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A few small issues about public engagement on nanotechnology
Created by assoceditor on 29/11/2011 10:42:31

Dr Craig Cormick has this week authored a guest blog on 2020 Science that highlights three issues relating to engagement with the public on nanotechnology.


Dr Craig Cormick, Manager of Public Awareness and Community Engagement within the National Enabling Technologies Strategy in the Australian Department of Innovation, has this week authored a guest blog on 2020 Science.  The blog focuses on engagement with the public regarding nanotechnology highlighting that, although there has been a significant growth in public engagement activities relating to nanotechnology over the past decade,

'The majority of the public are still rather unengaged on nanotechnology, and tend to think it’s all rather good (not including food). Media coverage is predominantly positive and concern-stories don’t get much traction. And yet there is a lot of funding going into public engagement of nanotechnology – so engagement has to happen.'

Within the article, Cormick highlights and discusses three issues with public engagement on nanotechnology:
  1. Most engagement activities favour the engaged, and there are not enough methodologies to engage with the broader unengaged people in our communities;
  2. There exists a need to find engagements that replicate real world experiences as much as possible for the broad unengaged publics, both to allow research into real world experiences, and to provide modelling that people might be able to transfer to their homes and work places etc.;
  3. While there is an expectation that people who take part in engagement activities will take their new knowledge or attitudes and go forth and multiply it within the broader community, there is very little data to demonstrate whether this actually happens or not.
Cormick concludes that:

'[W]hile it is useful to pool all the research data being obtained and make meta-analysis of the findings, as happens regularly, it might be more helpful at the moment to look for gaps in the data and then find ways to fill them. And that, I suggest, is the next major challenge not just for those undertaking public engagement activities, but for anyone seeking an effective way to come to good understandings of how the broad public actually relate to the risks and benefits of new technologies.'

Click here to read the blog in full. 

Source: 2020 Science

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