Science and Culture

This article addresses the recent attempts to integrate evolutionary history in the US national narrative. Focusing on the cultural, legal, and scientific controversy over Kennewick Man, the ancient human remains discovered in Washington state in 1996, the article explores the narrative politics of American national belonging. Through a popular historical novel on Kennewick Man's life, the article further theorizes nostalgia as a narrative tool in imagining the evolutionary origins of the nation. The article argues that nostalgia produces a temporal dynamic that bridges the gap between national history and global prehistory, and that this dynamic is reinforced through cultural ideas of genetic knowledge. At the same time, prehistoric nostalgia renders problematic ideas of ethnic difference largely invisible.

The study was geared by the growing need for teaching methods/strategies that afford the African child the strength to meaningfully learn science in the digital world, not as foreign and/or abstract concepts but as a unit of knowledge that exists around him, within his culture and which applies to his everyday life. The study was in two phases with a focus on two basic factors-perceived difficult concepts in chemistry and teaching strategies employed. The first phase comprises nine public and 12 private senior secondary schools in Nigeria and Ghana, randomly selected. About 51% of the respondents were females while about 49% were males. The second phase comprises two groups; the control group which had 44 students (30 females and 14males) was taught using the lecture method while the experimental group which had 32 students (12 females and 19 males) was taught using CTCA. Data gathered on a survey of difficult concepts in the new chemistry curriculum was subjected to mean rank analysis, the result obtained shows, benzene and its compounds (mean difficulty score=2.18) was perceived as the most difficult concept in senior school chemistry, followed by nuclear chemistry and the least was periodic table (mean= 1.56). One-way ancova statistic applied on the pre-test and post-test scores of the two groups shows a statistically significant difference in the achievement in favour of the experimental group (mean score for experimental = 20.23; control=17.82; [F (1,72) = 49.97; p< .05]. Implications for the study were highlighted.

What is mathematics? Is it a property of the world we live in? Does is exist independently of the reality we directly experience? Is it merely a construct of our mind? Philosophers have been asking such questions since Pythagoras. Contemporary neurosciences force us to rethink these issues. The old philosophical debate revives in a new context.

Regular Courses: Lectures and Seminars (4 semester courses):

1. History of Science and Technology (Ancient Civilizations and Classical Antiquity)
2. History of Science and Technology II (Middle Ages and Early Modern Times)
3. History of Science and Technology III (Baroque and Enlightenment, 17th and 18th Century)
4. History of Science and Technology IV (19th and 20th Centuries)

1. History of Physics and Chemistry I (Ancient Civilizations and Classical Antiquity)
2. History of Physics and Chemistry II (Middle Ages and Renaissance)
3. History of Physics and Chemistry III (Baroque, Enlightenment and 19th Century)
4. History of Physics and Chemistry IV (20th Century)

Special Courses: Lectures and Seminars (one semester):

- Highlights in History of Physics and Chemistry from Antiquity to 20th Century
- From the early stages of astronomy to modern astrophysics
- Cultural History of the Middle Ages - Science, Technology and Scientific Instruments
- Milestones: 100 Years Research in Hamburg Observatory in Bergedorf
- Cultural History of Classical Antiquity - City layout, theatre, libraries, technology
- European Enlightenment - Literature, Philosophy, Economy, Science and Technology
- Milestones of the History of Mathematics, Physics and Astronomy
- History of computer science and computers
- University Collections - Presentation in exhibitions and museums
- Colours in culture and science
- Docking - Hamburg, a Hanseatic City and its cultures 1848-1933
- From Alchemy to Lavoisier - The Development of Chemistry in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time
- The Formation of Modern Chemistry - The development of chemical science in 18th and 19th century
- History of Science and Technology in Museums
- Innovation by transfer of knowledge in the Early Modern Era
- WW I - the scientific and technological aspects
- Relicts, traces and images - Material culture and images as sources
- Analysis and replication of historical physical experiments
- Analysis of alchemistic and metallurgic literature of Early Modern Time
- From the historical question to the publication - working techniques and methodology in the historical sciences using examples from the history of chemistry
- Textiles and textile techniques from prehistoric time to the
21st century
- Seminar on Practical Chemistry in Ancient Civilizations
- History of science in the teaching in higher education ("Gymnasium", high school)
- Technology complexes and complex techniques from the beginnings to the 21st century

During the 1970s, widespread scientific interest in the risks of climate change prompted John A. Eddy (1931–2009), an astrophysicist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO, to investigate whether sunspots could be used to predict future climate changes.

