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Paper short abstract

Public unease with science has evolved rapidly into the political mainstream. In this paper I develop an analytical framework for understanding the sources of public unease through working at the interface of critical public engagement studies, knowledge politics and cultural sociology.

Paper long abstract

Public unease with science has evolved from a preoccupation of academics, science policy actors and fringe groups into the political mainstream with populist parties increasingly resisting science-based policymaking. Working with two cases where science-based policymaking is experiencing backlash – climate-change measures and vaccination policy – an analytical framework for studying the sources of public unease to controversial science is developed. Three innovations are proposed. (1) A critical and politically reflexive mode of ‘doing’ public engagement is proposed. By engaging publics in critical policy analysis, publics use lay experiential knowledge to challenge and reconfigure a dominant public policy representation of an issue, and where the role of the facilitator is to make issues explicit and political. (2) The concept of the ‘deep story’ – inspired by Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in their Own Land – is developed for understanding the narrative mechanisms through which disillusionment and disaffection with mainstream politics is enacted. From the perspective of the populist right, for example, climate-change policy is viewed as a Trojan horse, from which emerges the quintessential overreach of global government, imposing restrictions on personal freedoms in how people travel, heat their homes, purchase goods and so on, taking away residues of political control, agency and honour from publics. (3) The institutional dynamics underpinning the epistemic role of science as an actor in fostering polarisation and resistance is highlighted, to help explain the (often stubborn) resistance of policymakers to engage seriously with lay experiential knowledge.