Septima Earthaline Poinsette Clark was born in 1898 in Charleston, South Carolina. Her life and work can be characterized as being ‘for the people’. Her long career as an educator, which began with her accepting her first teaching position in 1916, was activist in its orientation, advocating for better conditions for African American schools and increased pay for African American teachers along with promoting education for the masses. After being fired from her teaching position due to her involvement with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), she began working for the Highlander Folk School, a multi-racial social justice training centre then located in Monteagle, Tennessee. Among numerous interventions in reshaping the United States Southeast, Clark is the orchestrator of ‘literacy-based citizenship pedagogy’ (Hall et al, 2010) which is revealed through examining the structure of the Citizenship Schools Program. Through the Highlander, and later through the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Clark launched the Citizenship Schools Program with Esau Jenkins, opening the first in Johns Island, South Carolina, in 1957 then expanding throughout the southeast. The Citizenship Schools were characterized as focusing on eliminating illiteracy, as voter literacy tests became common throughout the southeastern US to keep African Americans from voting, though the work of the schools extended to economic literacy, civil rights, and democracy education. By 1970, over 28,000 African Americans had gone through the Citizenship Schools, a powerful accomplishment highlighting ‘the nature of Clark's work in the movement: using education to empower grassroots people, particularly African American women, so they might become leading citizens in their communities’ (Hall et al, 2010, p 32). Re-orientating commonly held understandings of histories of inequality, oppression, exploitation, and white supremacy in the US Southeast reveals deep and long legacies of Black feminist activism and praxis.

As science communication continues to establish itself as a discipline in the 21st century, there has never been a better time to consider contemporary science communication and its practices. Misinformation and digital marketing are changing the context for science journalism. Emerging political eras are altering the way we think about expertise and trust in policy making, as well as the power of protest. Predatory publishing, open access, and the use of social media are presenting novel contexts for researchers to consider in the communication of their work. Meanwhile, there are contemporary scientific and technological developments that are consistently generating important ethical and social questions. Against this backdrop in 2020, we faced one of the greatest global health issues in a generation, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Concurrently, international events and social movements have drawn heightened attention to questions of inclusion, equity, and the abuse of power.

Contemporary Issues in Science Communication is a multidisciplinary series, welcoming submissions from a wide range of disciplinary areas, and international in outlook. Books contained in the series seek to be engaging, straightforward, and conversational in style, and of interest to science communication practitioners as well as academic audiences.

Books published in the Contemporary Issues in Science Communication series consider such science matters and their relationships to communication, engagement, and broader social conversations. The series links the present with the past by publishing titles that develop our understanding of the history of science communication, both in practice and as an academic discipline. However, they also cover a range of topics relevant to contemporary science communication, including, but not limited to: definitions, history, and ethics of science communication; expertise, replication, and trust; interdisciplinary knowledge; ideologies; knowledge and new forms of media; public policy; gaming, Sci-art, and visual communication and inclusivity in science communication. The scope of the series is broad but so are the challenges facing science communicators and public engagement practitioners.

In this book, Dr Elizabeth Rasekoala and the 30 international authors who have provided chapters for her edited collection tackle such testing scenarios head on. In Race and Sociocultural Inclusion in Science Communication: Innovation, Decolonisation, and Transformation, we are skilfully guided by both the editor and chapter authors to confront the challenges of sociocultural inclusion where race is concerned in ways that provoke sustainable, meaningful, and impactful change for the science communication sector.

This book has been inspired by two central questions. First, how are communities in Colombia seizing the initiative to build peace in the wake of the historic 2016 peace agreement? And second, what can participatory research contribute to these efforts, both within and beyond Colombia?

As is the case with any project in such a complex and shifting social and political situation, the findings we present and discuss here are necessarily provisional and partial. Colombia's conflict, the changing local and national politics surrounding it and associated efforts to understand and reduce violence – efforts that include local actors, NGOs, governments, international agencies and the research community alike – continue to evolve with dizzying speed. A meaningful or comprehensive peace in Colombia is a long way from being successfully ‘built’. Yet notwithstanding the limitations of our own efforts, we are confident of the significant untapped potential for engaged, immersive and non-extractive research in ‘post-conflict’ scenarios and, however embryonic and limited they may be, it is plainly evident that many communities beyond those we have examined here are constantly engaged in the careful, gradual and difficult business of constructing their own visions of more peaceful lives and futures.

