Johnson County Science Cafe

Making Science Public: Challenges and Opportunities

Speakers: Alex Smith, Senior Leverhulme Research Fellow in Sociology at Warwick University in the UK

Date: July 10, 2012

Time: 6:30 pm

Location: Coaches Bar and Grill, 9089 W. 135th Street, one block west of 135th and Antioch, south side of 135th St.

Alex Smith conducts sociological research on politics, religion and science in the UK and the USA. He will talk about the $2.5 million, Leverhulme Trust-funded research program “Making Science Public: Challenges and Opportunities”, an interdisciplinary, five-year collaboration between the UK Universities of Nottingham, Sheffield and Warwick. One of the program’s Project Leaders, Alex is directing a four-year project on science, religion and the making of public opinion in the UK and US. Alex has visited Kansas extensively over the last few years studying this subject. Alex will discuss the relationship between recent debates over religion and science in both countries. Visit the website, www.nottingham.ac.uk/sociology/research/projects/making-science-public/index.aspx, and find out more about this research.

Alex Smith is a Senior Leverhulme Research Fellow in Sociology at Warwick University in the UK. He is also Adjunct Assistant Professor in Sociology at Kansas University and holds an Honorary Lectureship in the Institute of Science and Society at Nottingham University. A Garrison Keillor Fellow in the Eccles Centre for North American Studies at the British Library in London, Alex is the author of ‘Devolution and the Scottish Conservatives: banal activism, electioneering and the politics of irrelevance’ (2011, Manchester: Manchester University Press). He has a PhD in Social Anthropology from Edinburgh University and edits the ‘New Ethnographies’ book series for Manchester University Press.

For more information: biologycctrack@hotmail.com