Stephen H. Jones, Author at International Research Network for the Study of Science and Belief in Society

S4 Episode 10: What do Muslims think about science?

In the 10th episode of Season 4, sociologists Dr Saleema Burney (University of Birmingham) and Dr Stephen Jones (University of Keele), reflect on their research on the ‘Science and British Muslim Religious Leadership’ and ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ projects where they studied the relationship between science and Islam. Taking a straightforward approach centered on asking Muslim religious leaders what they think about science, they talk about the complexities their research revealed. (This episode was recorded in September 2024) This podcast is 30 minutes and 52 seconds long. The keywords associated with this episode are: sociology of Islam sociology of science public understanding of science British Muslims For more on the research on British Muslims that Saleema and Stephen discuss in the episode, check out their report: Stephen Jones, Saleema Burney and Riyaz Timol (2024). “Science Communication, Islam and Muslim Communities: A Research Brief” University of Birmingham. You

The Secret Social Lives of Science

By Stephen H. Jones Read enough science journalism and eventually you will become familiar with two tropes that seem to contradict one another. On the one hand, journalists will often write about ‘science’ as though it is an unquestioned authority, with the more opportunistic members of the profession using the term to try to convince us that expensive trainers are bad, Kylie Minogue’s legs are good, and that politicians are competent. The word ‘science’, as the sociologist Thomas F. Gieryn put it, ‘often stands metonymically for credibility, for legitimate knowledge, […] for a trustable reality’. On the other hand, people from that same professional sphere also write about science as something remote from a public that is uninterested and unfamiliar: the preserve of elite, untrusted experts. This is a familiar refrain among science communicators too, who frequently talk of science being ‘undervalued in our culture’. Can these two things be