This year’s EUSEA (European Science Engagement Association) conference took place on 3–4 May in Bolzano, Italy. Here we talk to VA’s Julia Brink about her experiences at the event.
Firstly, tell us a bit about the EUSEA conference
It’s a conference held annually, bringing together public engagement professionals from across Europe to share experiences and gain inspiration. This year’s event was held in the beautiful South Tyrolean city of Bolzano, and involved 130 people from 20 countries. With a good mixture of keynotes, workshops and debates, the two days revolved around the overall theme of ‘Exploring Engagement in a complex world’. As President of EUSEA, VA’s Secretary General, Cissi Askwall, gave the opening welcome speech on the importance of finding new ways to engage our communities about the issues we face. Prior to the start of the conference, we also were given a tour of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology to see the 5,300 year old Ice Mummy, Ötzi!
Citizen science to help the environment was the title of your presentation – tell us more
Yes, I had the opportunity to present VA’s citizen science project, the Plastic Experiment, which is now in its second year. Thousands of people across Sweden, primarily school children, are helping researchers to investigate the amount of plastic waste found in the Swedish natural environments by collecting and categorising plastic litter.
As Marc Zebisch, Head of the Centre for Climate Change and Transformation at Eurac Research, highlighted in his keynote talk on ‘Climate change: communicating complexity’, one of the best ways to communicate about climate change is through co-creation and getting people actively involved in the process of developing solutions. And this is at the heart of the Plastic Experiment: By engaging participants in hands-on research, they are deepening their understanding about plastic pollution and how everyone can be involved in tackling environmental issues (something that we are also evaluating as part of the project).
At the conference, there was lots of interest from others in the Plastic Experiment and how VA is using citizen science as an effective science communication tool. We’ve been running citizen science projects annually since 2009, so now we have a lot of experience to share.
What were your overall impressions of the conference?
EUSEA as a member organisation provides a really supportive environment for anyone working in public engagement, offering both networking and learning opportunities. Although many of those attending the conference know each other, this year the conference organisers looked at ways to enable more researchers to attend, for example, by including poster pitch sessions. There was a huge choice of parallel sessions too, which were very difficult to choose between! So there were lots of interesting examples of science engagement and opportunities to learn about how others are doing public engagement.
What did you personally find most interesting/useful?
This was my second time attending the conference so there were a number of familiar faces as well as lots of new people to meet. As national Coordinator of ForskarFredag, Sweden’s European Researchers’ Night, it was a good opportunity to network and identify potential future collaborations. It was also particularly interesting to discuss how others finance their activities, as funding is a big challenge for many of us. The last panel session addressed the role of research funders in connecting research with society, with representatives from UK Research and Innovation, the Swedish Research Council, Science Foundation Ireland and the European Commission. It turned out to be a really lively discussion with a range of differing opinions between the speakers and audience.
EUSEA is definitely a conference where you come away from feeling energised and inspired, and I’m already looking forward to next year’s event to be held in Tbilisi, Georgia.
