In a large meeting room of the public library in a mid-western town, about sixty people have gathered to hear about invisible and unlabeled risks in cosmetics and sunscreens. On a table at the front of the room is a collection of popular name-brand products gathered by three members of a local consumer advocacy group. They are the organizers of this event and have set its agenda, decided its format, found its location, created the content, and done all the publicity. Almost everyone in this room knows each other; they have gathered for similar meetings in the past about issues like local water quality and concerns about food additives. In the back of the room are two tables, one with snacks, water, tea, and coffee. The other holds fliers, handouts, a clipboard with a petition, and a stack of notecards pre-addressed to local state and federal legislators. Tucked away in one of the back corners is a tripod with a small video camera, recording the entire event. It belongs to a man seated in the back row. He does not speak during the event, but is attentive and taking copious notes.
A month earlier that same man and his camera were in the back of a large lecture hall at a community college in a rural southern town. He watched and took notes as two speakers were grilled by an audience of nearly a hundred people. Both speakers were billed as experts on the risks of nanomaterials, tiny engineered molecules that have unique and often astounding properties. The participants were flummoxing both speakers with questions about imbuing particles with spin, the rate of decay of a charge, and how complex technical limitations were overcome to produce these molecules. The speakers had not expected these kinds of questions. After all, this was a public engagement event organized by the adult continuing education branch of the local community college. It just so happens that the community college is not far from a national research laboratory and their adult continuing education program consistently attracts scientists, physicists, and engineers who have retired in the area. As regular participants in the community college programs, many of the audience members knew each other and had established expectations and norms that made grilling these presenters acceptable and expected.
Each of these scenarios depicts a public engaging with science and technology. The man with the camera taking notes was one of the authors of this volume (Pat Gehrke), studying how these publics engage with science. Three years before these events, he had been working with a team of scholars on a grant proposal to study public concerns about the risks of nanotechnologies. His contribution was to articulate the public engagement portion of the grant, including its methodology and underlying philosophy. The approach to public engagement he proposed, which was used for these events and nine more like them, differed from how most researchers conducted public engagement events. Those differences came from research on what constitutes a public, how human communication functions in relationship to its ecology, and what it means to participate and engage. At the time, the idea for this public engagement methodology was largely philosophical and theoretical, but so much of the research in communication, psychology, and related fields supported the need for a shift in this direction that he was confident he was on the right track. He just needed funding for the fieldwork to test and refine the method.
After the National Science Foundation
funded the grant, he found himself presenting this methodology at an NSF meeting of primary investigators, all of whom were working on public engagement with science or public understanding of science. He knew his approach was unconventional, but so much of the research and theoretical literature supported the new methodology he was confident enough to share the argument with his peers. The response was not simply mixed, but polarized. Half or slightly more of the attendees were vehemently opposed to the ideas, staunchly defending methods that, by his reading of the research, were simply not designed to investigate public understanding or engagement with science, much less support the claims researchers sought to make. Slightly less than half were equally vocal and firm in their agreement with his arguments and the need to rectify core deficiencies in the most commonly used models of public engagement. Clearly he was on to something, but as of yet, neither he nor his colleagues could fully articulate their positions, and the method was untested and unrefined.
Over the following five years, through numerous presentations and discussions with colleagues, eleven public engagement events deploying various refinements of the methodology, and dozens of drafts, the methodology reached maturity. This method is called âorganic public engagement
â and the first short version of its articulation was published in
Public Understanding of Science
in 2014. This book is a more complete and extended argument for the need to move our public engagement with science toward such organic methodologies. As the following chapters document, organic public engagement
differs from most of the dominant
models of public engagement by paying closer attention to actually existing publics and how they behave within their existing ecologies. As its name implies, organic public engagement
seeks to work with existing local conditions and structures to better understand actually existing publics and create more sustainable engagement outcomes. Likewise, the name implies that many other forms of public engagement are something other than organic, perhaps even artificial. We go to great lengths to provide both concrete empirical research and strong theoretical foundations to evidence the artificiality of dominant methods of public engagement with science while also documenting the significant costs of such artificiality. Part of that argument is based on a disconnect between the kinds of âpublicsâ or groups of people who are gathered by artificial public engagement researchers and how people gather to form publics without the intervention of engagement experts and researchers. We argue that unless we can effectively engage these actually existing publics, as they exist in their given ecologies, then public engagement with science will be too artificial to generate useful research or sustainable public benefits. This artificiality is generated in large part by a disconnect between artificial public engagement and a century of consistent and compelling research on the role of ecology in human communication and behavior.