In this concluding chapter, we present a synthesis of the book's central empirical, theoretical and methodological insights. We begin by placing the key findings from the two empirical cases in dialogue with one another and in relation to the wider story of the Colombian peace process, including the ‘territorial peace’ agenda. Here we return to the book's core concept of DST and ask what potential lessons these experiences can offer for other community-based actors. In the second section, we outline our key reflections for peace scholars and practitioners, making the case that DST is not only a descriptive concept describing a particular form of dialogue practice, but also a normative one which provides an entry point for PAR-based research to play a meaningful role in partnering with and supporting communities within and beyond Colombia to overcome the conflict(s) that inhibit their ability to live with dignity. Finally, we offer a brief analysis of recent events in Colombia, specifically the election of President Petro in 2022, and the implications of his early efforts towards a lasting form of ‘total peace’.

Humanity stands at a crossroads, faced with a set of extremely important decisions. We can allow income inequality to grow and wealth to become ever more concentrated, or we can ensure that our shared resources are distributed far more equally. The price of failure is immeasurable. Climate change and the rise of AI present significant challenges that threaten to further increase and entrench inequality, and to negatively impact our quality of life across the board. But, with the right legislative approach, they also provide significant opportunities to improve the wellbeing of individuals and their households.

History has shown us that we do indeed have a say over the socio-economic conditions that prevail within our countries. Democratic systems provide their citizens with an avenue to address these conditions via the ballot box. A large portion of our adult lives are spent working, which makes the workplace an obvious point of focus. Depending on how governments legislate, work conditions can be either harsh or more humane. As voters, we should prioritise electing governments that put the welfare and wellbeing of workers first.

As workers, we should also be demanding a greater stake in the design and implementation of the jobs we do, including such things as the pace and length of the working day. Work is a heavy burden, but only when jobs are tedious and poorly designed. When employees have agency over all aspects of their jobs, work becomes far more rewarding than its paycheque. The shortest route to bolstering the rights of workers is to strengthen the trade union movement. The war waged against the trade union movement during the 1980s has decimated the average standard of living for low and middle-income workers.

Rising inequality is not the only threat to the wellbeing of workers. The twin challenges of climate change and AI both threaten to negatively impact worker's lives, without appropriate government intervention. Without such action, job insecurity and income inequality are only set to increase. Alternatively, we could implement worker-friendly measures aimed at addressing these challenges and simultaneously improving the lives of workers. These would include extensive manpower retraining programs, a shorter standard working day and the provision of secure jobs for all who want them.

The needs of workers extend beyond the workplace, and addressing their rights requires a broad political and social agenda.

Introduction

The longstanding calls for museums to practise accountability, inclusion, restitution, and equitable access have grown into critical decolonial demands over the last two decades, and particularly since the 2012 publication of Amy Lonetree's book Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums. Community members, practitioners, and scholars are collectively elevating the inherent need for museums to redress colonial harm and shift their operating practices from the colonial to the decolonial. However, many museums remain resistant to this much needed and imperative change. Why is that? Perhaps it's because change is difficult – it's uncomfortable, fluid, uncertain, and scary, especially if you have operated and been trained under the colonial constructs of ‘industry best practices’, which have reified your organisation's status as an ‘authoritative expert’ since its inception.

The ‘museum’ was established in order to support, legitimise, and celebrate the colonial endeavour. Museums grew from the European ‘cabinets of curiosity’, where the colonial elite would display their trophies of conquest in order to establish racial superiority and further justify the right to colonise. Much like today, in museums the objects, textiles, plants, animals, ancestral human remains, and animal skeletal remains were used to tell a story that the collector curated to match their interpretive plan, ethos, and worldviews (Bennett, 1995; Aldrich, 2009).

