ABSTRACT
In the last ten years the public understanding of science has stealthily emerged to become a focus for a wide variety of activities. It has come into use as a term that crystalizes worries in the scientific community about public attitudes toward and support for science. It has been taken up as a useful slogan by high-technology sectors of industry concerned about the public acceptance of their products. It has simultaneously become a rallying point for the activities of science journalists and other science communicators, with new training programs and degrees bearing the public-understanding-of-science label. It is also, inevitably, a new arena for academic, specifically social scientific and humanistic, research on science. When a new portmanteau term such as PUS (public understanding of science) appears and achieves wide circulation, social scientists commonly talk of a new discourse having been introduced (Yearley, 1995).
