“Research is not a point of view!” Museums beyond factivism and activism

Abstract

This article engages with the role of museums in contemporary science communication. It traces two current communication strategies in museums: factivism and activism. It is argued that we need to go beyond both strands in order to be open to the dilemmas and paradoxes in the relations between science, public life and decision-making.

1. Introduction: A case for science

In the spring of 2022, the status of science in society came to the fore within Danish public debate. The Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) interviewed a number of experts for a programme that appeared to be about flat-Earth theories. Among the experts was the internationally acclaimed Danish astrophysicist, Anja Cetti Andersen. What Andersen did not know, however, was that the journalist who interviewed her was actually not the one asking the questions but worked as a medium of a Danish flat-Earth theorist, who was following the conversation just outside the studio and formulated questions for the journalist through her earphone.

When Andersen was told about the plot, after the programme was recorded, she immediately demanded that the programme should be withdrawn. A few days later, she was asked to defend and explain her position in a weekly debate programme on DR. During the discussion, Andersen suddenly exclaimed that ‘Research is not a point of view, dammit!’ She later explained that, during the debate, she became indignant at the premise posed in the programme that the flat-Earth theorist and she, as a scientist, merely each represented their standpoint.

After the programme, Andersen posted the hashtag ‘#forskning er f*nme ikke et synspunkt!’ (‘research is not a standpoint, d*mmit!’), which kicked off a following of other researchers and proponents for research using the hashtag vividly, T-shirts with the hashtag being produced and supporters posting the hashtag on social-media platforms.

In this article, I do not dwell on the debate sparked by the now famous hashtag or try to analyse it further. Rather, I see it as a symptom of a general questioning of science in Danish society and ask whether such a questioning is necessarily a bad thing, and, most importantly, how we may think of our practice as science communication institutions in the light of such questioning. I place my analysis in the context of the establishment of a new Danish Museum of Science and Technology, which is expected to open around 2031‒2032.

2. Questioning science

The ‘research is not a standpoint, d*mmit’ debate did not come as an isolated event. I think we can list a number of reasons why research and science are facing what we may call a battle of trust. As elsewhere, the Covid-19 pandemic caused a number of anti-science effects in Denmark. The general approach within the Danish health-care system, which was stricter than that of our neighbours in Sweden and entailed extensive testing and vaccination campaigns, and the decision to cull all 17 million minks in the Danish mink industry to prevent the spread of the cluster 5 mutation of Covid, all generated tensions between public opinion and expert-based decision-making in public authorities.

So, while we may agree with Andersen that science is not comparable to any point of view in public debate, and even though questioning the world through scientific methods is qualitatively different from a political debate, science cannot escape its political entanglement. This may be even more evident in the current research funding system, where researchers are constantly asked to prove the value of their research by showing impact in the shape of new, sustainable solutions, improved health care, and innovations of all kinds.

It seems that the current shaking of the status of science leaves us two ways to go as science communication institutions in order to balance the relation between research and the public. On the one hand, some would claim science to be our tool to overcome the growing threat against facts. Fake news, changed rhetoric in political campaigns, as well as deep-fake videos and photos accessible on the web seem increasingly to challenge any common concept of ‘truth’ or facts. To some, this situation requires science communication institutions to be strongholds for facts and guarantors of the real truth in opposition to fake information spread through media.

Over recent decades, we have seen intense debates—at least in academia—on the role of the museum in society. From the so-called ‘new museology’ of the 1980s (Vergo, 1989) and ‘critical museology’ (Shelton, 2013) to current museum activism (Janes and Sandell, 2019), these movements have been sparked by debates in society at large that needed to be addressed in museums as well, such as colonialism, racism, gender and the climate crisis. Rather than maintaining a strict neutral/objective position, the museum is called to action to generate change in our modes of behaviour and thinking.

I find interesting points in both the fact-oriented and the activist approaches. There is no doubt that museums stake their authority and legitimacy on being trustworthy institutions. And there is no doubt that museums lose relevance if they do not address the acute problems we are facing in the world today. But I argue that we need to go beyond both factivism and activism in current science communication approaches. In the following, I present two modes of engagement that are at the root of the development of the future Danish Museum of Science and Technology, working by dilemmas and what we may call ‘qualified speculation’.

3. A museum of dilemmas and paradoxes

Since 2019, the Danish Museum of Science and Technology has been working on plans for a new museum in Svanemølleværket, which is a power plant in the harbour of Copenhagen. As applies for all such major museum construction projects, this project is not simply a matter of moving existing exhibitions to a new building, but rather a complete rethinking of the role of the technological museum today.

