 Welcome to the UWA weekly webinar series, The Science Exchange. Let's welcome our presenter, Dr. Sam Illingworth. He's a senior lecturer in science communication at the University of Western Australia and his research focuses on using poetry and games to help develop dialogue between scientists and non-scientists. You can find out more about his research by visiting www.samIllingworth.com and also I connect with him on Twitter at Sam Illingworth. Thank you very much Charlotte for that introduction. So hi everyone, as Charlotte says my name's Sam Illingworth and I'm a senior lecturer in science communication here at the University of Western Australia and I have various facets to my research but the work that I'm going to be talking to you today is about the poetry of science and as you can see here here's my email address and my Twitter handle and my website please do feel free to reach out to me really looking forward to taking questions from you at the end of this talk which will be about 20 minutes but if you want to follow up with during or after please do so as well. So I've decided to set myself a rather ambitious hypothesis shall we say and I want to state that poetry can be used to move towards a dialogue model of science communication in which members of the general public not only learn about scientific research but contribute towards its development and governance and what I mean here is that we're looking at science communication that isn't just people working out how others can find out about their research and be interested in it but rather how we can set up a two-way dialogue in which non-scientists and scientists interact together to develop new research and to develop new research governance and this is the general area of research that myself and Dr Heather Bray at the University of Western Australia are interested in and so the hypothesis I've set myself today is that poetry can enable us to move towards that dialogue model so I just want to start off with one of the websites that I host which is the Poetry of Science so I set up this blog about five years ago and every single week I read a new piece of scientific research and I write a poem about it and the reason for this is to try to encourage non-scientists to find out more about science now obviously science is something that's really relevant and important to different aspects of society but it's also just something that's really cool and the problem with some scientific research is that it can become quite alienating and quite difficult to understand so what I wanted to do with the Poetry of Science website was to write about science in a way that would encourage people to find out more about that research so you can see here on on the homepage three of the latest pieces Founding the Flames is about the effect of land management strategies on bushfires in Australia Moonlight pollination I'll talk about in a second and Giggle in Guano is this really interesting piece of research that penguin poo has so much nitrous oxide in it that it can actually cause you to slightly hallucinate if you're in the field with hundreds of penguins as you might be if you were an Antarctic researcher so that's the premise of the the website it's read a piece of research writes about it for a non-specialist audience and hopefully engage them with that so in terms of the process so this is a really great piece of research from Richard Walton and colleagues at the University of Central Young London UCL and basically what it did was it looked at how moths are actually a really important pollinator not only because they can pollinate at night unlike bees but also because they tend to go to rarer varieties of flowers than bees do as well therefore creating a larger pollinator landscape so this is really important and vital research that people maybe don't know much about however if you were presented with this research then you would be presented with this abstract here that you can see on my screen dramatic declines in diurnal pollinators have created great scientific interest in plant pollinator relationships and associated pollination services exist in literature however is generally focused on diurnal pollinating insect taxa etc etc this is actually a very well written scientific abstract however for a non-specialist or a non-scientific audience it can be quite alienating so what I wanted to do with my poetry was maybe think about introducing people to this concept that moths are really important nighttime pollinators but in a language that's maybe slightly different to technical scientific jargon so this is what I came up with beneath Diana's pale embrace two moths shimmer in the starlight waltzing through moonbeams as they flicker across the cool embrace of noon's forgotten corsage suffused with smoky browns their earthy tones glimmer in the gloom bellies sticky with the latent gratitude of their unexpected hosts timidly they retreat into the light their labours veiled by night's curtain as we wait for the dawn so this is a slightly different way of presenting that research and what I tend to do with the website as well is as well as having the poem there's also a lay person's or a non-specialist's summary underneath and if you ever do visit my website which I encourage you to do please don't look at the earlier poetry that I used to write as it's very very literal interpretations of the research with horribly forced rhymes of variations and statistics and things it's not very nice um whereas what I think I've tried to do recently is have the lay person's summary but then also have the poem as a way to try and inspire people or getting them thinking about the research in a different way I also have an accompanying podcast called the Poetry of Science which you can find on all good podcast providers I was heartened this week to find out that my podcast is listened to more people than the New York Times poetry podcast on certain platforms which which made me feel very good about myself although I have to say my poetry is no way near as good as anything that's ever appeared in the New Yorker so please do check that out along with the the blog and what I