Joy Zhang

At the invitation of UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Natural Sciences, I had the great pleasure of contributing to the UNESCO roundtable, ‘Empowering the Global Community Through Scientific Literacy,’ held this week in Paris.

I made three suggestions on basis of a draft white paper circulated:

1-Enhancing science literacy is not just about progress or development. It should also serve as a critical platform for cultivating social tolerance and understanding, even when agreement/solidarity may not be possible.

2-Social justice should be an integral part of STEM education.

3-Integrating art and science in public engagement has great potential, but it requires the input from the social sciences to translate the outcome into something that is constructive and not just provocative.

It was a lightning trip, but it was also amazing to see Prof. Martin Bauer again, who taught me at the LSE and to reconnect with friends from France, Malaysia and China!