Public awareness of science (PAwS), public understanding of science (PUS) or more recently, Public Engagement with Science and Technology are terms relating to the attitudes, behaviours, opinions and activities that comprise the relations between the general public or lay society as a whole to scientific knowledge and organisation.
It is a comparatively new approach to the task of exploring the multitude of relations and linkages science, technology and innovation have among the public. While earlier work in the discipline focused on augmenting public knowledge of scientific topics, in line with the information deficit model of science communication, the discrediting of the model has led to an increased emphasis on how the public chooses to use scientific knowledge and on the development of interfaces to mediate between expert and lay understandings of an issue. The area integrates a series of other fields, such as:
- Public controversies over science and technology;
- science communication in the mass media, internet, radio and television programmes;
- science museums, aquaria, planetaria, zoological parks, botanical gardens, etc.;
- fixed and mobile science exhibits;
- science festivals
- science fairs in schools and social groups;
- science education for adults;
- consumer education;
- public tours of research and development (R&D) parks, manufacturing companies, etc.
- Science in popular culture
- Science in text books and classrooms.
How to raise public awareness and public understanding of science and technology, and how the public feels and knows about science in general, and specific subjects, such as genetic engineering, bioethics, etc., are important lines of research in this area.
Read more about Public Awareness Of Science: The Bodmer Report, Project Examples, Further Reading
Famous quotes containing the words public, awareness and/or science:
“That’s where Time magazine lives ... way out there on the puzzled, masturbating edge, peering through the keyhole and selling what they see to the big wide world of chamber of commerce voyeurs who support the public prints.”
—Hunter S. Thompson (b. 1939)
“During the first formative centuries of its existence, Christianity was separated from and indeed antagonistic to the state, with which it only later became involved. From the lifetime of its founder, Islam was the state, and the identity of religion and government is indelibly stamped on the memories and awareness of the faithful from their own sacred writings, history, and experience.”
—Bernard Lewis, U.S. Middle Eastern specialist. Islam and the West, ch. 8, Oxford University Press (1993)
“I’ve been asked to give some words of advice for young women entering library/information science education. Does anyone ever take advice? The advice we give is usually what we would do or would have done if we had the chance, and the advice that’s taken, if ever, is often what we wanted to hear in the first place.”
—Phyllis Dain (b. 1930)