do with the podcast is I try to introduce a bit more of the science and also bringing some poetry from non-scientists and non-Sam Ellingworth people that also talk about the research or look at a topic that's related to that research in some way shape or form but going back to my original hypothesis of to what extent can poetry help to develop a dialogue model is this actually two-way communication hmm I don't know what I'm really doing there is I'm finding out science that I find to be interesting I'm writing about it in a way that tells other people about it but am I creating a space in which dialogue can take place I'm not entirely sure I mean similarly to that I've recently written a book called a sonnet to science scientists and their poetry available on all good bookshops and some not-so-good bookshops as well and what this book does was it looked at famous scientists through history who wrote poetry and explores how that poetry informed their research and informed their lives and practices as well so people like Humphrey Davey, Ada Lovelace, Ronald Ross who was the person who made the discovery between mosquitoes and malaria and this was a very interesting book to research as it helped me to further understand this duality between science and poetry and that actually they're not necessarily mutually exclusive entities but rather complementary disciplines that help us to better understand the world and the way in which we live but again is this two-way communication if I'm challenging myself no it's not it's me writing a book telling people aren't I great isn't this interesting science isn't this interesting poetry it's not two-way dialogue so what this led me to think though and what this led me to develop was a process and a research methodology in which we can we can use poetry to develop dialogue between disparate groups so if we think about developing dialogue why do we want to do that why do we even want to involve non-scientists in research governance and research direction well the reason is because if we don't we're actually ignoring a huge dataset let's think about something like flood risk mitigation strategies now if I'm working with a local community group and I tell them I'm a scientist I've looked at your data this area is going to flood this area is going to flood this area is going to flood this is what you need to do to stop that from happening well that's great but what about all of the expertise and local and tacit knowledge of those local community groups not only am I ignoring that but I'm also removing any agency from those groups which means that they're far less likely to take up any recommendations that I have with them so what we need to be doing more as scientists is working with those members of society that are affected by our research and asking for their opinions and working with them and treating them as experts because they are experts they're just not scientists necessarily however what I found is that and what others have found is that when we bring together scientists and non-scientists to start having this two-way dialogue we get established what I call hierarchies of intellect so this means that let's say again we're talking about flood risk there might be people that are in a community who have been living in that area for 50 60 70 years and have a lot of expertise with flood risk mitigation strategies however when we bring them and scientists into a room people that are non-scientists can maybe feel intimidated or can feel that they aren't an expert because they don't have the requisite letters after their name even though actually they have a lot of valuable expertise and knowledge to offer to that group so what we need to do is we need to level these hierarchies we need to find a way that can engender dialogue and break down barriers between scientists and non-scientists and the methodology that I've proposed and that I've developed with colleagues such as Kirstin Jack at Manchester Metropolitan University is to use poetry and what I mean by this is it's it's writing poetry together and using that poetry as the foundation of workshops and the development of dialogue and it's not about creating aesthetically pleasing poetry although sometimes that might be the case it doesn't really matter what the poetry looks like it's more about using the poetry as a starting point for dialogue and this is really effective for three reasons reason number one it grants permission to the non-scientists that their voice is worth listening to because when you create a poem and read it out people can't tell you that it's wrong or right it's a poem number two it grants permission to the scientists that they can display an element of pathos now scientists from an early age are often taught to present cold hard facts and to maybe not display a level of emotion now when you're doing scientific research it's very important to have objectivity however I believe that when you're talking about the impacts of your research it's really important to display an element of pathos because otherwise what happens is you further widen the disconnect between science and society how can you talk about research on global warming and climate change without getting angry or upset or frustrated about it and then the third reason is it creates a shared sense of vulnerability by which I mean it creates a safe environment in which people can level these hierarchies for example if you're a non-scientist and you see a professor stand up and she reads a really really bad haiku then you realise that oh maybe they're fallible after all and we can actually exist together on the same level so that's how poetry can be used in this way and the screenshot of the moment is from a paper that I wrote like a couple of years ago which was based on a study that we did in the UK that looked at working with underserved and underheard audiences in terms of environmental change so this was working with people living with mental health needs people that identified as being refugees and asylum seekers people living with disabilities and we know from other research that it's these underserved and in many cases vulnerable communities