Public Engagement is very important. Everybody says so. Some go as far as organising a whole symposium about it. But what if all the reasons you’re told you should do it are wrong? Would it really be so bad if you just quietly got on with some research instead?
Science Communicator Timandra Harkness takes five top reasons for doing Public Engagement and tears them to bits. And not only because she doesn’t need the competition. However, if one good reason survives, she may also pass on a few tips on how to do it better.
About Timandra Harkness
After running away from the circus to improvise comedy, Timandra spent years on the stand up comedy circuit before founding the Comedy Research Project, a double act with Dr. Helen Pilcher.
She returned to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2010 with Your Days Are Numbered: the maths of death, a comedy written and performed with Matt Parker and funded by the Wellcome Trust. This “exponentially funny” show featured at several Science Festivals in 2011 and toured the UK and Australia in 2012. With the same team she will be taking a new show – Humans V Nature: engineering FTW – to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2012.
Timandra has been involved with Cheltenham Science Festival since its first year, and is now a member of its Advisory Group. She’s also been involved in their FameLab competition from the start, both in the UK and in most of the 20-odd countries now participating.
Other recent public appearances include events at the Wellcome Collection, the Bishopsgate Institute, and debates on brain sex & on statistics at the 2011 Battle of Ideas.
She’s also written film scripts, radio comedy, text for science exhibits and – since winning the Independent column-writing competition with a short piece on goat-borrowing – more-or-less serious journalism on subjects from micromorts to motorcycles.
http://twitter.com/#!/timandraharknes
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