As new media proliferate and the public's trust and engagement in science are influenced by industry involvement in academic research, an interdisciplinary workshop provides some recommendations to enhance science communication.
Corresponding author: Aristea Fotopoulou, a.fotopoulou@brighton.ac.uk 2 Training to self-care: Fitness tracking, biopedagogy and the healthy consumer AbstractIn this article, we provide an account of Fitbit, a wearable sensor device, using two complementary analytical approaches: auto-ethnography and media analysis. Drawing on the concept of biopedagogy, which describes the processes of learning and training bodies how to live, we focus on how users learn to self-care with wearable technologies through a series of micropractices that involve processes of mediation and the sharing their own data via social networking. Our discussion is oriented towards four areas of analysis: data subjectivity and sociality; making meaning; time and productivity; and brand identity. We articulate how these micropractices of knowing one's body regulate the contemporary 'fit' and healthy subject, and mediate expertise about health, behaviour and data subjectivity.
In this article, we analyse a 2013 press conference hosting the world’s first tasting of a laboratory grown hamburger. We explore this as a media event: an exceptional performative moment in which common meanings are mobilised and a connection to a shared centre of reality is offered. We develop our own theoretical contribution – the promotional public – to characterise the affirmative and partial patchwork of carefully selected actors invoked during the burger tasting. Our account draws on three areas of analysis: interview data with the scientists who developed the burger, media analysis of the streamed press conference itself and media analysis of social media during and following the event. We argue that the call to witness an experiment is a form of promotion and that such promotional material also offers an address that invokes a public with its attendant tensions.
In this article, we provide an account of Fitbit, a wearable sensor device, using two complementary analytical approaches: auto-ethnography and media analysis. Drawing on the concept of biopedagogy, which describes the processes of learning and training bodies how to live, we focus on how users learn to self-care with wearable technologies through a series of micropractices that involve processes of mediation and sharing their own data via social networking. Our discussion is oriented towards four areas of analysis: data subjectivity and sociality; making meaning; time and productivity; and brand identity. We articulate how these micropractices of knowing one's body regulate the contemporary 'fit' and healthy subject, and mediate expertise about health, behaviour and data subjectivity.
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Copyright and reuse:Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University.Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. Corresponding IntroductionPublic knowledge about genetics and genomics is often framed as shallow, reactionary or just uninformed by stakeholder advocates for particular innovations in application or policy. Media representations are regularly characterized by scientists as exaggeration or fear-mongering and the general public's scientific knowledge is often characterized as slightly ridiculous. Against this general context, work on public engagement is often pursued to contest the assertion that there has been an historical distrust of science, and that there is currently an 'anti-science brigade', despite decades of work by social scientists demonstrating the contextual character of the 'public understanding of science ' (Wynne 1992, Irwin andMichael 2003). The figure of the 'antiscience brigade' was frequently mobilised by the UK Prime Minister Tony Blair during his time in office (1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007) through repeated references to 'irrational' public debate against which science needed to be defended (Haran et al 2008).The research findings presented here, however, are in tune with what Irwin and Michael call the 'ethnographic turn' in public understanding of science (2003: 28) which observes that: 'people do not simply possess knowledge about scientific "facts" and scientific procedures and processes, they can also reflect upon the epistemological status of that knowledge' (Michael 1996: 107). What is distinctive about the research is that it invited respondents to characterise and reflect upon the sources of their knowledge about genetics and genomics -areas of science which have been the subject of an exceptional degree of public discourse in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries -in a relatively open-ended way, without directing them to particular examples of genetic knowledge dissemination.Corresponding Author Dr K O'Riordan k.oriordan@sussex.ac.uk, MFM University of Sussex, UK Recent research into public engagement with genetics can be characterized in terms of three approaches: attitudes studies (Sturgis et al 2005, Condit, 2010; media content analysis (Kitzinger 2008, Nerlich et al 2002; and patient or focus group work (Kerr and CunninghamBurley 2...
The gay gene was first identified in 1993 as a correlation between the genetic marker Xq28 and gay male sexuality. The results of this original study were never replicated, and the biological reality of such an entity remains hypothetical. However, despite such tenuous provenance, the gay gene has persisted as a reference in science news, popular science writings, and in press releases and editorials about biomedical research. An examination of the life of the gay gene in U.K. news media demonstrates that the gay gene has become an assumed back-story to genetic sexuality research over time, and that the critique of its very existence has been diminished. Latterly, the gay gene has entered into the online biomedical databases of the 21st century with the same pattern of persistence and diminishing critique. This article draws on an analysis of the U.K. press and online databases to represent the process through which the address of the gay gene has shifted and become an index of biomedicalization. The consequent unmooring of the gay gene from accountability and accuracy demonstrates that the organization of biomedical databases could benefit from greater cross-disciplinary attention.
The recent proliferation of personal genomics and direct-to-consumer (DTC)genomics
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