How Nottingham won a Leverhulme Making Science Public grant

Making Science Public is an innovative combination of political scientists working with linguists. Adam Smith spoke to the winning team from the University of Nottingham.

“I still remember sitting down over Christmas and thinking about the bid,” says Brigitte Nerlich, a professor of science, language and society at the University of Nottingham.

Nerlich was a core member of a team at Nottingham’s Institute of Science and Society that had begun to work on answering a Leverhulme Trust research programme grant call into science and politics in late 2010. The call, open to any researcher to interpret ‘science and politics’ in any way they wished, had come just at the right time. The institute, which was being absorbed into the School for Sociology and Social Policy, was looking to re-establish its identity.