Over recent years, we have tested out new formats for exhibitions and activities, and we have tried to engage with themes that the museum had not engaged with up till now. At the root of these tests and experiments has been a wish to engage in social and cultural challenges that we expect most guests already to be concerned with (such as the green transition, AI and gaming), and to move away from an encyclopaedic position, where you might expect the museum to be the go-to place for absolute knowledge. Instead, we would like to see the museum as a kind of prompter, a place that allows us to engage with current challenges from a new perspective, and from a different kind of prompt.

After a period of four years, we slowed down a bit to reflect on what we have been testing, trying to see which new approaches we might have created for ourselves. One thing that stood out was that we somehow had to shed a bit of our eagerness to be ‘relevant’. Relevance has been a major theme in museums in recent years (Nielsen, 2015; Simon, 2016) for many good reasons. We may say that, in general, the debate on relevance has turned the tables around. If the classical encyclopaedic museum would identify relevance within its own collections and expert knowledge, the current debate on relevance would place relevance with the users: what does the public find relevant, and how may the museum respond to that?

What we found out was that, while identifying new themes for exhibitions and activities in what would be on the radar screen of our audiences certainly allowed us to stand out as more contemporary than the museum had generally appeared, the urge to be relevant and on-time also posed some challenges.

First of all, we faced a challenge of distinction. Taking up themes such as the green transition and AI placed us as one among a relatively large field of public and private institutions engaged in the same issues. Secondly, while we collaborated with companies and research institutions to provide contemporary objects for our displays, we had to face the fact that the kinds of objects we were able to provide were generally poor compared to the historical objects in our collections. And many of our collaborators would offer us photos and videos (often produced for a commercial purpose) rather than objects. So, we faced a problem of what we might call ‘the materiality of the contemporary’. Thirdly, being contemporary also means that you become obsolete quicker. Even as our exhibition on the green transition was on, some of the new technologies on display were discarded by the companies and researchers working with them.

So, we had to think of relevance in another way. We had to be more conscious about how our particular resources, collections and historical insights could add new perspectives to ongoing debates; that would allow us to differentiate ourselves from the many other actors engaged in communicating current technological challenges.

What we ended up doing was basing our approach not first of all in current challenges, but in the vast and basically incomprehensible evolutionary connection between the human species and technology. Working with the green transition and AI, we realized that we touched on some very basic dynamics of humanity. In terms of the green transition, it was obvious what problems the use of fossil fuels has left us with today. But, at the same time, looking back at the revolutionary development that has taken place over the past 200 years, it was obvious that most of us would never be ready to give up on all the innovations that today seem like everyday goods. And more than that, we do not have anywhere to retract to. We cannot go back to a state before the invention of the steam engine. In order to confront the climate crisis, we have to look ahead and develop new technologies and ways of living with technology and nature. In other words, there was a tale of the evolutionary connection between human beings and technology that somehow needed to be added to current debates on technology. Or, to quote Robert Hassan (2023): ‘We evolved with technology to become homo sapiens. We did not “discover” it’. This also means that our version of the history of technology would not begin with the steam engine, but rather with stone tools. While we may fear that the human capacity to develop and apply technology has driven the planet into a severe crisis, it is also clear that this capacity is at the root of what we consider ‘human’. Through observing and creatively exploring the potentials of the world (Fuentes, 2017), the human species has—for better or worse—evolved from a vulnerable species on the African savannah to the dominant power of the entire planet.

This approach is still under development as this paper is being written, but what we hope for is that it will allow us to become ‘relevant’ from a somewhat irrelevant or ‘strange’ position. One major advantage of the approach is that it is focused on human dilemmas at their root. Looking into human‒technology relations in a deep historical perspective immediately challenges both the celebratory mood of the classical technical museum and the critical mood of a good deal of contemporary museum practice. As Melvin Kranzberg (1986: 545) famously stated: ‘Technology is not good or bad; nor is it neutral’. In other words, our relation to technology is always entangled in dilemmas and paradoxes. While we may see grand potentials or eerie consequences of new technologies, it most often happens that the consequences of and our use of and relation to technologies turn out differently from what we had expected. The World Wide Web was intended to become the platform for unhindered sharing of ideas and a free, global exchange of ideas. This is still part of the web today, but maybe more prominent is the overtaking of the web by tech companies of an unimagined scale, and the use of the web for political propaganda and conscious disinformation. And the fossil fuels that provided humanity with energy resources on an unprecedented scale and gave rise to an evolutionary success of humankind, rising from around 1 billion people in 1800 to around 8 billion today, also gave rise to the biggest threat to our species with a lurking climate collapse.

