ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

When Scientific Images Go Rogue: Popularization, Pluralization, and Contestation

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This panel examines how scientific images change as they leave the lab and enter public space, moving through studios, streets and screens. Case studies include graffiti, televised talking robots and psychotherapeutic images of healing. By putting scientific illustration alongside street art and the BBC, the panel traces how disputes and reinterpretations emerge as images travel.

But popularization is more than simple translation. Public media refashion techniques, test authority and teach new users how to act. The panel treats popularization as double edged: it can discredit work as “merely” popular, yet it also multiplies scientific practice and invites marginal voices to engage, loosening singular claims to authority. Together the papers present popularization as a creative, contested process that opens many paths into science. They foreground marginal labor and epistemic disobedience and show that images and sounds in public—from Edinburgh to Woods Hole—do more than simply communicate.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Benjamin Lindquist, MIT

Individual Presentations

• What is a Microbe? Graffiti and the Elucidation of Biology - Michael Rossi, University of Chicago

• Breath, “Ah,” Form: Florence Cane’s Psychophysical Art Pedagogy - Julian Chehirian, Princeton University

• Robots on the Silver Screen: Real and Imaginary - Allison Marsh, University of South Carolina

• Viscous Signals: Paint, Paper Tools, and the Science of Graphic Sound in Postwar Britain - Benjamin Lindquist, MIT