Methodologically, Eddy’s investigations were uniquely
historical in nature. By interrogating old manuscripts of
solar observations since the early seventeenth century, he identified what appeared to be a correlation between the so-called Maunder Minimum – a virtual cessation of
sunspots between 1645 and 1715 – and severely cold
temperatures during the Little Ice Age. While he could not identify the physical mechanisms that governed solar-climate relationships, this historical episode fostered his curiosity.

Fortuitously, Eddy’s solar-climate research
coincided with efforts to use satellites to monitor and
record variations in solar energy output, which in context
constituted a significant development in managing
environmental and technological risk. But using the Maunder Minimum to advance the frontiers of knowledge about solar-terrestrial relationships was not
Eddy’s only – or even primary – motivation. In the mid-
1840s, German astronomer Heinrich Schwabe (1789–1875) discovered what appeared to be a decadal sunspot cycle, the existence of which inspired generations of astrophysicists to more precisely estimate its length as well as determine its underlying causes. Eddy, however, came to believe that the astronomical community failed to consider the implications of subsequent evidence suggesting that
Schwabe's solar cycle was not an enduring characteristic of the sun. Instead, he reasoned that evidence offered by nineteenth-century European astronomers Gustav Sporer and Edward Maunder in the 1880s and 1890s had been entirely overlooked. But rather than arguing that their evidence was overlooked in error, Eddy identified what he cast as a conspiracy of wilful ignorance on the part of a staid and conservative astronomical community. By utilizing Eddy’s private hand-written notes as they appeared in undergraduate lectures, public speeches and academic talks, as well as his appreciation for the seminal views of sociologist of science Thomas Kuhn, I show that Eddy sought to rectify this injustice by proposing a contrasting vision of science as an interdisciplinary, collaborative and
creative process of exploring the ignored areas between
scientific disciplines.

In April 2014, the largest aerospace museum in Asia will open in Jeju Island in Korea. The visitor count of the Naro Space Center Space Science Museum operated by Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) was over a million in January 2014. The general public in South Korea is growing more interested in space. To increase public interest about space at this time, the role and meaning of the Science Museum within the Korean space culture should be studied.
The public has been an important part of Korean space development since 2005. With two important projects, the first Korean astronaut project and the Korean Space Launch Vehicle-1, the Korean government and KARI actively performed public promotion, and the public responded to them enthusiastically and space culture started to appear in Korea. The situation within which science and space museums exists is the base of this movement. There are five national science museums, one space museum operated by KARI, three private aerospace museum and activity centers in Korea. These museums have developed with growing interest in space among the Korea population. In this paper, the specific roles and effects of these museums in raising public awareness of space and space culture in Korea will be analyzed, and the future roles and meanings will be proposed.
The research was performed by archive analysis, interviews of curators of science museums, and surveys. Although the science museums have not played significant role in space culture, they are places that people met science and technology. They began to change their roles from passive place providers to active promoters of space culture as core centers of public education. The museums have developed themselves as the space culture in Korea has expanded and the new aerospace museum in Jeju Island will be a new trigger to make museums more important within space culture.

This Ph.D. dissertation has as its object of study the Theory of Literature and the Film Theory. The main objective is to investigate common sense built on these theories and demystify certain precepts that are reaffirmed in contemporary times, especially around the discourse about the theories’ crisis. Three major theoretical blocks are analyzed: Russian Formalism and Soviet Montage Theories; Roland Barthes and the French magazine Cahiers du Cinema; feminist theories, both of film and of literature. The first block is about the struggle between the theoretical discourses that wants itself as scientific and those other discourses that are intended more culturalist. Then, I discuss the figure of the author and its complementary opposite, the reader, and the clash between these two places becomes more strained in France during the postwar period. In the third block, the problem regarding the canon of literary history and film history is questioned under the bias of a feminist theory that puts at stake the representation and the ideologies. Finally, I also analyzed ideological problems of theories and their invented tradition, to thereafter questioning the contemporary discourses on the alleged crisis. In a sense, the theory did not end - even with all the discourse about the "end" of the theory or about the post-theoretical moment - but turned into something different and, as a ghost, back to revise.

Call for Papers: Science Area of PopCAANZ

Papers, panels, and round tables are now invited for the Science Area of the Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand (PopCAANZ) 7th Annual Conference being held at Sydney University Village in Sydney, Australia from 29 June - 1 July, 2016.

