What is Public Engagement with Science?

Public Engagement with Science: Definingthe Project, coauthored by Melissa Jacquart and me, was published with Cambridge University Press in January 2025. This volume represents the culmination of years of Melissa’s and my efforts to explore the contours of what it is for academics to do public-facing work about science.

Engaging the public in science: what does this look like?

Way back in 2017, I received initial approval from my institution, the University of Cincinnati (UC), to develop a Center for Public Engagement with Science. Melissa Jacquart, also a philosopher, soon joined me at UC to co-develop the center. Initially, a lot of the work was identifying patterns in how academic science—broadly construed to include natural and social sciences, as well as other STEM disciplines—interfaces with public life. 

And, while we were interested in engagement opportunities created by the internet, our main focus from the start was how academic science interfaces with the local communities its embedded in. We quickly realized that we want to conduct and support public engagement that is (1) participant-centered, (2) interdisciplinary, and (3) community partnered. So that is the basic recipe for the UC Center for Public Engagement with Science, or PEWS.

One of Melissa’s and my early activities was to host a 2021 workshop convening academics interested in public engagement with public engagement practitioners (supported by NSF Award SES-1946951). Videos of this workshop are available on the PEWS YouTube channel. This newly published Element is our first of two planned publications summarizing our learning from that workshop—and, really, our learning from our years spent laying the groundwork for PEWS.

I like thinking of our Element as a tour of resources for and important considerations bearing on attempts to engage with the public about scientific research. Many academics, including Melissa and me, find themselves wanting to use their academic skills to engage not just with other academics but with public audiences as well. This can be motivated by the desire to share scientific content, to encourage more connections with science, or even to shift scientific research priorities toward topics of public concern. We wanted to create a volume accessible to readers from a wide variety of backgrounds who want a window into getting started with public engagement with science.

In this Element, we consider how public engagement with science is defined and what aims it might have (section 1) and explore the wide range of academic disciplines with resources to offer public engagement with science (section 2). We then consider the aims and techniques of collaborating across disciplines and with practitioners on public engagement initiatives, and we consider university structures that can support public engagement (section 3). We outline a goal-directed approach for developing public engagement with science initiatives (section 4). Finally, we consider the variety of forms public engagement can take and how public engagement can feature in research and teaching efforts (section 5).

Cambridge University Press developed the Elements format of publication to be midway between an academic journal article and a full-length book. Elements come in thematic series, all sharing the same cover illustration, and all curated by a series editor (or coeditors). Our Element is actually the first in a new series, also edited by Melissa and me, Elements in Public Engagement with Science. Together with an interdisciplinary and international Editorial Board, we are commissioning Elements on topics like STEM learning ecosystems, citizen science, children’s engagement in science, indigenous science, and more.  You can learn more about the series at its website.

Public Engagement with Science: Defining the Project is available open access, here: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009475105

Angela Potochnik is Professor of Philosophy, Head of the Philosophy Department, and Director of the Center for Public Engagement with Science at the University of Cincinnati.​  She is the author of Idealization and the Aims of Science (2017) and Science and the Public (2024), as well as coauthor of Recipes for Science: An Introduction to Scientific Methods and Reasoning (2018, 2nd Ed. 2024) and Public Engagement with Science: Defining the Project (2025). She earned her PhD from Stanford University in 2007. 

EPIC's Year in Review and Festive Greetings

Celebrating a Remarkable First Year

As we wrap up EPIC’s inaugural year, our project manager Charlotte Withers reflects on our journey and achievements. 

EPIC was established with a range of ambitious goals: fostering collaborations, appointing key personnel, building a vibrant community, and establishing a robust online presence. Thanks to the dedication and creativity of our team, we are proud to say we have accomplished these aims and set the stage for an exciting future.

Festive version of the EPIC logo

Fostering Collaborations

Collaboration is at the heart of EPIC’s mission. This year, we’ve developed a strong network of partnerships across institutions and countries. Our investigators at Birmingham, Nottingham, Swansea, and Bristol have made significant strides in building internal and cross-institutional connections.

• Institutional Efforts: the Nottingham team developed a research network, and the Birmingham team launched a reading group and this blog to connect scholars and ideas.

