Rethinking science communication

Description

The RETHINK EU-funded project aspires to rethink science communication, both its theory and practice, to accommodate the major challenges to the individual and collective process of making sense about science. A guiding principle of RETHINK is that the contextual knowledge of citizens across the EU should play a vital role in shaping future scientific and technological developments and the sharing of this knowledge should be facilitated. The overall objective of the project is to contribute to making the European science communication ecosystem more open, inclusive, reflexive and adaptive.

They aim to improve the quality of interactions between science and society by providing concrete recommendations and training resources for nurturing open and reflexive science-society interfaces. The RETHINK project brings together six partners as well as four linked third parties, across ten European countries, integrating scholarly and practical expertise, experimentation and good practices of new approaches in communicating science. It brings together organisations ranging from academia to science centres, from media to technology assessment and a European Sounding Board that league very different backgrounds and areas of expertise. In this Lookout interview we hear from Tessa Roedema and Dr Frank Kupper, who have been involved with the project over the last three years, and with the Workrooms series that took place as an idea-thon in November 2021.