By. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent*

ABSTRACT

Reflecting on the debate about the value of the category “popular science” to historians, this essay argues that the model of legitimate science that is currently emerging invites us to consider how the notions of science and the public have been mutually configured and reconfigured over time. It begins by pointing to the tremendous impact of technosciences on the public sphere. The recent shift from the deficit model to the participatory model has profoundly changed the values underlying science communication. Whereas reviously

such communication was performed in the name of science, it is now performed in the name of democracy. This political turn suggests that we should consider symmetrically not only how science and its public face are socially constructed but also how the notion of a lay public has been constructed by scientific practices. Finally, the essay suggests that historical studies should focus on the mechanisms of demarcation and discrimination between science and rival forms of knowledge. DOWNLOAD JOURNAL

By. Andreas W. Daum*

ABSTRACT

This essay suggests that we should understand the varieties of “popular science” as part of a larger phenomenon: the changing set of processes, practices, and actors that generate and transform public knowledge across time, space, and cultures. With such a reconceptualization we can both deessentialize and historicize the idea of “popularization,” free it from normative notions, and move beyond existing imbalances in scholarship. The history of public knowledge might thus find a central place in many fundamental narratives of the modern world. More specifically, the essay proposes that we pay more attention to forms of knowledge outside the realm of “science,” embrace the richness, traffic, and transfer of public knowledge on a transnational scale as well as in comparative perspective, and rethink conventional forms of periodization.
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