• International Partnerships: the Birmingham team are collaborating with the University of Ferrara on a case study addressing depression and demoralization in cancer patients and with the University of Bologna on dementia research.

These collaborations have created a foundation for innovative, interdisciplinary research in the years to come.

Ground-breaking Publications

EPIC’s inaugural year has also been a banner year for publications:

• Bortolotti edited an open-access collection entitled Epistemic Justice in Mental Healthcare (Palgrave), with a preface by Bortolotti and Broome.
• Articles have appeared in leading journals such as Kidd's article in Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, Degerman's article in Philosophical Psychology, Russell's article in Erkenntnis, and Kidd and Carel's article in Social Epistemology.
• Chapters have been prepared for inclusion in edited collections, such as a chapter co-authored by Broome, McGuinness and Kidd on ‘Epistemic injustice, informed consent, and shared decision-making in mental health care’ and a chapter co-authored by Bortolotti, Murphy-Hollies, and Byrne on 'Epistemic Injustice in Mental Health: new directions'.

Future publications include two anticipated monographs and proceedings from upcoming conferences in Leipzig and Nottingham. 

EPIC has also prioritized accessible outputs, publishing in venues such as Psychology Today and The Conversation and producing a number of podcasts and videos for the general public.

Building Community

Creating a thriving community has been central to EPIC’s success.

• Online Engagement: EPIC hosts monthly seminars, featuring renowned speakers such as Miranda Fricker, and offers a ‘Friends of EPIC’ sign-up on our website to keep stakeholders engaged.
• Social Media Presence: Our website, blog, and Facebook page share regular updates, alongside impactful campaigns like ‘Women in Philosophy’ and ‘World Mental Health Day.’

Presentations and Outreach

EPIC members have shared their work globally, presenting at prestigious venues, including International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis (ISPS-US), the Chilean Society for Neurology, Psychiatry and Neurosurgery (SONEPSYN), and seminars and conferences at the universities of Cambridge, Aarhus, Eindhoven, Tokyo, California Irvine, and Prague - to mention just a few.

Our outreach efforts have made epistemic injustice accessible to broader audiences, including the following:

• Workshops with the Voice Collective resulted in co-produced videos and open-access resources.
• Collaboration with the Patients Association and the WHO Behavioural and Cultural Insights Hub are producing impactful briefing papers.

Memorable Events

EPIC launched with an inspiring event in Bristol featuring a commissioned musical piece by Toby Young. We’ve since hosted workshops for early-career women in philosophy and epistemic injustice scholars, with more exciting events planned through 2025/26.

Looking Ahead

EPIC’s first year has been a resounding success. From fostering meaningful collaborations to publishing innovative research and building a vibrant community, we have laid a strong foundation for the future.

Here’s to an even more impactful year ahead!

Happy 2025 to the EPIC blog readers 

 

Behind the Stigma: the podcast

Today's post is by Seiara Imanova. 

When I began my Master’s in Psychology at King's College London, I quickly realized there was a significant gap between the advancements in mental health research and how that knowledge is communicated to the public. This inspired me to start my podcast, Behind the Stigma, with the goal of bridging the divide between academic discussions in psychology, neuroscience, and mental health, and making them accessible to the general public.

Logo of Behind the Stigma

Although psychology is a science, in the way that it uses empirical research and rigorous methodologies to understand phenomena, its practical applications—especially in clinical work—are often deeply rooted in subjectivity (biases, power dynamics, and social hierarchies etc). This is particularly evident when we examine the lived experiences of individuals, especially those from marginalized groups. These groups are often silenced or undervalued, a concept known as epistemic injustice.

Epistemic injustice refers to how certain individuals or communities have their knowledge and experiences systematically dismissed or ignored. Below are a few episodes where we tackle these critical issues:

Race, Culture & Social Equalities in Mental Health with Hári Sewell

In this episode, Hari Sewell, founder and Director of HS Consultancy, offers insights into the systemic forces driving racial disparities in healthcare. For example, he explains how societal attitudes shape patient outcomes by highlighting the disproportionate detention rates of Black individuals in psychiatric wards compared to their white counterparts. Also, how unconscious biases subtly influence clinical decision-making, affecting everything from patient engagement to the formulation of treatment plans. His insights underscore the urgent need to confront these systemic issues in order to build more just and equitable mental health practices.