We recognise this barbarous past, acknowledge that colonialism continues to manifest in museums today, and thus ask ourselves the profound question: Can an inherently colonial museum be decolonial? Our answer is that we don't know, but we must try. Maya Angelou, American poet and civil rights activist, talks about how someone can only do the best they can until they know better, and that once they know better, they must also then do better. We agree with Angelou both on a personal and on an institutional level. We recognise that museums continue to actively perpetrate colonial harm towards Black, Indigenous, and Peoples of Colour (BIPOC) internationally. With a deep systemic colonial legacy, the Museum of Us, where we both work, is no different, and now it is our responsibility as senior museum practitioners (in key leadership positions), community members, and as humans to do better to redress this colonial harm.

In recognition of all of this, we hold on to the call for decolonial change and the need to do better as museum practitioners.

This book started from the observation of contradictory, flip-flopping, muddling-though behaviour in international politics, and from the assessment that the existing theoretical repertoire in International Relations (IR) and Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) does not really help us to make sense of these phenomena, which we nevertheless frequently observe. To address this gap, I proposed a conceptualization of reluctance that tries to move away from the often polemic and politically charged use of this notion. Building on different stages of concept reconstruction and concept building, in Chapter 2 I proposed an understanding of reluctance that focuses on two constitutive dimensions: hesitation and recalcitrance. Since both dimensions can be operationalized and observed empirically, my conceptualization of reluctance can be used for the classification of foreign policy, and can be usefully applied in empirical analyses.

Chapter 3 was devoted to developing a theory of reluctance in order to explain why this phenomenon originates and why it can be observed in different intensities across various cases. Building on a range of theoretical approaches from IR and FPA more broadly, I argued that a reluctant foreign policy will emerge if governments are faced with difficulties in devising clear preferences and, at the same time, a number of different and competing expectations by external actors. Such difficulties in preference formation can, in turn, emerge for a number of reasons.

For one, governments might be politically weak, which makes it difficult for them to devise a clear foreign policy course and to implement it. Second, states might have capacity problems of various kinds. They might have a weak bureaucratic apparatus and insufficient resources to implement a coherent foreign policy; or the state apparatus might be well equipped, but fundamentally divided. Forms of bureaucratic infighting such as struggles among different ministries can lead to problems in devising a clear foreign policy course and ultimately to flip-flopping or contradictory policies and statements on the part of various actors. A third possible driver of reluctance has to do with the individuals involved in decision making, and especially with their cognitive abilities. These can be seriously hampered in grave crisis situations that require swift decision making, and this can lead to a range of psychological mechanisms that ultimately result in ambiguous and hesitant policies.

This chapter explores how the nuclear revolution in war changed the character of conflict and challenged our traditional conception of what constituted an act of war. The related question of how this change impacted the war–state relationship is also explored. I explained in the previous chapter how the rise of modern war is intimately connected with the industrial revolution. Innovations in this period transformed warfare and contained several military revolutions on land and the sea. One of the most pronounced of these ‘revolutions’ was the emergence of airpower as a distinct but separate environment of modern war. The rise of electronic warfare was less well known but as important. However, in terms of impact, dropping two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945 represented a true paradigm shift in the conduct of war. It is often pointed out that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was genuinely awful if measured in terms of deaths, but the USAAF firebombing of Tokyo in the preceding March was far worse; between 80,000–100,000 killed versus 66,000 at Hiroshima and 39,000 at Nagasaki. Viewed in this way, the explosive potential of the atomic bomb represented a critical enhancement in the firepower available to the US but, at the time, it was not necessarily seen as a game changer in the conduct of war. It is important to note that the significance of the atomic bomb in terms of its conduct on war is contested. In the view of Price and Tannenworld (1996), this weapon was viewed as just another weapon, albeit one that packed a lot more punch, to be employed on the battlefield. As such, its claimed impact has been much exaggerated. In their view, the most crucial change was the development of thermonuclear weapons. The detonation of the first hydrogen bomb in 1952 produced a ten-megaton explosion approximately 500 times more powerful than Hiroshima. What possible use could such a weapon have but to prevent war?

