Joy Zhang

I’m super thrilled to launch ‘Tuning EARS for the Future’ — a GSEJ–PET collaboration and proud part of Wellcome’s ‘Constructive Conversations’ programme — together with our vision paper, After Attitudes: Tracking the Distance Between Science and Society to Guide Action.

EARS starts with a simple question: public attitudes matter — but where does the distance between science and society lie, and what action might it warrant?

Our starting point is three propositions:
1. Trust is not agreement.
2. Distance is not a deficit.
3. Collective action is not conformity.

Over the next 12 months, I’ll be working with the fantastic Sarah Norcross and Sandy Starr at the Progress Educational Trust, Shan Jin at the Royal Agricultural University, and our new postdoctoral researcher Aleksandra Stelmach and project manager Caroline Challans at GSEJ, University of Kent. We will to develop and test an EARS Compass, which maps social distance across four dimensions: Epistemic, Affective, Resource and Structural — E.A.R.S.

We’ll work with members of the public and LGBTQ+ communities, using direct-to-consumer (DTC) genomics and in vitro gametogenesis (IVG) as contrasting test cases. In doing so, I’m interested in moving from the familiar question of ‘What does the public think?’ towards something more relational: Where are science and society out of tune, why, and what might help?

For me, this is a very exciting and significant new methodological exploration within the O.D.E.SS.I. initiative. An exhilarating 12 months ahead. I can’t wait to see where EARS takes us ✨

Our vision paper is available here.