4. Qualifying speculation

To return to the opening of this paper, science will also always be implicit in such dilemmas rather than being the sole arbiter of what is right or wrong. And, actually, I think Andersen would agree with such an approach, as it also touches upon another central point of science: science is always dynamic, and knowledge is always temporal.

I think we can argue today that the days of the encyclopaedic, fact-centred museum are gone—for a while, at least. While museums still rely on a qualified, scientifically grounded approach to knowledge making, we cannot leave our audiences with mere facts. We need to activate facts to open up the social and cultural dilemmas in which science and technology is also a part. In Bruno Latour's (2004) terms, we need to go from ‘matters of fact’ to ‘matters of concern’. In this way, the museum can play a central role in pointing to what we should actually be concerned about.

Currently, we are collaborating with the Human-Centred Innovation Section at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) on a project called ‘Grounding AI’. The project is based on an observation made by researchers from the DTU group. While AI is certainly a hot topic, what we actually discuss, when AI is debated in the public sphere, is basically ChatGPT, and how AI will take over a number of jobs. So, in a sense, by focusing on very few AI-related topics in public debate, we lose track of how and where AI is already working and transforming research, organizations and education. Therefore, the DTU group has identified more than 2 million scientific articles from the 1980s up to today that all mention ‘machine learning’, ‘algorithms’ or similar terms. By the use of an AI, this body of articles has been semantically mapped so that a number of themes come up, such as ‘food conservation’, ‘education’ and ‘climate analysis’. All 2 million articles have been projected as dots onto a map, which visualizes the concentrations of articles around specific themes.

To make this mapping engaging for an audience, the map has been printed as a 10 × 10 metre carpet, which means that you can walk on the map, studying the distribution of 4000 application areas of AI like it was a geographical map (see details at https://grounding-ai.github.io/). In an app, the audience can find each of the 4000 thematic cores with a short text, explaining what is at stake in, for instance, the field of ‘AI in education’. Furthermore, a sceptic and an optimistic bot have been developed, adding each their opinion on the use of AI in each specific field.

The map has not yet been tested on an audience, but our intention is to use it to point to the ‘matters of concern’ that we ought to debate. While AI may be a difficult theme to display (although many worthwhile exhibitions have been produced on the theme in recent years), we may explore the potential controversies related to AI with our audiences. One problem about public debates on technology is that many of us have only a limited insight into how various technologies work, and what kinds of effects they may have on our daily lives, as well as on society and cultural development in a longer perspective.

But the museum as institution offers a promising platform for public debates of this kind that build on a common experience and a common sharing of knowledge of the kind that the AI map and app offer. The point is that we need a qualified level and selection of insights in order to consider the potentials and possible consequences of emerging technologies. But these insights are no longer the end point of our activities. The insights would be better understood as prompts than as answers. They serve as a tool that allows a common debate and speculation on possible futures with our audiences.

At the Danish Museum of Science and Technology, we are taking only our first steps into what it may mean to apply the museum as a prompter for debates on our common future with technology. But we are quite convinced that this is a road we need to go down to carve out a new role for the science and technology museum in a contemporary setting.

5. Conclusion

By way of conclusion, I would like to return to the ‘research is not a point of view, dammit!’ controversy that I introduced in the beginning of the article. I hope that by now it is clear to the reader that I basically agree with Andersen's claim. Science is not just a point of view, but a structured, methodological way of making sense of the world. The danger is, however, if we use such statements to maintain a position of science as exclusive. Science is implied; it is part and parcel of the dilemmas we all face in our everyday lives. Therefore, we need to find ways to engage and not simply ask audiences to accept scientific points or emulate scientific practice. This is not a 1:1 show. We need to find ways in which we can engage science productively in the concerns of audiences and stakeholders today.

This entails that we should turn the dilemmas and paradoxes that science and technology pose to us into the very core of our engagement with the public. If we do so, we also need to accept that, while we may provide crucial insights, and the curiosity that is the driving force of good research, the ultimate end point is no longer to provide the answers. Grounding our relation to the public in such a playful and explorative approach, I am convinced that the science museum may find a strong public profile that is stuck neither in the authoritative position of factivism nor in the established either‒or position of activism.