I carried out the field work for ‘Homer in the Laboratory’ in 2015, spending 12 weeks in total in an applied microbiology laboratory. Lab work has always fascinated me and my book, Science, Culture and Society: Understanding Science in the 21st Century (Polity 2016), has extensive descriptions and analysis of laboratory work (not the same… Continue reading →

We have a curious relationship to science, and this makes understanding science, specifically understanding its role in society and its relationship to culture, difficult. By ‘we’ I mean all of us and, in particular, three groups I would like to focus on here.   The general public, the ‘lay public’ as we / they are… Continue reading →

I love science, its workings, its practitioners, its methods and results. I have spent much of the last 20 or so years researching science from a broadly sociological / cultural studies perspective and have thoroughly enjoyed doing that. I’ve published a few books and papers based on my research (most recently Erickson 2015), and I… Continue reading →