Short Abstract
Over recent decades, research in science communication studies has argued that information transfer is not an appropriate model for most science communication and that all communication necessarily entails an interaction with audiences’ values and sensibilities. Over the same period, scientific institutions have greatly expanded their science communication activities, often in ways that make direct emotional appeals. However, the way in which this ‘affective turn’ intersects with the institutionalised context of science communication has gone relatively unexamined. In this seminar, I take the case of the appeal to wonder, examining the long history of the cognitive passions, in which the shifting meanings of wonder and curiosity were associated with an individual experience of natural knowledge and whose cultural significance served to demarcate the known from the unknown and the elite from the popular. In considering how wonder is reconfigured when invoked by contemporary institutional voices, I hope to highlight the ways in which the affective turn resonates with the dominant marketing paradigm of contemporary society.
Brief Biography
Felicity Mellor joined the Science Communication Unit in 2001, where she runs the MSc in Science Communication. She specialises in the media coverage of science, with a particular interest in the ways in which scientists’ public interventions align with ideological positions. In 2010 she led a content of analysis of the BBC’s science coverage, commissioned by the BBC Trust. Her research has been published in journals such as the Public Understanding of Science and Social Studies of Science. She has edited two collections of essays, one with Alice Bell and Sarah Davies on Science and its Publics and one with Stephen Webster on The Silences of Science.