Abstract:

Aim: Our study moves from a background knowledge which considers essential the interrelation of various policies/ reforms (governmental, educational, etc.) - with the research in the field of science and education. Therefore we will explore the literature inspired by the Social Representations Theory * (SRT) in order to investigate: a) to what extent the dissemination of knowledge and science popularisation affect and are affected by socio-cultural resources and science policies in different cultural contexts and according to various decades from 1952 to 2016; b) how the science and technological development influence social representations.

Data sources and Methodology: Extracted from more than 10.000 scientific texts - filed in the specialised repositories of the SoReCom“A.S.de Rosa”@-library - we have selected the sources strictly related to education, science, social representations and communication. They have been analysed using the Grid for meta-theoretical analysis specifically developed by de Rosa (version 2014). The abstracts and the key words of the selected corpus have been submitted to analyses (supported by the software Iramuteq).

Exploratory hypotheses: Moving from the assumption that the effective communication of science deals with the government, economic, cultural, educational and other policies, we expect that the dynamic social representations of science guide acts and communication in the process of the dissemination of knowledge and education. We also expect that the developments of technologies lead to crucial changes in the transmission of science and societal issues to the public, arising polemical representations when the impact of technology and science introduces new hot objects (like genetically modified foods) interfering with the traditional nature-society relation and destabilising hegemonic representation.

Acknowledgement:
EC-funded project (ITN-People MSCA-IDP 2013, no. 6072799): * http://www.europhd.eu/SoReComJointIDP

References:
[1] Moscovici, S. (1961/1976). La psychanalyse, son image et son public. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Engl. Transl. (G. Duveen, Ed.) Psychanalysis: Its Image and Its Public, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008. Italian Transl. (A.S. de Rosa, Ed.) La psicoanalisi, la sua immagine, il suo pubblico, Milano: Edizioni Unicopli.
[2] de Rosa, A.S. (1994). From theory to meta-theory in S.R.: the lines of argument of a theoretical-methodological debate. Social Science Information, 33 (2), 273-304.
[3] de Rosa, A.S. (2013a). Research fields in social representations: snapshot views from a meta-theoretical analysis In A.S. de Rosa (Ed.), Social Representations in the "social arena". (pp. 89-124), Routledge, New York – London.
[4] de Rosa, A.S. ed. (2013b). Social Representations in the "social arena". Routledge, New York – London, p. 280.
[5] de Rosa, A.S. (2014). Advanced Guidelines for the Meta-Theoretical Analysis of the Literature on Social Representations: Presentation of the new grid and tools State of the Art of the SoReCom 
"A.S. de Rosa" @-Library (14-15 January 2014; http://www.europhd.eu/html/_onda02/07/25.01.00.00.shtml

Keywords:

Education, science policy, Social Representations Theory, integration, change, meta-theoretical analysis.