The Wholesome Show presents: Everything science communication shouldn’t do

Author: Will Grant – Australian National University, Australia

Co-author: Rod Lamberts – ANU

Look at you: you’ve had a long hard day of conferencing. You’ve thought the deep thoughts, networked your network, and powered through your 200 slide presentation in 12 minutes (new PB!). Now it’s time for real conference business. Drinks, gossip, and talking about all the things you just couldn’t discuss in your 11 minute roundtable, interactive, 360 degree, petcha-koochie, un-lecture, workshop, story circle session.

We hear you, PCST.

What you need is a nice Wholesome Evening that dissects everything science communication can’t, won’t and shouldn’t do. An evening that involves dubious beverages, 2 semi-qualified hosts, and a roster of 4 international luminaries of sci comm.

Featuring literally no research and close to zero preparation, The Wholesome Show will irreverently digest PCST 2018. We’ll ask our luminaries the big questions: What’s awesome right now in science communication? What’s dreadful? What should we just leave the hell alone and never speak of again?

What are we proposing?

The Wholesome Show is a podcast and live show hosted by Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant of the Centre for the Public Awareness of Science ANU. In their normal mode they have lighthearted pub chats with interesting people most of us would never normally meet: Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Alan Alda, a number of Nobel prize winners, the heads of major research agencies, and even a right wing journo or two. The Wholesome Show prides itself on asking the dumb questions so their audience doesn’t have to.

What do we need? 

We’ve got the beginnings of a plan: we need a pub, a speaker system, room for 80-150 guests, and beer. We’ll interview about 4 people for 20 minutes each. A Vice-Chancellor? A minister for Science? An All-Black? Or some of the best presenters from the rest of the conference? That’s yet to be decided.

The author has not yet submitted a copy of the full paper.

Presentation type: Perfomance
Theme: Society
Area of interest: Investigating science communication practices