Proposals must include a 150 word abstract and 100 word bio, and can address any aspect of the complex interrelationship of science, culture and society, including (but not limited to):

• Representations of science/scientists in television, film, art, print, and other media
• Use of science in popular culture
• The cultural influence of science
• Influences of culture on science and scientists
• The social impact of science/social impacts on science
• Science fiction
• Internet culture and science
• Science-related cultural artefacts
• Scientists as celebrities/celebrity advocates of science
• Science communication, popularisation and education
• Non-Western cultures and Science
• Translations of science into the public domain
• Molecular gastronomy and other food science
• Intersections of science and the humanities
• Use of science in advertising and marketing
• The artistic dimensions of science/science as art
• Public understandings of science
• Science and the paranormal/pseudoscience
• Public and popular dimensions of scientific debates
• History and philosophy of science
• Moments of conflict between scientific discoveries/knowledge/work and cultural beliefs

The deadline for proposals is 1 March 2016

Submissions and inquiries can be sent to Steven Gil:
science@popcaanz.com

PopCAANZ will publish double-blind peer reviewed Conference Proceedings online following the conference, and presenters will be invited to submit suitable articles to our new journal, The Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture (Penn State University Press) from June 2016. Papers from the Science Area will also be eligible for consideration for inclusion in the upcoming, Journal of Science and Popular Culture (Intellect).

Marco referencial El surgimiento de la Ciencia Moderna estuvo condicionado por el de un nuevo modo de producción: el capitalismo. El progresivo deterioro del sistema feudal hizo posible la constitución de renovadas relaciones en la producción y en los conocimientos. Para este estatus innovado resultaron necesarios nuevos saberes y hasta una reforma religiosa, capaces de dar cuenta de las complejas alternativas de un mundo &quot;nuevo&quot;. Tal &quot;novedad&quot; fue la que permitió la conceptualización de situaciones y de problemas no planteados hasta el momento y que influyeron decisivamente en el nacimiento de la citada Ciencia Moderna. Es entonces cuando se pretende brindar nuevas explicaciones a problemas inéditos, no abordados aún, y una manera de ver el mundo es reemplazada por otra. Así, el cambio en la manera de percibir y de pensar al mundo pone en crisis muchas de las concepciones ya consolidadas y promueve el advenimiento de otros modos posibles, en virtud de que la inm...

This paper focuses on voluminous published works of Vincenc Prasek (1843 – 1912), an important Moravian-Silesian specialist in pedagogy, a linguist, a historian and also an organiser of research works. This contemporary way of publishing the expert works was called " research journalism " , a term created by former researchers. This study follows the bibliographic list of Prasek´s work that is clearly and broadly processed into a form of tables and graphs. First of all, Prasek´s journalistic works are typologically divided, which is then followed by typical examples analysing Prasek´s journalism. The analysis of Prasek´s contributions to newspapers and magazines covers all his journalistic period from 1861 to 1912.
Předložená studie vznikla za finanční podpory Ministerstva kultury v rámci institucionálního financování na dlouhodobý koncepční rozvoj výzkumné organizace Slezské zemské muzeum, interní grantový projekt SZM č. 3IGS1208 Slezsko – člověk a " jeho " krajina.

That science communication applies to both a field of practices and a field of research on those practices seems obvious enough. The very title of the 2020 book, Communicating science. A global perspective-part of an attempt to provide an overview of the way modern science communication has developed over the past 40 or so years, in 39 different countries or regions, reinforced by instructions to the prospective authors-framed the project around 'science communication', naturalizing it, encouraging its homogenization and reinforcing it through the peer-review and editing processes (It is worth noting that such a survey was conducted and published on the occasion of the 1994 PCST Conference in Montreal. See Schiele (When science becomes culture, University of Ottawa Press, Ottawa, 1994). But the draft chapters showed that 'science communication' is not a universal term. It has many definitions, and from the second half of the twentieth century researchers and practitioners have described it variously as an objective, a goal, a process, a result and an outcome. In this chapter, we have sought to list every term used by the authors and evaluate their degree of penetration of the field, understood as the frequency of their occurrence and as the number of authors using them. Close examination showed that 16 different words or phrases were used in the book for what we called 'science communication'. Some were confined to a single country, others were applied across a number of countries. Only five authors defined the terms they used, but most did not, probably considering that their meaning was self-evident. This chapter lists and categorizes those terms, grouping them into three categories : ➀ most mentioned, ➁ moderately mentioned and ➂ least mentioned. Authors tended to use the terminology
interchangeably, even though most terms are context specific and tributary to
national political, social and cultural trends.

