Professor Charlotte Sleigh, School of History
>>I'm here to talk to you today about some fashion dilemmas in science communication. Does someone you love like science? Are you stuck for a present to buy them? Why not buy them a science t-shirt - you'll be surprised how many are available when you search a website near you. 

>>Here are some funny ones and I'm sorry to say that I'm geeky enough to actually find these quite amusing - 'Ah! The element of surprise', or this one: 'I found this humerus'. Do you get it? It's actually a picture of a humerus. 
>>Geek humour is great but clothes can carry hidden messages - what else are some of these t-shirts saying about science? Here's a couple that might make you think about some of the gender issues that raise their heads within science. 'For the man in your lab' ... 'Men of science', available, I note, as a unisex t-shirt. Or this one: 'Particle physics gives me a hadron'. Let's not think too much about that one. 

>>We can also find some fashion errors in our t-shirts, some choices of slogan that perhaps gives some slightly mistaken ideas about science. So, the one on the left tells us that science is about finding a cure for cancer, while religion is finding a cure for homosexuality - clearly a very ironic statement here. But, hang on a minute, if you know anything at all about the history of 20th century psychiatry, you'll know that the second of those is exactly what science spent a lot of the 20th century trying to do. Similarly, 'Make science, not war' - it sounds great, who could disagree with that, but again if you even know a teensy bit of science you might have second thoughts about that if you think about what happened at the end of the Second World War. 

>>Of course, you all know what a capsule collection is, right, even if you're scientists - it's that little, just mini selection of clothes that you take on holiday - just a suitcase full - it's all you need to be fashionable for your whole week in the Bahamas. If there's a capsule collection for science t-shirtsI reckon it's this one, if you just have one t-shirt to say what you needed to say. This is a very popular one at the moment: 'The good thing about science is that it's true, whether or not you believe in it '. Now, we could spend a long time discussing the meaning of this t-shirt - you could have in fact exactly the same t-shirt for a religious fundamentalist about their religious views: what I believe is true, whether or not you believe in it. It's not very helpful as an argument. 

>>Why do these t-shirts matter? Well, how we feel about science will be affected by the t-shirt scientists wear and of course I'm not talking about real t-shirts although, if you see someone wearing one of these t-shirts, you might think a little bit about the message that that's bringing, but also I mean in a metaphorical sense: the images, the messages that people give about science.

>>This man is Steven Chafin and he's a very, very well known and well established scholar in what we call Science and Technology studies and he's had a lot of really important things to say about the images of scientists and the messages that they bring, and this is what he says: "What we know about comets, icebergs and neutrinos irreducibly contains what we know of those people who speak for and about those things." In other words, the way we judge what people say about science relates to how we judge them as people themselves; in other words, the t-shirts, the hidden messages that they bring to bear. 

>>So let's take a quick run through some of the key figures in science that we see today and think about what those hidden messages are, their t-shirts, if you like. 

>>So here, on the left, we've got our friend Brian Cox. I'm sure some of you have watched some of his documentaries on TV. His overriding message, I think, is one of wonder - the wonder of the universe and all that it contains. It's a message of science that contains no politics whatever, it's just purely something to be gazed upon and wondered at. 

>>In the middle, a very interesting figure, Elon Musk from the USA. His vision of science is that it can give us techno fixes to all the political problems that we face today,  so he is talking much more about the real world, he's interested in solar energy, he's also interested in forming human colonies on Mars as a way to escape climate change so I guess he's kind of hedging his bets there. 

>>And Richard Dawkins perhaps needs no introduction - we already saw one of his t-shirts and if you can just make it out he's wearing he's wearing another one of these t-shirts actually literally in the picture. 

>>So these three men between them tell us about galaxies and spaceships and genes but they also tell us implicitly what counts and what doesn't count as science -  what matters and what doesn't matter, how we should judge all the claims that come after them.

>>These t-shirts, these hidden messages about science speak both inside and outside the laboratories. It's a key message that we get from scholarship in the science humanities but messages about science circulate in much more complicated ways than simply from the lab to the public. In fact, we can even question whether there is a meaningful distinction between science and the public. If we go back to Steven Shafin's claim, we can apply it within science - how scientists know about science also includes how they know about other scientists. I'll give you three examples.

