Putting the "pub" back in "public engagement"
by Molly Webb
While Jack was taking LA by storm, and James was galavanting around India, I was getting my own dose of excitement at the ESRC-funded Science in Society workshop, right here in sunny London yesterday.
In the modern if window-less basement of The Department for Productivity, Energy and Industry or DPEI (the re-branded DTI), a few social scientists and civil servants were thrown into a room together to figure out how public engagement can inform horizon scanning.
Steve Rayner led a lively discussion through academic jargon, policy jargon and back again. I talked a bit about Nanodialogues , our "experiments" in upstream engagement. It was suggested that public engagement should happen where people are already talking to each other, in a place like, say, the pub. Which is where I'm off to now...