Paperback edition: June 2017

"Since the early 1990s, evolutionary psychology has produced widely popular visions of modern men and women as driven by their prehistoric genes. In Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction in Evolutionary Narratives, Venla Oikkonen explores the rhetorical appeal of evolutionary psychology by viewing it as part of the Darwinian narrative tradition.

Refusing to start from the position of dismissing evolutionary psychology as simply reactionary or scientifically invalid, the book examines evolutionary psychologists’ investments in such contested concepts as teleology and variation. The book traces the emergence of evolutionary psychological narratives of gender, sexuality and reproduction, encompassing:

- Charles Darwin’s understanding of transformation and sexual difference
- Edward O. Wilson’s evolutionary mythology and the evolution-creationism controversy
- Richard Dawkins’ molecular agency and new imaging technologies
- the connections between adultery, infertility and homosexuality in adaptationist thought.

Through popular, literary and scientific texts, the book identifies both the imaginative potential and the structural weaknesses in evolutionary narratives, opening them up for feminist and queer revision. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the humanities and social sciences, particularly in gender studies, cultural studies, literature, sexualities, and science and technology studies."

Resumo Neste trabalho discutimos como temas e concepções sobre a ciência e a tecnologia têm surgido e se expressado no carnaval brasileiro ao longo do tempo, com especial atenção para os desfiles das grandes escolas de samba no Rio de Janeiro e para a experiência mais recente de uma troça carnavalesca em Pernambuco. Uma manifestação cultural como o carnaval, que envolve uma parcela significativa da população a cada ano, especialmente de jovens, oferece uma oportunidade para um diálogo entre ciência e arte, e pode ser pensada e utilizada como uma atividade de popularização da ciência e tecnologia. Introdução Na medida em que a ciência e a tecnologia (C&T) se tornaram cada vez mais parte da vida cotidiana, elas penetraram no universo de artistas e foliões, em particular, dos compositores, carnavalescos e participantes do carnaval, a festa popular mais ampla e tradicional do Brasil, que atinge uma parcela significativa de sua população a cada ano. Analisamos, neste trabalho, como temas de C&T têm surgido no carnaval brasileiro, desde o século XIX, com especial atenção para os desfiles das grandes escolas de samba no Rio de Janeiro e para as atividades de uma troça carnavalesca em Pernambuco.

Several nineteenth century scholars have remarked upon the movement from “catastrophism to gradualism” in the transition from Romantic to Victorian culture. They see the shift to gradualism in literature (and society) as the result of the incursion of science and its ideas into cultural realms  (e.g., Cosslett, Culler). While recent writings in the discourse of science and literature studies have complicated this one-way traffic by acknowledging a dialectical flow between cultural realms, such readings are nevertheless situated with reference to C.P. Snow’s “two cultures” paradigm. In referring literature to scientific discourse and vice versa, science and literature studies may capture a mutual conditioning of respective cultural spheres, but nevertheless continues to discount a reading of the determinations of both spheres by other important social and political factors.

In order to account for a shift from catastrophism to gradualism, I argue that science and literature must be referred to underlying discursive pressures mediating between cultural spheres. Rather than considering literature as appropriating the idioms of science, and/or vice versa, the social and political significations of competing epistemologies and philosophical positions within and across cultural spheres should be traced to account for changes within cultural representation.

Since the 2003 call by the Institute of Medicine to educate undergraduates in public health, various models have emerged for incorporating public health into the liberal arts and sciences. One model is a professionalized public health major that uses core public health competencies to prepare a workforce of health professionals. A second model offers a broad-based public health major rooted in liberal arts principles, resisting the utilitarian trend toward human capital formation. A third model resists even the label of " public health, " preferring instead to introduce undergraduates to many ways of analyzing human health and healing. The multidisciplinary Culture, Health, and Science Program, based on six key commitments for preparing liberal arts students to analyze health and respond to global health challenges, is offered as an alternative to the public health major.

Recent ‘new materialist’ readings of evolution by such feminists as Elizabeth Grosz, Claire Colebrook, Luciana Parisi, Susan Oyama and Myra Hird have provided important insights on the openness of evolutionary processes and the emergence of difference by focusing on evolution as a temporal dynamic. Building on Darwin's observations on geographical variation, this article highlights the importance of viewing evolution as not only temporal but also spatial. For this purpose, the article turns to population genetics and its practice of mapping the early human diaspora. The article identifies a spatiotemporal dynamic of evolutionary emergence that posits gender, sexuality and race as ontologically mutually constitutive, as well as shows that such ontology is inseparable from the techniques and technologies that study it. The article argues that this mutual embeddedness of ontology and epistemology provides a site where both the limits and potential of evolutionary emergence may be examined and negotiated.

