Science Communication webinar with Dr Jamie Lewis and Dr Andrew Bartlett

Description

Fringes and Frontiers: Living 'Scientifically' and the Search for Bigfoot

What does it mean to be ‘scientific’? Our research has explored the ways in which Bigfooters - those attempting to collect evidence of Bigfoot - make, defend, and debunk knowledge claims about Bigfoot. This is collective work and they do so using a variety of evidential sources, including witness accounts, images, sound recordings, footprint casts, and biological traces. But what is the model of science that organises such activity?

We argue that Bigfooting involves an attempt to engage with the myth of two ‘frontiers’; the American frontier, at which ‘civilization’ meets ‘wilderness’, and the frontier of science, inhabited by the image of the lone (male) scientist wrestling truth from nature in the face of institutional indifference, or worse. In this sense, the meaning making at work in Bigfooting is not just that of creating knowledge, but of re-enchantment.