that are going to be the most affected by environmental change however their voices are very rarely heard so what we wanted to do is we created an environment where we went into these various communities asked them what was important to them in terms of environmental change and then wrote poetry with them to try and identify which issues they wanted to find out more about then brought in scientists to talk about those issues then collaboratively wrote poetry to further explore why those issues were important and what could be done to mitigate those issues in that community to give you an example of this we worked with one community group in Longsite in Manchester which is a in a city area that has a constituency which is generally in the lower socioeconomic bracket and these were also a people a group of people who identified as living with serious mental health needs and we asked them to write a poem about about issues that were important to them and it turned out that air pollution was something that was important to them and so then we had a discussion about air pollution and I asked them again to write a poem about air pollution and one of them wrote this poem and it's just five lines but I just think it's incredibly powerful I've never seen pollution never noticed it it's always been here but I'm unaware of it just breathing it in and what that demonstrated to me to the scientists to the non-scientists in the room was how important it is to give voice to these audiences and how poetry is a way to help to engender that dialogue and to create a platform in which they can be heard so continuing this I was involved in another project which was looking at using poetry with different groups again across the UK and this included faith communities and what we found was that using poetry as a way to engender dialogue in these workshops actually by creating this safe space what it did was it showed that these audiences that had traditionally been underserved and underheard actually had many many great solutions and suggestions for how to tackle the interdisciplinary problem that is anthropogenic climate change certainly working with faith communities was a very powerful reminder that at the central tenet of many faiths is an idea of stewardship of the earth so even though there may be tensions between scientists and faith communities there are really sensible set of groups to work with in terms of developing attitudes and strategies to mitigate and adapt to climate change and we found that poetry was a really powerful way of bringing these disparate groups together in one of the workshops we had people from five different faiths sat around discussing climate change and actually come into the realization that there were many commonalities there for them to explore is this two-way communication I would say that it is because we worked with these communities we gave voice to these communities and ultimately these communities and their ideas have since helped us to inform on our practices with how we engage the UK public and other publics on climate change and you can check out this report online and from the climate communications project that was sponsored by NERC and climate outreach the findings from that those previous studies went into them so in terms of pathos for the scientists which I talked about earlier I think this is really one of the final points I want to finish on now is there's not many platforms that enable scientists I don't think to be able to talk about how they feel about their work and their research through an artistic lens and a lot of people spent a lot of scientists find that they can become pigeonholed and that you know they've been told scientists for them but arts isn't for them or poetry isn't for them so I've recently set up a science and poetry journal called Consilience which is an opportunity for people to write poems about science and it adopts a science peer review model so we accept all poems we don't desk reject anything and we work with the poets using a peer review system to help develop their artistic and poetic abilities so if there's any latent poets out there or talented poets out there or not talented poets everybody's welcome please do check out that website as it's a great way I think of helping to grant permission to scientists that write in poetry is an acceptable way of not only developing dialogue but better understanding the world and the way in which we live so to return to my hypothesis that poetry can be used to move towards a dialogue model of science communication in which members of the general public not only learn about scientific research but contribute towards its development and governance I believe this is definitely the case I think the next stage in a lot of the research that I've been doing is further implementing the the relationship between recommendations and policy change and that's the next stage of what we're doing but I think I've answered that hypothesis quite honestly and if you would like to find out more about my work and my research please drop me a line here and now I would be very happy to take questions thank you very much for listening thank you Sam that was absolutely fascinating um so let's start with what advice would you have for aspiring scientists or aspiring poets who are not scientists how would they make this work for them how would they sort of get in touch with you or get in touch with the community in terms of writing poetry or in terms of okay so please like my inbox and my twitter feed are always open so I'm really really welcoming for people to come in to come and join um I think that writing poetry is a really effective way of thinking rethinking about your science as well so I find that there's for two reasons one there's something called the incubation period which is you know that thing where you're like doing some coding or you're doing some like research design and you're completely stuck and so you leave it and you go away for like a few hours on a walk or whatever and it comes to you um so that's an that's a passive way of identifying the incubation period however poetry is a really effective way of actively