Cosmic Carbons, Messy Legos and Researchers in Becoming
: an Ethnography of Public Engagement in the Europah Network

Student thesis: Doctoral ThesisDoctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Abstract

At the heart of the European Commission’s Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) agenda, lies a call for dialogue between researchers and wider society which requires researchers to participate in interactions with non-academic publics. While public engagement (PE) is considered one of the pillars of RRI, there are, as yet, no detailed studies of what happens when this becomes a compulsory activity for researchers and the resulting impacts on research culture and academic identities.
This thesis is a detailed ethnographic account of these dynamics in Europah, a European research network focusing mainly on astrophysics and astrochemistry, where 16 PhD students (including myself), working across 6 European countries, were required to do public engagement as a regular part of their academic experience with the support of a specialised science communication consultancy.
Gherardi’s approach to understanding organisations through analysing the “texture of learning” (Gherardi, 2006) helped me explore these engagement practices through a relational and processual lens while acknowledging the heterogeneity of actors and dynamics at play. Being a full member of the network facilitated immersion through participant observation over 18 months among the other Early-Stage Researchers (ESRs). In addition to in-depth interviews, I sat in astrophysics summer- schools with them, built a pop-up science shop side-by-side with them, witnessed their first encounters with non-academic publics. I also worked through an autoethnographic exploration of my own positions, emotions and reactions, and how they played into the texture of public engagement in Europah.
In this process, the following key findings emerged:

The Early-Stage Researchers (ESR) were exposed to a range of learning opportunities for engagement practices, from a situated curriculum supported by science communication professionals and rooted in material and emotional understanding of engagement, to self-organised engagement activities where they learnt from each other in a horizontal way. Through managing different expectations and cultures of engagement, they also learnt to manage dissonance and discomfort.
Indeed, this study surfaced profound tensions between contradictory dimensions of academic agendas such as ideas of excellence rooted in elitism or internationalisation at all costs, and the values of social inclusion and transparency that engagement cultures tend to foster.
In the context of Europah, the ESRs developed their own academic identities while integrating a unusually eclectic range of engagement practices, from posters-and-Lego science fair to the

conception and building of an entire shop for non self-selected publics in a mall. They experienced a variety of roles that sometimes contradicted how they saw themselves as scientists. This variety of activities allowed for highlighting unusual aspects of engagement, in particular a dimension of care.
Institutionalising public engagement in this way generated additional collective work with dimensions of service and care. This invisible labour was widely taken on by women ESRs, while benefitting the men as well. The ethnographic inquiry was an occasion to open conversations within the network about gendered division of labour and make hegemonic masculinity more visible.
Normative models of science communication (such as the deficit/dialogue split) were not well suited to describe the types of heterogeneous and messy dynamics happening in Europah. The variety of views and tensions around research cultures and diverging views of PE, despite the discomfort generated, was also a working tool for collaborating across various communities of practice. Interdisciplinary collaborations do not always need consensus in order to generate valuable experiences. Nonetheless, this study suggests that any initiative that institutionalises public engagement in a community of researchers must take into account the risks of creating more inequality, by asking who these dynamics benefit, as well as who they could disadvantage.
Date of Award24 Jan 2023
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • University of Bristol
SponsorsH2020 MSC
SupervisorKeri Facer (Supervisor) & Helen Manchester (Supervisor)

Keywords

  • Public Engagement
  • Ethnography
  • Autoethnography
  • Organisational learning
  • Feminist Theory

Cite this

'