Introduction to weeknotes
Its been a while, its been exhausting, and I’m far from rested. However, I am going to try to write a short summary of each week over the next three months to record my progress and the development of my ideas. I’m on my very last module for my MPA - the thesis (in other UK unis we’d call this a dissertation, thesis sounds very grand!). These “weeknotes” will be scrappy, inarticulate and naive. If anyone does stumble on them, please do send a note of encouragement.
Term 3 week 1 - finding a topic and research question
This week is bootcamp week on the MPA. About 2/3s (maybe 3/4s) of the cohort will being doing placements as groups in various organisations. The rest of us are writing theses. These are all roughly themed around policy. I’ve been relieved to find that I am like many whom have little in the way of a strong idea, just an area of interest. And, I have to say, what fascinating areas are being looked at - from the heuristics used in policymaking, to policies on arts. Also philanthropy, citizen engagement and lots on climate.
My interest, since I started the MPA in 2022 (although I’d not formed the words around it then) is the gap between science and policy. I’m particularly thinking climate and biophysical science, and recent AI x-risk wierdness, because these have been areas of work, study and activism for me for decades. A quick skim of research article titles indicates that health is righ up there too. Actually, I spoke to Professor John Boswell a while back and already have a tonne of fantastic pointers on this gap that I now have time to follow up.
My last few assignments have helped me explore these ideas a little. Each assignment was a rush and felt very naive, but I will link them once they’ve been marked. In the autumn term, I looked at the UK AI Safety Summit to try to explore how this followed, and would impact, UK AI safety policy. This term, I looked at parliamentary mentions of various terms (and attempted to perform a topic and frame analysis of the debates the terms were mentioned in). Both “climate change” and “artificial intelligence” are very spiky, suddenly errupting before subsiding. Probably this is not a surprise, but it hints at hype bubbles, which burst. Interstingly, “tobacco” has no such pattern.
In another assignment, I considered how citizen participatory approaches to design could help close the science-policy gap. My framework was a triangle: citizen-science-policy (CSP). However, whilst writing this piece I understood (mostly from what I was reading, I take little credit) how much certain types of knowledge are revered over others, and how damaging this is. The effect of this was less of a shock to my sense of identity as a scientist, but as a “finding of words” to describe the unease I’ve been feeling for a long time (which partly drove me back into education).
This week, I’ve been wrestling with how to define my first research questions (in the knowledge that my literature reading and research will change this). Perhaps I should look at the spikes in apparent parliamentary interest in this topics, and understand what caused them and what effect they actually had on policy (if any)? Or perhaps I should return to the CSP triangle and dig deeper into how citizens can help close the gap? I left day 2 of the 4-day bootcamp yesterday, exhausted and with a feeling that there was something too dry about both directions.
Outside of bootcamp (there’s a fair chunk of “life” happening to me right now, too), I have been escaping into listening that I missed during the last hectic term. Something that I’ve been enjoying on my train rides is the gorgeous 3-parter from Outrage + Optimism “Our Story of Nature”. Actually, I listened to part 1 three times. This episode is like the most blissful nurturing audio hug. Here, again, the scientist in me has been wonderfully, wholesomely challenged to step aside and make way for the whole of me (the me that has finds myself sitting in, or under, a tree experiencing an exquisite joy that no successful experiment ever yielded). Then, yesterday, on leaving bootcamp, I returned to Dougald Hine’s At Work in the Ruins. Chapter 2, addresses how science, and particularly the appeal to unite behind the science or follow the science have closed off public conversation. Two paths forward are described - one is to progress technology to solve our problems but which ultimately leads to a dead end. The other path sheds the fantasy of technological progress, instead building resilience close to the ground, and is ultimately the only route to surviving the polycrisis. Hine’s words and tone (I’m listening to the audiobook) speak so strongly of my own journey over the last few years and once again put words to my unease - that science and technology represent only a thin dimension of the thick and wonderful world we inhabit.
As I arrived at Waterloo station yesterday evening, I wondered if I can build in this sentiment into my thesis. Thus, (opposite platform 11), I arrived, my first attempt at a research question: The science-policy gap - why is rationalism failing us? I’m pretty sure this is a poor research question but I would like to bring the whole human into this research. This whole human includes society and its experience of science and the subjects of science, as well as effect on scientists and policy-makers of the constraints we work under, and much more.
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