This article contributes to discussions of methodology in gender studies by examining narrative analysis as a feminist method. Using direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry services as a case study, the author discusses the potential of narrative analysis in interrogating complex cultural phenomena. The analysis focuses on the commercial website of the UK-based genetics company Oxford Ancestors, which the author situates at the intersection of the cultural narratives of commercialization, scientific advance and personal quest. By interrogating the mutual embeddedness of these narratives, the author demonstrates how narrative analysis moves across structure and context capturing the processes through which facts about gender come into being. The author suggests that this focus on the tension between the abstract and the specific in cultural phenomena is what makes narrative analysis a particularly effective tool for feminist cultural analysis.

Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) inaugurated a kinship relation between the traditionally distinct categories of human and animal, engendering new possibilities for cross-species empathy while also provoking anxiety about the bestial potential within the human. Vivisection, a technology of evolutionary biology, inspired debate regarding the limits of human connection with other species. Vivisection exists at the nexus of opposing positions within evolutionary theory: it is predicated at once on physiological sameness and moral/emotional difference between humans and animals. H.G. Wells’s novella The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) takes a prominent place in these dialogues. This essay reads the novel not only as a literary text with philosophical significance but as an intervention into specific late-Victorian scientific and activist debates surrounding research methods and the theories that rationalize them. In Wells’s text the pain of the vivisected animal discomfits not through conscious connection with another being’s unique suffering, but rather through horrified recognition of the self in the Other, cognizance of a shared capacity for pain that threatens rationality and, carried to the final extreme of death, extinguishes selfhood. By locating empathy in instinctive physiological reflex rather than reason, the novel undermines humanity’s claim to moral superiority over animals.

This book explores how human population genetics has emerged as a means of imagining and enacting belonging in contemporary society. Venla Oikkonen approaches population genetics as an evolving set of technological, material, narrative and affective practices, arguing that these practices are engaged in multiple forms of belonging that are often mutually contradictory. Considering scientific, popular and fictional texts, with several carefully selected case studies spanning three decades, the author traces shifts in the affective, material and gendered preconditions of population genetic visions of belonging. Topics encompass the debate about Mitochondrial Eve, ancient human DNA, temporality and nostalgia, commercial genetic ancestry tests, and tensions between continental and national genetic inheritance. The book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of science and technology studies, cultural studies, sociology, and gender studies.

Affect and emotions not only connect the mind and the body, they also connect us to human and nonhuman others. Affects and emotions are ambivalent: they may both challenge and strengthen dominant social orders. This panel seeks, firstly, to understand the complex ways in which emotion and affect shape the production, circulation, routinization and cultural reception of science. Secondly, the panel charts the role of science and science studies in the emerging political landscapes of " post-truth " reality in which emotions often override factual evidence. The deployment and circulation of affect and emotions within and between sites of technoscience poses an urgent challenge for STS. To make sense of this challenge, we seek to connect empirical analyses of emotions at specific sites of technoscience to theorized accounts of the affective dynamics of technoscientific society. We hope to chart elusive and elucidatory connections between sites where affect and emotion emerge as powers that shape our social worlds. The panel is open to papers that address any empirical site or historical moment. We welcome a range of theoretical approaches that address affect/emotion, for example, as flows, intensities, pulsations, embodied sensations, global networks, culturally circulated objects, socially negotiated structures, or cultural frameworks that shape our actions. Papers may address questions such as: How is affect or emotion evoked, appropriated and embraced at a particular site of science and technology? What kinds of constellations of actors and relations these affective dynamics produce? How are different sites of affect and science connected?