The subsequent introduction of intercontinental ballistic missiles, heralded by the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik, gave this weapon an almost invincible aura.

However, as Freedman explains, the significance of this technology lay in the fact that a single bomber armed with a single bomb was able to destroy a city (Freedman, 2003, 17).

Introduction

In May 2014, Philip Inman reported that ‘Economics students from 19 countries have joined forces to call for an overhaul of the way their subject is taught, saying the dominance of narrow free-market theories at top universities harms the world's ability to confront challenges such as financial stability and climate change’ (Inman, 2014). These students certainly have a point. As mentioned earlier, the most crucial aspect of the birth of economics is the fact that it was explicitly conceived by the leading spokesmen of a political movement which was determined to wrest away economic and political power from the monarchy. These activists did their best to argue that democracy would not intrude upon the political peace of the country, nor would it wreak havoc on production and trade. The basic analytical apparatus that those spokesmen erected still occupies centre stage in the analytical core of present-day economics.

That said, it is also true that a quite different portrait of economics emerges from the pages of the most prestigious scholarly journals of economics; likewise from book-length publications of economists, a significant number of whom are Nobel Prize Laureates. The content of this body of literature seems to rarely find its way to the classroom. This might be related to the fact that professional journal articles typically come with an extensive mathematical apparatus that is beyond the reach of the majority of undergraduate students.

The diversity that one would find in that wider range of professional literature is in fact quite remarkable. At one end of the spectrum sit academic economists such as Tony Atkinson and Nobel Prize Laureates George Akerlof, Amartya Sen, Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz. All have devoted much of their academic careers to in-depth study of wealth and income inequality. At the other end of the spectrum are Nobel Prize Laureate economists who subscribe to the Chicago School of Economic Thought. For instance, Robert Lucas, a 1995 Nobel Prize Laureate and prominent member of the Chicago School of Economic Thought, has noted that he has no interest whatsoever in the study of inequality. Worse still, as Paul Krugman notes in his 2014 publication in the New York Review of Books, Lucas describes the study of inequality of wealth and income as ‘poisonous’ (Krugman, 2014).

Introduction

The social and economic characteristics of neighborhoods in Detroit were influenced tremendously by the city's bankruptcy, which made conditions for a large segment of the Detroit population much more difficult. Many residents of Black and Hispanic neighborhoods were exposed to more poverty and higher rates of unemployment. Some residents had more difficulty finding jobs in higher occupations at the management and professional levels (Ihlanfeldt and Sjoquist, 1991). Other residents were not residing in the same neighborhoods as highly educated residents and they experienced wage inequality. Some residents had difficulty becoming homeowners, and those who did own their home often had a lower home value.

When such conditions exist, it is quite common for residents to search for neighborhoods and places that will improve their quality of life, even if this means moving away from the city and the neighborhood where they have lived most of their lives. Urban geographers call this search by residents the geography of opportunity (Rosenbaum, 1995; Rosenbaum, Reynolds, and De Luca, 2002; Goering and Feins, 2003; Galster, 2017). The movement away from the city has also been called the spatial mobility alternative (Darden and Thomas, 2013: 298–317). In Darden and Thomas’ Detroit: Race Riots, Racial Conflicts, and Efforts to Bridge the Racial Divide (2013), the argument was made, citing migration theory, that residents often move due to two major factors: (1) push, and (2) pull (Greenwood, 1985; Darden and Thomas, 2013). The push factors impacting residents in Detroit include the already-mentioned factors, plus the low quality of education provided by the Detroit public schools and the lack of affordable quality housing in most neighborhoods. The research questions that this chapter aims to answer are whether the quality of life changed for residents of Detroit after bankruptcy, and what were the social and economic characteristics of municipalities in the suburbs compared to social and economic characteristics of the neighborhoods in Detroit.

