaborations can take different forms: they could be among
scientists, between scientists and social scientists and between humans and
non-humans. This is another topic that I am interested in and hope to explore
in coming several years.
Other than the formal part of the
conference, I manage to get to see some familiar faces and to catch up with
them over lunch and coffee. And of course I did meet new people who are doing
very interesting STS work. I already look forward to the 4S next year, which
will takes place in San Diego, and really hope that no more unnecessary (and
very stressful) trouble will fall on me… Well, the annual meeting of Japanese
Society for Science and Technology Studies is the next big event coming up in a
month time, and it will be great to see some interesting presentations there
too.
22 Sep 2012
Lives of Property (Day 2)
I very much enjoyed this conference, though I am not able to give you full account of it. Here, I just want to focus on two things.
First, the idea of property seems to be closely tied to the notions of 'ownership' and 'value'. And I felt that the dimension of 'singular-collective' and also the notion of 'responsibility' would give interesting twist to it.
1. things can be collectively owned, but it obscures responsibility for them. Of course, this issue may be dealt with by introducing a new structural order. Here I am thinking about a company and its shareholders. While they are owners of the company, not each of them is responsible for its operation. They delegate the responsibility to the director, who is often employed by the company. The point is that for many properties ambiguity persists; it only become visible when some has to be liable for whatever the properties have done.
2. things can be collectively valued. They just don't add up but it may enhanced or multiplied. It may be useful to think about collectables here. It is not a single property itself but is the variation that gives value to it. This does not mean a property is not valuable: it is valuable as part of the collection. Yet, this creates new kind of responsibility, which is the maintenance of the collection. It is not necessary that one person owns all of it but someone has to make sure that its network sustains.
Second, Prof. Mario Biagioli's keynote talk on plagiarism gave me a lot to think about in relation to the points I described above. He highlights the kinship relationship between the author and his/her writings. Although his talk focused on individual-based writings in science, just as the kinship structure differs across societies, the authorship in science varies across disciplines, some are individual-based, some are lab-based, other may be based on an even larger research network. Again, it would be very interesting to see not only how the issues of ownership and values are managed in different disciplines but also how that of responsibility is dealt with in different areas of science.
Well, I thank the colleagues of InSIS who put this together and look forward to exchange out thoughts sometime in the future again!
First, the idea of property seems to be closely tied to the notions of 'ownership' and 'value'. And I felt that the dimension of 'singular-collective' and also the notion of 'responsibility' would give interesting twist to it.
1. things can be collectively owned, but it obscures responsibility for them. Of course, this issue may be dealt with by introducing a new structural order. Here I am thinking about a company and its shareholders. While they are owners of the company, not each of them is responsible for its operation. They delegate the responsibility to the director, who is often employed by the company. The point is that for many properties ambiguity persists; it only become visible when some has to be liable for whatever the properties have done.
2. things can be collectively valued. They just don't add up but it may enhanced or multiplied. It may be useful to think about collectables here. It is not a single property itself but is the variation that gives value to it. This does not mean a property is not valuable: it is valuable as part of the collection. Yet, this creates new kind of responsibility, which is the maintenance of the collection. It is not necessary that one person owns all of it but someone has to make sure that its network sustains.
Second, Prof. Mario Biagioli's keynote talk on plagiarism gave me a lot to think about in relation to the points I described above. He highlights the kinship relationship between the author and his/her writings. Although his talk focused on individual-based writings in science, just as the kinship structure differs across societies, the authorship in science varies across disciplines, some are individual-based, some are lab-based, other may be based on an even larger research network. Again, it would be very interesting to see not only how the issues of ownership and values are managed in different disciplines but also how that of responsibility is dealt with in different areas of science.
Well, I thank the colleagues of InSIS who put this together and look forward to exchange out thoughts sometime in the future again!
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