This weekend's main feature on the cover of New Scientist magazine said 'What animals are really thinking. Why human-like intelligence is far more common than we thought.' This is an expression of sameness between humankind and animalkind. 'The Leader' on p.5 goes further, "Clearly, humans aren't alone in possessing a flexible, problem-solving sort of brain-or indeed attributes that build on that, such as culture (see page 15)" More sameness. Not just in intelligence but culture too. On the way to p.15 however p.12 says "Humans have triggered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Aliens could do the same." Aliens could do the same, but not animals. If you accept that geology is nature's deepest aggregate it is worth reflecting on what is being asserted here by geology, that a single species' impact on the planet is so great that it has triggered a geological epoch. This is the most profound difference, coming from geology, not biology it is worth noting. On p.15 Andrew Whiten being quizzed by Michael Le Page says "…culture is everywhere" not just among apes, whales and chimpanzees, but insects as well. More sameness. Here is the issue, and it should be the most pressing scientific questions in the world, and of our time right now, but they are not even being asked despite their urgency. Why is there no settled theory of culture from the evolutionary perspective? Climate change is both: (a) a consequence of human-level intelligence in action, and (b) culture grinding on nature. To equivocate humankind with animalkind is to diminish the difference between culture and nature, and the current pressure that culture is putting on nature. While this remains the case, there is a climate change dilution in fuller awareness of what is going on right now, and into the future. If humankind and animalkind are so the same in terms of intelligence, mind, and culture and culture is an evolutionary process then all things that humans do are natural. That is a vulgar read on the world out there, and even more unforgiving that it comes from science.

In many ways Dutch physicists conform to the picture that Paul Forman has given us of German physicists during the early years of the Weimar republic. Forman attributes their rejection of causality to a hostile intellectual climate and a resulting eagerness to incorporate the lebensphilosophische notions and values of the German cultural elites in their physics. Critics have contested his thesis by pointing to specific problems within atomic physics as internal reasons for a rejection of causality. A comparison of the Dutch and the German cases, however, tends to support Formans view that these repudiations cannot
fully be explained in this manner: atomic physics played no visible role in the Dutch questioning of causahty, whereas expressions of Lebensphilosophie abound. On the other hand, as in the case of some German physicists, philosophical concerns among Dutch
physicists, including the issue of causality, clearly antedate the interwar period. Expressions of such doubts are best understood as belonging to a general concern among Dutch intellectuals in the early twentieth century with the role of the 'living' and the 'spiritual' in an increasingly naturalistic and materialist world. The war did little more than magnify these concerns. Therefore, the views of these physicists are better seen as an integral part of a cultural movement than as a 'capitulation' to a suddenly hostile environment.

This article examines a narrative dilemma that popular texts on evolution face. On the one hand, popular science tends to privilege linear and culturally familiar narrative structures, as previous studies of popularization have often emphasized. On the other hand, however, the Darwinian idea of natural selection resists linear narration, as narrative theorist H. Porter Abbott has argued. This resistance arises from the fact that evolution by natural selection lacks proper narrative entities and narrative events and that it relies on two parallel narrative levels, the levels of species and organism. This paper explores how two popular science books on evolution negotiate this narrative dilemma by introducing a third narrative level. Both texts appropriate characteristics from the narrative levels of species and organism and project them on molecular and minute scales by portraying evolution as a micro-narrative that takes place in chromosomes, genes, cells and microscopic details of human organs. While this textual strategy produces a coherent and compelling narrative that for the most part succeeds in masking the structural gap between the narrative levels of species and organism, it also risks naturalizing cultural imagery. In particular, this micro-narrative tends to represent popular gender ideologies as biological truths embedded in molecular processes within our bodies.

The article examines the rhetorical strategies through which popular science books written by scientists participate in epistemic controversies. The analysis focuses on two books, Niles Eldredge’s Why We Do It and Nancy Etcoff’s Survival of the Prettiest, which address the debate about the evolution of human nature and sexuality. Although the books differ radically in their arguments, they appropriate similar textual strategies in order to negotiate epistemic authority. Both books engage in ‘boundary work’ by appropriating dichotomies such as science versus politics, true versus false Darwinism, and linguistic clarity versus inaccessibility. The article argues that it is this potential for large-scale boundary work that renders popular science books appealing rhetorical tools for those wishing to participate in cultural debates about science.

This research study was conducted in Trinidad and Tobago to investigate students' responses to a summative assessment of a cross-cultural unit of work. The unit was designed to help students learn Western science by building bridges between their traditional practices and beliefs on selected health-related matters and conventional science concepts. Students' responses to a summative test were analysed qualitatively by a process of coding and categorising. The results indicated, firstly, that students did not necessarily show that they had learned conventional science when personalised tasks were associated with contextualised stimuli. Secondly, students' responses provided evidence of parallel collateral learning. These findings were deliberately explored during a second research cycle. The initial findings were corroborated. In addition, examples of dependent and secured collateral learning emerged. There are implications for assessment policy and for further research to develop a science of science within the Caribbean.