Introduction

Since 2005, researchers and scientists in Aotearoa New Zealand who seek public funding for their work have been encouraged to situate their research in relation to the government's Vision Mātauranga (VM) policy. VM seeks to ‘unlock the science and innovation potential of Māori knowledge, resources and people’ through investment in Māori knowledge, people, resources, partnerships, and improved relations between Māori people who are indigenous to Aotearoa New Zealand, and the British Crown, represented by the New Zealand government (Ministry of Research Science and Technology, 2007). VM builds from the premise that ‘Māori success is New Zealand's success’, and the policy incentivises researchers to work with and engage with mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) in the Aotearoa New Zealand research, science, and innovation (RSI) sector. VM also supports those including mātauranga (Māori knowledge) within public outreach and science communication. Today, there is an expectation that public conferences and seminar series will include sessions on mātauranga Māori. Museum displays, such as the permanent Te Taiao exhibition at Te Papa Tongarewa: Museum of New Zealand, engage both science and mātauranga. National broadcasting imperatives to produce media in te reo Māori (the Māori language) along with VM policy saw the funding, production, broadcast, and international distribution of the television show Project Mātauranga (Douglas 2012; 2013), which ‘celebrates Māori innovation in the science sector’. Each half-hour programme showcases how mātauranga Māori is working alongside Western science (Mercier et al, 2014, p 70). Collaboration is not trivial, and many have written about the distinctions between mātauranga and science (Roberts, 1996; Jackson and Mercier, 2020; Morgan and Manuel, 2020) and explored Māori philosophy's uniqueness (Mika, 2012; Jackson, 2013; Stewart, 2021a).

The New Zealand education sector and education outreach initiatives have engaged both mātauranga and science for decades: in curriculum design for Māori language immersion and bilingual schools, within schools and universities, tertiary outreach to primary and secondary students, and cross-sector initiatives designed to ‘inspire Māori and Pacific students to see themselves as scientists’ (Mercier van Berkel, 2021, p 231). The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) Wellington Regional Science Fair has for nearly a decade offered prizes to students whose experiments or exhibits engage te reo Māori and mātauranga Māori. From 2024 onwards, the mainstream secondary school science curriculum is expected to include mātauranga.

India

• I1: Indian expert, New Delhi, 18 October 2013.

• I2: Retired Nepalese diplomat, New Delhi, 29 October 2013.

• I3: Afghan academic, New Delhi, 31 October 2013.

• I4: Indian scholar, New Delhi, 12 November 2013.

• I5: Retired Indian diplomat, New Delhi, 14 November 2013.

• I6: Former high-ranking government official, New Delhi, 14 November 2013.

• I7: Former high-ranking government official, New Delhi, 22 November 2013.

• I8: Indian scholar, New Delhi, 26 November 2013.

• I9: Indian scholar, online, 8 November 2022.

• I10: Indian scholar, online, 15 November 2022.

• I11: Afghan scholar, online, 16 November 2022.

• I12: Indian scholar, online, 18 November 2022.

• I13: Nepalese scholar, online, 20 November 2022.

Germany

• G1: Senior German diplomat, Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, 20 April 2015.

• G2: Expert, German Council on Foreign Relations, Berlin, 21 April 2015.

• G3: Expert, German Council on Foreign Relations, Berlin, 21 April 2015.

• G4: Expert, Federal Academy for Security Policy, Berlin 22 April 2015.

• G5: German government official, Federal Chancellery, Berlin, 23 April 2015.

• G6: Senior German diplomat, Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, 23 April 2015.

• G7: German diplomat, Federal Foreign Office, Berlin 23 April 2015.

• G8: German expert, Berlin, 24 April 2015.

• G9: German government official, Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, Berlin, 24 April 2015.

• G10: German government official, Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, Berlin, 24 April 2015.

• G11: German academic, Hamburg, 27 April 2015.

• G12: German academic, Hamburg, 27 April 2015.

• G13: German expert, telephone interview, 29 April 2015.

• G14: German academic, telephone interview, 12 May 2015.

Brazil

• B1: Expert on Brazilian foreign and defence policy, online, 5 July 2022.

• B2: Scholar based in Chile, online, 14 July 2022.

• B3: Brazilian scholar, online, 23 August 2022.

• B4: Brazilian academic and former government adviser, online, 8 September 2022.

