Since this blog was last updated, the staff and students at the Centre for Science and Society have been busy sharing their work.
Courtney Addison and her colleagues wrote ‘Persuasive bodies: Testimonies of deep brain stimulation and Parkinson’s on YouTube’, published in Social Science and Medicine. Read it here. “In this paper, we examine amateur YouTube videos featuring people receiving Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. DBS has become a widely implemented treatment, and it is surrounded by high expectations that can create difficulty for clinicians, patients and their families. We examine how DBS, Parkinson’s disease, and DBS recipients themselves, are delineated within these YouTube videos.”
Nayantara Sheoran Appleton has published an article, ‘Get back to life: Contradictions in/of emergency contraceptive advertisements in contemporary India’. in the Economic and Political Weekly. Read it here. “The tensions made visible in the advertising campaign for one particular emergency contraceptive—i-pill—are analysed by looking at three key elements: the photographic image, the tag line, and the health-related information text. It is posited that messages in contraceptive pharmaceutical advertisements are contradictory in their avowed message and intended aim.”.
James Beattie and his colleagues have published a book, China in Australasia: Cultural Diplomacy and Chinese Arts since the Cold War. “Drawing on expertise in art history, exhibition studies and cultural studies as well as politics and international relations, China in Australasia presents significant new perspectives on the role of art in the cultural diplomacy of the People’s Republic of China.”
James has another publication as Editor: International Review of Environmental History, Volume 5, Issue 1. “This first issue of 2019 speaks to the many exciting dimensions of environmental history. Represented here is environmental history’s great breadth, in terms of geographical scope (Brazil, the Atlantic world, Europe, global, Africa and New Zealand); topics (animal studies, biography, climatological analysis, energy and waste); and temporal span (from the early modern to the contemporary period).”
Congratulations to Science in Society/History PhD student, Anton Sveding, on his latest publication in James’ edited volume. ‘Providing guideline principles: Botany and Ecology within the state forest service of New Zealand during the 1920s’ in the International Review of Environmental History: Check Anton’s work out here. “This article examines the application of the sciences of botany and ecology by New Zealand’s State Forest Service (SFS) during the first half of the 1920s.”

Rebecca Priestley had an essay published in the book Headlands: New Stories of Anxiety. This chapter was also excerpted in the Listener here as as ‘Lucky to be here: Dr Rebecca Priestley on the harsh reality of Antarctica’
Rebecca also has a new book due out in September by the Victoria University Press, Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica.
Rhian Salmon with Heidi Roop wrote ‘Bridging the gap between science communication practice and theory: Reflecting on a decade of practitioner experience using polar outreach case studies to develop a new framework for public engagement design’. Read it here in CambridgeCore. “We propose…a framework for planning and design of public engagement that provides an opportunity to become more transparent and explicit about the real goals of an activity and what “success” looks like. This is critical to effectively evaluate, learn from our experiences, share them with peers, and ultimately deliver more thoughtfully designed, effective engagement.”