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Short abstract:

A survey within the French neuroscience community, supplemented by interviews, aims to explore researchers' attitudes towards public engagement and emerging themes like gender and climate change. It will also consider political and organizational affiliations of researchers.

Long abstract:

Public interest in neuroscience is growing and is accompanied by an increase in outreach activities. Both to respond to public interest and to combat misinformation about the brain and its capabilities, the involvement of researchers in scientific mediation is crucial.

It inevitably generates expectations from the public with regard to science popularization initiatives. But how do researchers perceive them? What impact does this have on their willingness to engage in communication with the public, and on the content of their messages? To what extent can this perception of public expectations be a factor in researchers' reluctance or motivation to engage in popularization?

The present work, based on a questionnaire survey circulated within the French neuroscience community at the beginning of 2024, supplemented by interviews, aims to understand the environment of existing popularization practices in this discipline and its recent evolutions.It aims to reassess the motivations and reluctances of researchers to engage in mediation activities in order to provide a finer segmentation, both from the point of view of relationships with audiences (patients, schoolchildren, journalists...), and the formats proposed (personal writings or responses to interviews, social networks...).

The study will look again at the transformation of practices linked to Covid-19, but above all to the new themes tackled by researchers (gender, global warming) when addressing audiences. It will also highlight the political, associative or trade union commitments that structure, or not, their engagement with the general public.