Love the wild text formatting in this book.

Conclusion: OK so not all the chapters are completely finished.

8. Power and Legitimacy: How can we communicate science and technology meaningfully when so much of it is beyond words? Here I make the case for a form of emotionally mature science communication that brings in all the good stuff like love, care, and repair.

7. Meaningful Participation or Meaningless Bullshit?: Participatory forms of engagement like co-production and citizen science can infantilise the communities that they wish to empower. Understanding the underlying emotional conflicts faced by public engagement professionals can help address this.

6. Hype and Techno-Optimism: The desires and fantasies of tech bros get scaled and embedded in technologies, influencing everyone else’s capacity to dream. If we want to drag technology back down to reality, and have mature conversations about it, we need to confront uncertainty and ambiguity.

5. Can We Engage with Conspiracy Theorists?: Maaaaaaaaaybe. But you need to understand the underlying affective dynamics that psychoanalytic researchers have kindly outlined for us. Conspiracy theorists’ feelings of anxiety & alienation are familiar – they just build a bad social critique from them.

4. Vaccine Hesitancy: Who Should the Public Trust?: How can we overcome vaccine hesitancy? Approaching emotions like trust as social practices that are configured morally and discursively and within specific historical and institutional contexts is a good start, I say in this chapter.

3. Is it OK for Scientists to Cry?: Scientists are made up of human beings. They have bodies and these bodies sometimes get stressed out. Especially when they try to communicate about climate change. Or exist in the US. Affective insights can help us understand how to communicate in these contexts.

2. Affect and Emotion in Science Communication: No one seems to know what an emotion is so I’m going to try and cobble together an interdisciplinary perspective that draws from affective neuroscience, affect theory, sociology of emotions, and psychoanalysis. It’s very cobbly.

1. Intro: Sci comm faces numerous challenges – conspiracy theories and misinformation, public mistrust in knowledge institutions, technological hype, and a rise in right-wing anti-intellectualism. Thinking about the emotions involved in these relationships can help us to understand what is going on.

I think we need to go back to the early 2010s and consider what the vibrating matter makes of all this.