Our purpose in writing this book, however, is not merely to level a critique against artificial public engagement methods. Our goal is to provide a practicable alternative that is grounded in current empirical research, historical perspective, and sound theoretical foundations. In the chapters that follow, we have endeavored to provide the reader with a broad introduction to the history and principles of research in ecological thinking
and ecological validity
, with special attention to how ecology impacts both human behavior and the validity of social scientific research. That research, combined with work by scholars of communication and political science, yields a more robust understanding of what constitutes a public and what it might mean to engage actually existing publics. In our view, once one is familiar with the research on ecology, ecological validity
, human communication, and publics, the critique of artificial public engagement becomes rather obvious and quite damning. What is less obvious and make us hopeful is that the same research leads naturally toward an alternative: the general methodology of organic public engagement and specific methods both for conducting research and building theory from that research.
Chapter 2 introduces the reader to ecological thinking
, beginning with early work on ecologies in botany, biology, and geology in the nineteenth century. We then move to the development of theories of ecology in human and social sciences in the twentieth century, with particular attention to anthropology, sociology, and psychology. That foundation then permits the introduction of the standard of ecological validity (first introduced in the 1940s) and its application to the study of deliberation and communication. From this rich history and robust body of research, we articulate five standards for ecological validity in public engagement with science.
Chapter 3 advances our critique of artificial public engagement with science by applying the five criteria from Chap. 2 (and the research supporting each) to common methods of public engagement. We begin by considering survey studies, media studies, science fairs and cafés, museums, and digital engagements, providing recommendations for each based on ecological thinking. The bulk of the chapter, however, focuses on deliberative engagements such as consensus conferences, citizen panels, citizen juries, and deliberative polls. We argue that each of these, as currently conceived and practiced, has serious deficiencies in their ecological validity. These deficiencies are common, we contend, because these deliberative methods are built upon certain political and philosophical commitments that produce both cynical and idealist attitudes toward the publics they study.
Chapter 4 details these political and philosophical commitments that drive artificial public engagement with science. We trace their origins through the history of political philosophy, with some attention to Immanuel Kant, Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, John Rawls, and JĂŒrgen Habermas (the last two being especially important to current theorists supporting artificial public engagement methods). We then contrast their assumptions with more recent research on publics and public communication, especially studies of counterpublics and vernacular rhetoric. We argue that this work produces a more practical, balanced, and sound basis for public engagement with science. Modern theories of publics and counterpublics, combined with studies of vernacular rhetoric, offer us a richer approach to considering what constitutes publics, how they form and change, and how they can be studied.
Chapter 5 then confronts one of the thorniest problems in public engagement with science (and to a lesser degree, public engagement in general): the demarcation between experts and nonexperts. We begin by noting the long history of the problem in philosophersâ challenge to differentiate types of knowledge. We then move specifically to the issue of scientific knowledge, working through the theories of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. As we are ultimately concerned with how these philosophical and theoretical issues impact actually existing publics and practices of engagement with science, we turn next to how the demarcation problem has played out in political contexts, especially in the courts. This leads us to the call for a âthird waveâ of science studies, the utility of counterpublics and vernacular rhetoric research in confronting the demarcation problem, and how methods drawn from human communication scholars can aid in this research. We also note here the irony of much public engagement with science, wherein the âexpertâ priesthood of science is defrocked and asked to stand in equal conversation with ânonexpertâ lay citizens, but self-styled engagement experts claim a special status as the holders of the truth of democratic politics.
Having concluded the foundational research and critique that drives our turn toward organic public engagement, Chap. 6 defines and lays out the methodology in some detail. Organic public engagement methodology draws from a variety of fields, informed by the theories and research covered in the previous four chapters. We provide researchers and practitioners enough foundation to conduct organic public engagement with science events and walk them through how one study implemented the methodology. A reader solely interested in implementing organic public engagement with science could jump here, but we caution from our own experience that the method is more easily and fruitfully deployed once one has at least an introduction to theories of ecology, the principles of ecological validity, research on counterpublics and vernacular rhetoric, and the demarcation problem.
Chapter 7 concludes the book by discussing how organic public engagement events can be used to generate meaningful research outcomes and build theories. We believe that organic public engagement is especially well-suited to building middle-range theories or heuristics. Such theories and heuristics, we argue, are more actionable and meaningful outcomes for public engagement with science than the more âgrandâ theories science sometimes seeks. By drawing from research in multi-sited ethnography and the methods of grounded theory, we argue that one can collect outcomes from multiple organic public engagement events to make more useful and robust theories and heuristics.
As with any methodology, organic public engagement should not be considered complete or finished. In fact, one of the important dimensions of organic public engagement as a methodology is that it should always be adapting and growing to meet the conditions in which it is deployed. We hope that the reader finds in this book both sufficient reason to take up the challenge of conducting organic public engagement with science events and also the practical tools for doing so.