Returning to Wholeness: A Story with Psychiatric Nurse Neseret Bemient

In this episode, Neseret Bemient, a former psychiatric nurse in Canada, shares her profound journey toward wholeness and alternative healing. Neseret reflects on her experiences in psychiatric care, revealing how her role often involved navigating a system that frequently dismissed the voices of patients. Diagnosed with medication-induced bipolar disorder, she discusses the ways in which her history and lived experiences as a refugee was an important factor in understanding her wellbeing. Neseret emphasizes the importance of integrating spirituality and holistic approaches into practice, shedding light on the issues within psychiatric care. She urges us to recognize and validate the diverse experiences and knowledge of individuals diagnosed with mental health conditions.

Philosophy of Psychiatry with Lisa Bortolotti 

In this episode, philosopher Lisa Bortolotti delves into the distinctions between delusions and irrational beliefs, as well as exploring implications for agency in youth mental health. She discusses her research examining how young people navigate clinical encounters within mental health settings, highlighting how practitioners often undermine or dismiss young people's contributions due to negative stereotypes, which can lead to epistemic injustice by discrediting their experiences. By advocating for a greater focus on individual agency and integrative approaches, she highlights the necessity of validating diverse experiences in mental health, with practices that validate young people's voices and nurture their sense of agency, ultimately encouraging better mental health outcomes that involve users in decision making. 

Through the podcast, I strive to create a platform for meaningful dialogue around mentalhealth. I believe that by fostering understanding and empathy, we can work together to create a more equitable mental health landscape for all.

Seiara Imanova is a doctoral candidate at the University of Birmingham. Behind the Stigma has explored a range of topics, including AI and mental health, the effects of antidepressant, psychedelics as a therapy, and institutional racism.

Health and epistemic injustice at Festivalfilosofia

The Festivalfilosofia is a three-day public event held in the city of Modena and the nearby towns of Carpi and Sassuolo in Italy. It's a highly attended festival, drawing about 95,000 participants last year, with its YouTube channel boasting 45,000 subscribers. 

Official image of the 2024 edition of the Festival

This year, among the 52 philosophers and cultural figures invited to speak was Elisabetta Lalumera, who works at the University of Bologna and is part of the EPIC project team. On Sunday morning, September 15th, Elisabetta gave a lecture on the different concepts of health and well-being in medicine. Each concept not only describes facts but also conveys values, meaning that selecting a particular concept of health influences choices in care, research, patient support, and the doctor-patient relationship. The audience was large and diverse.

Elisabetta Lalumera at Festivalfilosofia

Later in the afternoon, Elisabetta shared the stage with Claudio Vagnini, Director of the University Hospital of Modena, where they discussed the humanization of healthcare. On this occasion, Elisabetta focused on epistemic injustice in healthcare. The audience, primarily composed of healthcare professionals, listened as she explained how this form of injustice often arises from unconscious biases. 

Panel discussion on humanizing medicine

Like cognitive biases, negative stereotypes toward certain groups, including patients, are hard to overcome, but healthcare professionals can learn to recognize and address them. Becoming familiar with the concept of epistemic injustice—without perceiving it as a reason to blame—can help healthcare professionals live their roles with greater awareness and fulfilment.

A chapter written by Elisabetta Lalumera on the promises of digital health in tackling epistemic injustice will be published in a forthcoming open-access book entitled Epistemic Justice in Mental Healthcare: Recognising Agency and Promoting Virtues Across the Life Span (Palgrave).

McPin Young People's Network

In this post, Lisa Bortolotti interviews Rachel Kimberley Temple, Public Involvement in Research Manager (Youth Involvement Lead) at the McPin foundation.

Logo of McPin's Young People's Network

LB: Hello Rachel! What is the McPin Young People's Network and what is your role in it?

RKT: Hi Lisa! The young people’s network consists of over 400 young people from across the UK, aged 13-28, who identify as having lived experience of a range of mental health issues. Everyone in the network has signed up because they wish to get actively involved in mental health research. Researchers can contact us and share their youth involvement opportunities with the network. The network is essentially intended as a resource for both young people and researchers who are seeking to work together. 

My role is to manage a small team who oversee the network; raising awareness about it, building membership, and sharing key findings from projects connected to the network. We also collaborate directly with researchers who wish to engage with the network, advising and facilitating youth involvement in their projects.

