Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
Queering science communication should give LGBTIQA+ people power and the chance to play. This conclusion summarizes the various contributions to this book and draws out some unresolved issues that deserve attention in future research and practical science communication endeavours.
Queering science communication must entail something more than recognizing LGBTIQA+ people are present in our discipline. The field must review underlying structures and values in our culture and together work out how to improve. Science communicators must expand the way we understand and discuss the diversity of humanity and then embrace these ways of being within our research and applied practices.
Citizen and community science has been recognized as an impactful development in science communication and has become an important avenue for potential lifelong STEM engagement. This chapter focuses on LGBTIQA+ people’s experiences participating in citizen science projects in the US with recommendations for improving their experiences and broadening participation. The chapter highlights how few community and citizen science projects have focused on queer topics, issues, or participants in the US and elsewhere.
Despite this notable effort to meaningfully support inclusion among some axes of identity, a remaining challenge is creating science communication communities that are radically and intentionally inclusive of queerness.
This chapter seeks to present how this came to be and provide recommendations for how we might build science communication communities that are inclusive of intersectional queer identities moving forward. It discusses practical strategies for building inclusive networks and events, emphasizing the need to continue adapting to diverse people and needs.
Queer people face specific issues in the world of science and have unique contributions to make to science communication, so bringing ‘queer’ and ‘science communication’ together in dedicated events, products, and networks is an important part of queer protest, liberation, and visibility. Yet an examination of the science communication research literature reveals that little has been published on the intersection between queerness and science communication over the past thirty years or more.
This introduction provides the foundations of a book on queering science communication. It covers the structure of the book and describes how contributors approached queering science communication in different domains.
In countries where LGBTQIA+ people still experience discrimination, what role can queering both science and science communication play in promoting equity and societal change?
In the Philippines, the queer and colonized remain subjugated and dispossessed by social, economic, and cultural conditions. This chapter discusses queer people’s experiences working in diverse science communication domains to examine how queering those spaces contributes to broader societal liberation.
The chapter explores what queering science communication means in countries where homophobia, unequal rights for LGBTQIA+ individuals, and stereotyping queer representations remain rampant.
LGBTIQA+ people have unique contributions to make and issues to meet through science communication. So, bringing ‘queer’ and ‘science communication’ together is an important step for queer protest, liberation, and visibility. This collection examines the place of queer people within science communication and asks what it means for the field to ‘queer’ science communication practice, theory and research agendas.
Queering science communication entails attending to our field’s engagement with queer people. It also entails attending to science communication’s engagement with queer needs, experiences, perspectives, knowledge, skills, expertise, and more. It means thinking about how queer people, queer concerns, and queerness itself are represented in our public science communication products, from museum exhibits to tweets to movies.
Written by leading names in the field, this book offers concrete examples for academics, students, and practitioners who strive to foster radical inclusivity and equity in science communication.
Pedagogy in science communication can be wide ranging, spanning formal education, informal education, everyday science learning, and professional development contexts. This chapter considers how we might apply the concept of queer pedagogy to these multiple processes and settings. The chapter explores what queer theory could bring to science communication when taught as a subject in tertiary education and outside of that context. It considers the possibilities of teaching science communication queerly.
500 Queer Scientists is a visibility campaign launched in 2018 in San Francisco, inspired by a study showing 40% of LGBTQIA+ scientists were not out to their colleagues.
This spotlight discusses an annual 500 Queer Scientists event held during the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in Australia to celebrate queer scientists and their research. The spotlight discusses the rarity of science-related activities within queer festivals and how this event has enabled some LGBTIQA+ people to finally find their place within Mardi Gras.
This spotlight reflects on Endosymbiotic Love Calendar 2021, an art-meets-science project supported by Arts Council England and the Microbiological Society and completed in 2020. The project combined scientific experimentation, art-making, post-human ecology, and queer approaches through the format of a familiar domestic object: a wall calendar for 2021.
The project reframed symbiotic microorganisms as radically queer beings. They literally brought this queer-science-art discourse into people’s kitchens in the form of a calendar. The objective was to explore identity, performativity, and social justice through a queer ecology that reimagined aesthetically these symbiotic relationships.
Medical research largely fails to consider or even acknowledge the existence of transgender and intersex people. This results in a lower likelihood of people, firstly, receiving appropriate medical care as the information to provide that care may not exist and, secondly, accessing medical care because they fear harm resulting from inappropriate medical treatments.
This spotlight reviews how poorly recent medical research papers concerning gender have engaged with the realities, experiences, and needs of trans, intersex, and gender diverse people. The spotlight highlights the importance of using trans, intersex, and non-binary people’s expertise to improve this.
