Website:
For publications click here
Martin W.Bauer at conference speech in Nancy
In September 1994 I joined the LSE where I am closely involved with Social Psychology and the Department of Methodology.
Before that I had graduated in Psychology and Economic History [Bern & Zurich] and worked briefly for NCR Switzerland in office automation, but then decided to do a PhD in Social Psychology [PhD, LSE].
As a Research Fellow at the Science Museum London, I spent a great part of 1993 at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris, and I teach regularly in Brazil (in Alegre and Campinas).
‘He advises European Commission, Brazilian, Taiwanese, Chinese and British Government agencies and OECD on measuring public attitudes to science and technology.’
My research focuses on the changing science-society relations and the modern common sense as empirical issues of ‘social representations of X among Y’. Among other things, changes manifest themselves in public controversies of science and technology. This leads on to particular topics such as resistance in social processes, social influence and public opinion dynamics, science communication and literacy, attitudes to science and technology issues arising from developments in biotechnology, nuclear power, global warming and other topics.
The key questions of the DSP-MACAS research group (mapping the cultural authority of science) are: what is the perceived position of science in society compared to other institutions? How do public attitudes pile up, evolve and impact on socio-technical developments? In that context we organized three significant conferences: in 1993 on 'Resistance to New Technology' at the Science Museum in London, and in 2007 on 'Science and the Public – towards cultural indicators' at the Royal Society of London; and in 2015 at Stellenbosch University in South Africa on the ‘Cultural Authority of Science in Comparative Perspective’.
MACAS hosts the monthly London PUS (public understanding of science) Seminars which run since the mid-1990s, and 2009-2016 I edited the international leading journal with that name. MACAS constitutes the hub of an international network of scholars that reaches to colleagues across Europe and globally to South Africa, China, Taiwan, Korea, India, Canada, the US and Latin America.
I retain a vivid interest in a social psychology of activity with topics such as job design, motivation, emotion & stress, resistance and collective learning amounting to a general social scientific ‘Resistology’ and in methodological issues of ‘big data’ text analysis, corpus construction, experience sampling and 'bemetology' (i.e. behavioural meteorology).
Currently I am directing the MSc Social and Public Communication and convene and teach several courses in collaboration with colleagues:
PS429 The Social Psychology of Communication
PS464 Social Influence
PS439 Science, Technology and Resistance
Publications
Please see these links for up to date listings:
LSE experts page
Google Scholar page