LB: Why do you think is important that young people are actively involved in mental health research?

RKT: I think it’s vital that young people have a role in research that will directly impact them. By applying their expert knowledge, the research becomes more relevant, accessible and appropriate. This not only improves the quality of the research but also makes it more likely to achieve the desired impact. Research therefore benefits hugely for involving young people.

LB: How do young people benefit from involvement in mental health research?

RKT: Young people we have worked have told us that they value learning new skills and find it empowering to apply their expertise to something that will positively benefit others. I think this is so important, because having mental health issues can make you feel powerless. Therefore, being actively involved in research can offer a sense of control - a feeling like you can make a difference. 

We’ve also been able to see young people grow in the role; becoming more confident, making valuable connections with external partners and building their own careers.

LB: Can you give us an example of a research project you have been involved with, and of what the young people helped achieve?

RKT: One example that comes to mind is the agency project. On this project, we worked with young people and academics to co-analyse video data of young people’s mental health interactions within emergency departments. We drew on our unique perspectives and expertise, and combined this to make some important discoveries: how to maximise young people’s agency in interactions about their mental health. We translated those findings into various resources targeted at professionals, young people and other researchers.

To learn more about the Young People's Network visit their website or follow them on X and Instagram. 

If you are a researcher seeking to involve young people in your project or collaborate with McPin, visit this page. 

McPin Young People's Network has contributed to several outputs for the Agency Project including a podcast called "How to give young people agency in mental health" and a poster entitled "What I wish my younger self knew about mental health" aimed at secondary school students. Check them out!

Logo of the Agency Project

EPIC Poetry

On 27 February a group of poetry enthusiasts, patients, arts and health practitioners, health professionals, generally curious folk, a few students, and a dog gathered in an upstairs room of a pub in Bristol to take part in a poetry workshop. The workshop was the first step in a process which will see the creation of a musical piece for EPIC. The choral piece will be based on lyrics written by poet Jennifer Thorp which will be set to music by composer Toby Young. Its theme is epistemic injustice.

Working in groups with words and images

 

This is the second time I’ve had the good fortune to work with Jennifer and Toby, who I met via Jess Farr Cox (thank you, Jess!), who was instrumental in the creation of a previous piece, Under the surface. This composition from 2016 invited the hearer to explore breathlessness and our relationship to our breath. You can hear the piece Toby and Jennifer created for a previous research project I led, the Life of Breath, here (there’s also an interview with Toby about the creation of the piece).

The idea behind the new, EPIC choral piece is to give a voice, sound, and words to experiences of epistemic injustice, which can be bewildering and inchoate. The piece will help share the experience with a variety of audiences, inviting reflection on the nature of epistemic injustice and how to communicate it.

The piece will initially be quite short - under ten minutes - and we plan to add a few minutes to it each year of the six years of the project, based on that year's research and ideas as they develop.

So how did we start off? Jennifer, who led the workshop, first asked us to warm up with a series of writing exercises. We worked in small groups to generate random metaphors, such as 'voice is a grizzly beast.' We then wrote a list of words and descriptions evoked by several powerful images, including a painting by Edward Hopper and an illustration from Maurice Sendak.

Poetry workshop

 

Jennifer then asked us to think of examples of situations in which we experienced silence of various kind: being silenced by a mother or spouse, an awkward silence at a dinner party, the silence following bad news ... many examples were given and elaborated on.

Our next exercise was to describe a situation involving silence from the point of view of an object on the scene (a pillow, school gates, and a stone were some of the objects).

We then created lists of words evoked by a particular situation of silence of our choice which we then turned into short poems. Here is one:

It’s childish, I know.
But it feels hotly dignified.
It is a punishing, vindictive, wrathful silence.
But it leaves you cold.

Jennifer took away many pieces of paper with ink and crayon markings on them. What will become of those pieces of paper? On that in our next blog post, in which we will hear more about the creative process as Jennifer and Toby take it to the next stage.

The choral piece will be premiered at the EPIC project launch on Monday 13 May 2024, where it will be performed (as part of a social justice themed program of choral pieces) by the wonderful Bristol University Singers. Please email Charlotte Withers (charlotte.withers@bristol.ac.uk) if you'd like to attend.