New approaches to RRI informed by art and design

Jane and Rob with Ionat Zurr, Oron Catts and Tarsh Bates from SymbioticA at the University of Western Australia, Erika Szymanski at Colorado State University, and the Rosser and Cachat laboratories at the CMSB have collaborated on the ‘Crossing Kingdoms’ project. This project attempts to fuse mammalian and yeast cells to explore the social, cultural and scientific implications of the hybrids produced. It has created interdisciplinary collaborations that make contributions to artistic, social scientific and natural scientific research agendas simultaneously.

Funding cultures and public science

As the development of synthetic biology shows, research funders are fundamental to the implementation of RRI and shaping the trajectory of the field more broadly. While the power of research funders is widely acknowledged, there have been few in-depth studies of their day-to-day decision making and even fewer opportunities to inform this decision making with social scientific research. Rob has been leading work with an international network of bioscience funding agencies (ERACoBioTech, which includes the BBSRC) to help them think about designing funding programmes that are themselves shaped by RRI.