New VA report: Record high confidence in Swedish universities

Concepts like “post truth” and “alternative facts” are being increasingly used, mainly in American politics, but also in debate internationally. Does this indicate a crisis of confidence in research? Not in Sweden anyway. A new VA report shows that Swedes’ confidence in universities is greater than ever.

VA leading campaign for more evidence-based election debate

How do you know that? (#Hurvetdudet) is a Swedish initiative led by VA promoting more evidence-based election campaigning in the run up to the Swedish general election in September 2018. The campaign is urging political candidates to highlight research findings and science in political debates and to make a clear distinction between perceptions and facts. About 80 Swedish organisations are supporting the campaign.

Forthcoming activities

VA is organising two sessions at this year’s EuroScience Open Forum in Toulouse, 9-14 July.  Explore the secrets of a number of successful Nordic science communication initiatives in a panel discussion on “NextGen SciComm - digital tales from the Nordics” and have your say in an interactive roundtable session on “Has digital media changed how people feel about science?”, involving representatives from 10 European science communication organisations. We are also participating in a variety of other sessions on RRI, open science, genome editing, trust in science, and science communication. Read more

Pupils and members of the public across Sweden are being invited to participate in a mass experiment combining ladybird monitoring and artificial intelligence, to be run as part of the 2018 Researchers’ Night activities in Sweden. Read more

VA is involved in an international project to discover what happened to the cannons of the world-renowned Swedish warship, Vasa, which sank on its maiden voyage in 1628. A global citizen science campaign will engage members of the public in the search too. Read more

VA’s latest activities

VA has been busy participating in a number of international conferences over the last few months:

Two VA colleagues travelled to New Zealand to present aspects of VA’s work in citizen science, scientific literacy and public engagement at the 15th global PCST science communication conference in April. Read more

VA ran a workshop on how to design engaging transdisciplinary public engagement activities at Eusea’s European Science Engagement Conference in May in Madrid. Read more

The international ECSA Citizen Science Conference held in June in Geneva, Switzerland, provided the opportunity to present the News Evaluator, VA’s mass experiment in which teenagers and researchers explore the credibility of digital newsfeeds. It was also an important forum to gain inspiration for VA’s ARCS project, developing Sweden’s first citizen science portal. Read more

VA presented the results of research undertaken by the Horizon 2020 SciShops project, including case studies and a survey on community-based participatory research at the 8th Living Knowledge conference in May in Budapest. Read more

The annual Nordic Science Communication Forum held in April in Gothenburg, and co-organised by VA, included presentations in English from Professor Alexander Gerber, Rhine-Waal University, on the third generation of science communicators, and Professor Maja Horst, University of Copenhagen, on exhibitions as means of doing science communication. Videos of the presentations are available online.

Swedish researchers view science communication as important but a lack of time and rewards remain the largest obstacles. The term ‘open science’ is relatively unknown but mostly associated with open access. These are some of the findings from a recent study conducted by VA together with the Swedish Research Council. Read more

The project website of the new EU-funded project BLOOM is now live. Find out more about the project, the involved partner organisations, including VA, and how they will boost the public’s knowledge and interest in the bioeconomy in Europe. Read more

VA’s recent publications and resources available in English

VA Barometer 2017/2018: An annual survey into the Swedish public’s general attitudes towards science and researchers.

VA information folder 2018: Information about VA and its members.
 
SwafS national advocacy platform: to enhance Swedish participation in Horizon 2020’s SwafS programme.

VA in social media