• B5: Colombian scholar, online, 16 September 2022.

• B6: Brazilian scholar, online, 19 September 2022.

• B7: High-ranking officer in the Brazilian Armed Forces, online, 26 September 2022.

• B8: Scholar based in Brazil, online, 27 September 2022.

Dialogue cannot be a panacea for all conflict challenges, nor did the social leaders and community members engaging with our project expect it to be. Their main priority was to find pragmatic ways of addressing ongoing problems and bringing improvements to their territories, often through de-escalating ongoing violent conflicts and finding strategies to avoid overt confrontation. Many participants shared concerns that latent tensions were being intensified by the failure to implement key parts of the peace agreement. Yet, we found that a broad range of social actors saw value in community-driven peacebuilding through dialogue. The main aim of this chapter is to introduce how methodological approaches and ethical sensibilities from Participatory Action Research (PAR) can open up opportunities for researchers to work alongside social actors in the co-production of such dialogues, instead of merely documenting them. We focus in particular on the format of diálogos socio-territoriales (DSTs), which the chapter also defines in more depth.

We must begin by recognizing that territorially rooted, dialogue-based modes of participation were not, for the most part, created de novo after 2016. Such efforts have been part of communities’ repertoires of ‘peacebuilding from below’ for decades (Jaramillo Marín et al, 2018). Community-based organizations have frequently created and convened participatory spaces when state actors have proved unresponsive or unable to interpret their claims (Archila, 2019). Yet, these dialogues have not been adequately recognized either by the literature on peacebuilding, or by the national peace agreement's promises of citizen involvement in the construction of ‘territorial peace’. In many cases, the invented spaces of dialogue that communities have sustained in the ‘post-conflict’ period have been a continuation of, or have built upon the foundations of, those previous efforts. They have also continued to adapt to changing (post-)conflict circumstances, in doing so producing innovations that have opened up further avenues for participation, the construction of peace and pursuit of life with dignity.

This chapter consists of four sections. The first outlines the Improbable Dialogues project from which this book emerges, situating it in the context of receding violence and increasing political optimism that at first followed the signing of the peace agreement. The second section briefly outlines the project's roots in the Latin American tradition of PAR as developed in the pioneering work of Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda, and explains how we applied these principles critically in our approach to community engagement.

Before we move on to developing explanations for the varying occurrence of reluctance in world politics, we need to develop a sound conceptualization of reluctance. So far, this term has been used in a rather casual manner, and such unspecific usage has made the term not particularly useful beyond mere description. By contrast, if appropriately conceptualized, ‘reluctance’ can yield analytical benefits by helping us to make sense of the widespread indecisiveness and muddling through that can frequently be observed in contemporary international politics. Conceptual clarity is indispensable if we want to make sense of this phenomenon and to adequately operationalize it for empirical analysis.

The conceptualization of reluctance builds on and combines different approaches to concept reconstruction and concept building, which are briefly discussed in the next section. The actual conceptualization exercise proceeds as follows. First, based on a qualitative content analysis of selected International Relations (IR) literature that explicitly uses the notion of reluctance, I inductively identify the key issues usually associated with this term. This helps as a first approach to delineating the broader semantic field of reluctance, and thereby contributes to concept reconstruction, as suggested by Sartori (1984: 41–50). Based on this broader semantic field, in a second step I move on to discussing the related but distinct notions of exceptionalism, isolationism, under-aggression, under-balancing, buckpassing and free-riding – and I highlight why we need reluctance as an additional concept to make sense of a distinct set of phenomena. Based on the insights gained from situating the concept of reluctance in the existing IR literature, I proceed with the actual concept-building exercise, which follows the guidelines outlined by Goertz (2006) in his work on social science concepts. I therefore discuss the negative poles of reluctance – that is, what reluctance is not; I develop two core ‘secondary’, constitutive dimensions of reluctance; and I operationalize these two dimensions, developing indicators for empirical analysis. In a nutshell, I conceive of reluctance as a specific way of doing foreign policy that involves a hesitant attitude and a certain recalcitrance about conforming to the expectations articulated by others.