engaging the incubation period so what I encourage people to do is if you get stuck on a particular problem write a poem about it instead because what it does is it engages a different part of your brain and gets you thinking about it in a different way that then really helps that to take place so that's one reason why I always encourage people to write poems the second thing is that it helps us to rediscover I think our love of our research doing poet doing science is great but we can become so lost in the maniacure of what we do that it's very very easy to forget why we fell in love with science in the first place and I think writing poems about it is a really powerful way that enables us to do that and you know as I've demonstrated through my own poetry you don't need to be particularly good in order to create something that is at least cathartic in that respect um so yeah I'd encourage people to to please do start writing poetry feel free to email them to me uh tweet them to me or to join the conciliants organization as well perfect great I mean he doesn't want to activate both sides of their brains so we've got a question from Nick awesome presentation he says and also how did you originally make the link between using poetry and science that's a really good question that's a really good question Nick so basically um when I transitioned from my my background is as an atmospheric physicist and when I transitioned from physical sciences into social sciences really through science communication I was originally interested in the relationship between science and theatre um because I used to be a playwright as well but then I kind of realised that oh I'm um basically as a as a teenage boy I wrote a lot of poetry I thought I was um you know Shelley or Byron or something like that turned turned out I turned out I wasn't um and then I thought that oh this is a really nice way to maybe think about communicating science um one of my friends then challenged me to actually investigate this and I've got a paper out um in the journal F1000 which looks at how scientific um how poems could potentially replace the traditional scientific abstract so I gave 50 scientists um a prose abstract and I gave 50 scientists the poem that I wrote about that prose abstract and asked them to rank it in terms of accessibility interest and inspiration and with statistical significance I am pleased to say that on every category the scientists preferred the original prose to my poem um which was just an indictment of their complete lack of aesthetic taste I think but um yeah that was how I got started in it really and Jennifer's got a question again fascinating talk but as a means of engagement with the community how does poetry compare to other arts such as music or painting that's a really good question so like literally every single time I write everything about poetry like in a research journal it's always like why but why are you doing poetry over any other form and like every single art form is a great way of engaging those different groups um I think poetry is just something that I can do I'm not particularly great at at drawing so that's why I use it but I think also it's super accessible I mean you need a pen and a piece of paper or or or a laptop and it even transcends language like when I've worked with asylum seekers and refugees and people where English isn't the first language we've basically just used google translate and then written in people's mother tongue and it's an amazing way of giving um of you know giving agency and ownership to those communities that they can communicate in a language that they feel passionate about and that they're able more freely to talk about and it certainly made me revisit revisit my own expectations as when we've done some of these workshops I've gone into it with maybe a prejudice that this group doesn't have an understanding of environmental change but then once we've done the poetry and we use different languages it's actually transpired that they really do it's just that English was the thing that was holding them back from expressing it really quite common too um and also I've got another question from Linda do you think we could use poetry to communicate the process of science and not just our results absolutely that's a great question Linda please do email me because I'd be very interested to collaborate on how to do that but I think sometimes um the problem with science sometimes is that it's quite opaque and I think breaking down these I mean breaking down these barriers between science and society remembering that scientists are part of society as well is really really important and being as transparent as possible so that when we're working with these communities we're saying look we're part of your community as well we're you know I work on climate change I'm I'm affected by climate change as well right like I'm part of your community I'm part of your society um and I think making science transparent for example through poetry through art through sculpture through dance is a really powerful way of us helping to transcend those barriers yeah and Moira asks if perhaps we should have light relief for assessors by do you think funding bodies will react well to poetry and grant applications I can tell you now that they react terribly to poetry in funding no they don't I I think they they act okay they act okay to poetry in funding applications and I think that with with any arts-based approach you know it's interdisciplinary as well so sometimes there's a danger that it can kind of fall between the gaps um so a lot of funding bodies are very keen to talk about interdisciplinary research but certainly from my own experience when you apply for interdisciplinary work in the sciences or the social sciences or the humanities what tends to happen is they say oh but that's a science issue or that's a humanities issue or that's a social science issue um but I have definitely included poetry in successful grant applications before so I would encourage people to continue doing that yeah well that's good to know um bray brady's got a question saying that there's commonly pushed back from