>>One thing that we should know is that there is no such thing as 'a scientist' - everyone has their own specialism. So, a biologist is, if you like, 'the public' to a physicist; an expert in artificial intelligence is 'the public' to a microbiologist, or - a second example - even scientists within the same field still have to communicate to one another, they still have to bring something about themselves, their own personal messages as they talk about the research that they do. 

>>At the simplest level, to get a job or a recommendation to a particular research project, you have to have a good reputation. When your research is discussed at conferences, it will be judged in the context of all the gossip about you - where you came from, what you do, what you did last, where you've been. To get a grant, you have tobe persuasive and explain why the research matters. You need a good track record - you need a good track record of telling the story about why your research matters, and to do all of that these days, of course, you have to be good at social media. 

>>Now, you might come back to me and say 'Well, what about peer review? Peer review is the one place where we can be sure that reputation, that what we know about the speaker, doesn't matter because it's anonymous.' 

>>Well, I think even there, what the reader or the listener knows about you as a scientist does matter. The all-important abstract has that moment where you have to convey why this research really matters, why it's so cool, and let's be honest, when papers are peer-reviewed, in the very, very specialist world of science, there's a good chance that the person who is reviewing it might be able to guess perhaps even who you are or, even if they can't, they can see the track record of research that you're responding to - you're talking about papers by people whom you do name, they know who they are, they have their opinions about how plausible this line of research is. 

>>To help us think about this problematic question, then, about how messages circulate and where we find science and where we find the public, we can actually rewind quite a long way to this man, the political philosopher John Dewey, and he came up with a really interesting definition of, not 'the public',but 'publics', plural. He said "If the consequences of conversation extend beyond the two directly concerned so that they affect the welfare of many others,the act acquires a public capacity." Now that's a really useful and productive definition, I think, because it indicates that, as scientists, we actually make our publics through the act of our research. 

>>But, sometimes, it looks like there really is one public, a public, and arguably we're in just such a moment right now because we're seeing some very serious attacks on science. Sorry to mention this man - Donald Trump - there's a whole series of tweets you can look up."The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive." Or, again, "Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shots of many vaccines, doesn't feel good and changes - AUTISM. Many such cases!” When I began teaching on the science communication programme here, I thought the anti-vaccine controversy, for example, was rather old news and it was dead and I sort of felt a bit guilty about bringing it up in classes, but here we are again 10 years later and it's still happening. 

>>As a result of these attacks, we've seen science marches happening recently across the US, the UK and in Europe. The collected interests of many scientists are under attack: there are threats to funding, there is deliberate erasure of data related to climate change, there is a general culture of scepticism about expertise. This has called into being, if we follow Dewey's way of thinking about it, a'public' comprised of scientists and their allies, protecting something general which they're calling 'science'. It begins to create an idea that 'science' is an overarching thing, that there's a scientific way of doing things, that science is opposed to political, economic and religious fundamentalism. We're right back to the t-shirts where we started.

>>But we have to be careful about making science into this kind of a monolith - monoliths, as we all know, can have feet of clay. Science has some regrettable things in its past, like those homosexuality and war t-shirts. If supposedly all-powerful science is shown to make a mistake or a poor judgment, the whole lot can then be called into question, as we've seen time and time again in climate-sceptical circles. More dangerously, or more simply, it's dangerous to create a 'them' of the 'dumb public' versus an 'us' of experts. We risk creating alienation, we risk feeding the fire that we're trying to put out. 

>>So, what have we learned in this lecture? Well, I've been trying to make two key points. The first is that scientists are also science communicators - they can't help but be if they're getting research done. Science communication is part of science, it's not something that's done after the research is finished. And when we look at what our graduates do from the Science Communication [MA], that's how we see them being involved. They've gone on to work in national museums, they've gone on to work in PR for professional scientific bodies, they've gone on to work as educators for international scientific NGOs and what they're doing in all of those jobs is participating in the making of science, they're participating in the building of trust both in what scientists say and in the scientists themselves as trustworthy people. 

>>The second thing that I've been talking about is a characteristic of effective science communication doesn't sell science as a complete package, an overarching ideology. It acknowledges that each question is specific and generates its own public. Effective science communication will not be tempted to respond to the sceptics with a single simplified view and, most of all, its practitioners will think very carefully about what t-shirt to wear.

>>Thank you.