The aim of the book has been to provide a detailed analysis of patterns of development in Detroit after bankruptcy and determine whether or not these developments have been equitable and inclusive. Over the course of the last nine chapters I have measured: (1) changes in trends toward an inclusive city; (2) whether more racial equality occurred after bankruptcy; and (3) whether the data and analyses answered the question of whether Detroit met its overall objective of becoming a more racially inclusive city after bankruptcy.

I started the book by focusing on the antecedents to bankruptcy. On July 18, 2013, Black lawyer Kevyn Orr was appointed Emergency Manager by Republican Governor of Michigan Rick Snyder. Orr's task was to conduct research on the predominantly Black city and recommend a legal decision to declare the City of Detroit bankrupt. According to Bloomberg News (2013), Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr rushed the $18 billion bankruptcy petition into federal court on July 18 just minutes before a state judge could stop him. The decision by the Emergency Manager made the City of Detroit the largest city in the US to experience bankruptcy.

Chapter 1 examined the historical, economic, social, demographic, racial, and non cooperative relationship between the State of Michigan and the City of Detroit that led to the bankruptcy decision. There is evidence to suggest that the seeds for Detroit's bankruptcy were planted over time by the actions of investors, who reduced their investments in the City of Detroit and increased investment in the suburbs over a period of 60 years (Darden et al, 1987). These actions resulted in increased unemployment in the city, the outmigration of the white middle class, a decline in property values, an increase in housing abandonment, and a reduction in tax revenue for city services (Gillette, 2014). Instead of financial assistance from the State, Detroit, like other cities in Michigan, was faced with a reduction in revenue sharing (Lavelle, 2014; Sapotichne et al, 2015). Such disinvestment by the private sector and a reduction in revenue sharing by the State made the financial problems of the city very difficult to solve (McFarland and Pagano, 2014).

Instead of providing the financial support needed, the Governor used a new, stronger Republican-passed Emergency Manager Law in 2011 to remove the democratically elected African American Mayor and the City Council from power (Pew Charitable Trusts, 2013).

Introduction

Recent trends in science communication have demonstrated that there is an increasing need for scientific information as well as the ability to access it. This has been especially true during the COVID-19 pandemic, where the extent of misinformation and disinformation (Ahinkora et al, 2020) has been a source of concern, with information-sharing as a public prerogative no longer monopolised by scientists and science communicators. The complexity of the current communication ecology is exacerbated by the diversity of available sources of information and the ever-increasing need to be first, right, and credible in sharing information. This era thus requires reflective thinking about the contextualisation of science communication epistemologies.

There has been increased appreciation of the fact that many scientific and social innovations that have the potential to empower society and facilitate social transformation can only achieve that aim through inclusive engagement methodologies and approaches. For example, Chivers and Hargreaves (2018) note that inclusive public engagement and participation methodologies are instrumental in realising socio-technical transitions. In the Global South, scientists and science communicators are increasingly acknowledging the significance of socially inclusive methodologies and approaches that will enhance participation in knowledge creation, knowledge-brokering, and science communication systems (Covello, 2021). Their transformative efforts are however hampered by the reality that most of the epistemologies and science communication insights are Eurocentric and fall short of being contextualised to Global South contexts. This lack of contextualised approaches results in the unequal distribution of and access to opportunities for effective public engagement with the processes and outcomes of science in the Global South.

The continued marginalisation of local insights through Eurocentric approaches to science communication calls for evidence-based advocacy for the advancement of socially inclusive approaches to science communication. In as much as the deficit model is often defined as one-way communication from scientists to the public without acknowledging other knowledge forms (Wibeck, 2013), this chapter argues that in marginalising the Indigenous knowledge systems in the Global South as a knowledge and communication base, the Eurocentric dominance of science communication in these regions is also in effect a problematic manifestation of the deficit model in practice.

Drawing from practical examples of science communication in the Global South, this chapter provides insights into how Eurocentric approaches to science communication, applied in these regions of the world, miss out on the opportunity to harness Indigenous knowledge systems.