older academics against anything with an artistic side so what advice do you have for people who are trying to convince others of using sort of poetry for their science communication I'd say I would say honestly though when you scratch the surface many of those older academics actually are really really interested in the arts like either they've got their own like arts collections or they they spend a lot of time at the theatre or the opera or art museums and once you get past that and you you explain to them that look this is actually a way of utilizing that interest in a way that can help to bring in new audiences to discuss science I think that can actually be a real commonality um there's always kickback against when you do things that are slightly um different you know I spend a lot of my time my research is around using poetry in games I mean I spend a lot of my time having to defend the fact that what I do is serious research um but I think that by speaking in a language that those audiences understand and for example with some older academics that might be with regards to grant successes or it might be with regards to h-indexes or publication successes then that's how you can do that with any audience it's about working out what language they speak and then developing it appropriately for them and um Elliott's also asking he's got a question he says what do you think is the relationship between poetry and truth the relationship between poetry and truth that's a deep question okay so I think I think that we've with with anything right like with science with history with poetry it's whoever to some extent the truth is determined by the people who write it and there's always different lenses of truth as well now conducting science is attached to a certain privilege like to be able to do science to be able to do scientific research you have to have certain privileges to be able to do that however I'd make an argument that anybody can can at least um have access to writing poetry and to doing poetry and the truths that you can develop and that you can put forward as a poet are fundamentally personal to you but also potentially universal as well so I would say that poetry and truth are very important things to consider and that they offer an opportunity for talking about that your truth for you as a person and you as a community may be more so than science enables as well but again of course remembering that poetry is very very subjective very personal um probably just one or two last ones we've got one from Vivian who uses poetry theta and prose as a way of interrogating science and society which seems to go beyond communicating just the science and her question is where do you see this in the wider context of science communication so I think that there's many people there's quite a few people doing interesting work around the use of poetry um in terms of science communication I think part of part of trying to convince people that it's a serious discipline and it's a serious aspect is creating platforms in which that can be published and which in that can be experienced so I'm also the chief executive editor of the journal Geoscience Communication which is part of the Copernicus stable so it's a very serious journal but in that journal what we do is we encourage people to explore these topics so Vivian had research that she was interested in publishing I'd be really happy to talk about that two recent papers I was involved with one with my colleague Dr Arianna Soldati which looked at all of the poetry that had been written about volcanoes since the year 1800 and then performed a quantitative thematic analysis looking at how that voice had changed and what that told us about the relationship between humankind and volcanoes and then another paper I wrote recently was looking at 80 different poems about climate change and doing a coding analysis of that to tell us how poets interpreted the at times esoteric principles of climate change and what that in turn could do to help us better communicate science or climate change to different audiences so I think it's about creating platforms that help to put this kind of research on a similar level as as other interdisciplinary studies as well and I'm really happy to talk about geoscience communication to anybody. Thank you and the last one for today um can you please let us know how you use poetry in games this is from Joanne. Okay how I use poetry in games I think I'm still in the process of trying to work out how to use poetry in games Joanne so my other research is basically as a games designer um with my colleague Dr Paul Wake and we do a lot of work in working with community organizations and working with um different publics in designing games that can then be used to engender dialogue around a particular topic so for example we recently did a game called carbon city zero which was done with the climate charity possible in which we workshops with a load of activists community members policymakers scientists what was the most important issues around becoming a zero carbon city and then we created a game around that um and you can check that work out on a website that I'm also the co-director of which is the Manchester Game Studies Network um but I'm now that you've said that I'm going to have to try and work out a way of making a game that involves poetry and why haven't I done that before thank you for bringing another aspect to those Venn diagrams together I appreciate that something else for you to do in all your spare time well we'd like to thank everyone for listening to us today and attending and also if you're watching it later and also a very special thank you to Sam and to keep the conversation going you can head over to Sam's website which is www.sam millingworth.com and he's also on Twitter at Sam millingworth and you can keep up to date with what's happening in this space which is where poetry and science meet. UWA some great courses available on this if that's of interest to you so in the meantime don't don't forget to catch up with us next week and we'll have another very interesting topic to discuss and thank you very much for your time goodbye