Two of the Kavli Center's first Ethics, Science, and the Public fellows, Arik Shams and Leana King, collaborated to research and author a piece featured this month in Undark on creative efforts to engage the public in decisions about science.
Arik and Leana, two scientists in genome editing and neuroscience respectively, took part in a pilot project as part of their fellowship which ultimately led to this article. The project brought the fellows and a group of graduate journalism students together for a rare opportunity to work collaboratively on science stories for publication in a news outlet. The experiment was led by one of the Kavli Center’s core faculty, Elena Conis, historian and professor in the Graduate School of Journalism. For a full semester, Kavli Fellows were invited into her class, not just as audience members, but as active participants in the journalistic process. Fellows gained experience being interviewed by reporters about their topic, learned how to formulate a story, how to find the core messages within that story, and how to write it for a public audience. Graduate Fellow Leana King had this to say about the experience; “working with journalism students on a reporting project helped me understand how journalists prioritize information much differently than scientists do, which I think is a very crucial practice for any scientist in more public-facing research."
In their piece, Arik and Leana ask the question: Could ‘Science Courts’ Help Build Public Trust? After researching the history of 'science courts' and learning about methods and examples along the spectrum of public communication and engagement, the fellows explore whether "debating scientific topics in a courtroom setting could be a way to inform and engage citizens in public policy."
Read the article at Undark