This chapter seeks to understand the psychological facilitators of active community engagement with the public health response to successful responses to disease outbreaks. It summarises research on the key psychological predictors of engagement in protective behaviours in the COVID-19 pandemic, it describes how mutual aid groups have helped people to shield and self-isolate during the pandemic, and it summarises research on the factors that have sustained these groups over time. It draws out the general principles and the policy and practice implications that emerge from the research on this topic. The focus is largely on evidence from the UK, although many of the points covered in this chapter apply equally to the situation in other countries.

Understanding the ‘human dimensions of wildlife’ – how humans value wildlife, how they affect and are affected by wildlife, and what triggers people to be willing to live with a translocated species – are the first building blocks and vital steps towards the long-term success of a conservation translocation project. However, to be fully meaningful, the understanding of the human dimensions needs to be nested in a social engagement process, which has too often been overlooked or poorly designed by conservation practitioners. A well-developed engagement process has the power to increase the transparency, credibility, and legitimacy of a decision-making process, thus fostering support for a conservation policy, plan, or project – including a conservation translocation. Nevertheless, planning and running a tailored engagement process are not the final steps. Reporting back and evaluating the process is key to ensuring the success of any public involvement. Such an approach keeps the public engaged over time, increases transparency, and legitimises the decision-making process. ‘One size fits all’ stakeholder engagement approaches typically fail to reflect the specific needs of the unique social dynamics within the system and fall short of reconciliation of the relationships, and disentanglement of the deeper roots of conflict. The ‘Levels of Conflict’ model is one tool used to orientate conservation practitioners and stakeholders to the types and depths of conflict in a given situation. Conservation conflicts are microcosms of larger societal conflicts, and conservation conflict transformation (CCT) provides a way of thinking about, understanding, and actively addressing such conflicts. Practitioners of CCT consider disputes as opportunities to constructively engage with the underlying relationships, decision-making processes, and social systems to create an enabling social environment for effective, lasting, broadly supported conservation efforts.

The May 2019 IPBES emphasised the scale of the current biodiversity crisis and the need for transformative change, but highlighted that the tools exist to enable this change. Conservation translocation is an increasingly used tool that involves people deliberately moving and releasing organisms where the primary goal is conservation – it includes species reintroductions, reinforcements, assisted colonisations and ecological replacements. It can be complex, expensive, time consuming, and sometimes controversial, but when best practice guidelines are followed it can be a very effective conservation method and a way of exciting and engaging people in environmental issues. Conservation translocations have an important role to play not only in improving the conservation status of individual species but also in ecological restoration and rewilding by moving keystone and other influential species. As the climate continues to change, species with poor dispersal abilities or opportunities will be at particular risk. Assisted colonisation, which involves moving species outside their indigenous range, is likely to become an increasingly used method. It is also a tool that may become increasingly used to avoid threats from the transmission of pathogens. Other more radical forms of conservation translocation, such as ecological replacements, multi-species conservation translocations, and the use of de-extinction and genetic interventions, are also likely to be given stronger consideration within the wider framework of ecological restoration. There have been significant advances in the science of reintroduction biology over the last three decades. However new ways of transferring and sharing such information are needed to enable a wider spectrum of practitioners to have easier access to knowledge and guidance. In the past the biological considerations of conservation translocations have often heavily outweighed the people considerations. However it is increasingly important that socio-economic factors are also built into projects and relevant experts involved to reduce conflict and improve the chances of success. Some level of biological and socio-economic risk will be present for most conservation translocations, but these can often be managed through the use of sensitivity, professionalism, and the application of tried and tested best practice. The role of species reintroduction and other forms of conservation translocations will be an increasingly important tool if we are to restore, and make more resilient, our damaged ecosystems.

This chapter engages with ‘legacy’ in two respects. It argues that Article 15 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), the so-called right to science, has no legacy. It has achieved only marginal real-world impact and remains largely aspirational – all potential. By contrast, Graeme Laurie’s legacy, grounded in the public good and a strong sense of humanism, is significant and informative. Through multiple strands and projects, he has engaged deeply with the social contract between actors in the health setting, developing and refining the tools that could be used to help shape science and science governance in positive ways. Through an exploration of Article 15 ICESCR and select examples of Graeme’s scholarship, this chapter argues that the manifestation of Graeme’s legacy – the calling upon of his legacy – is what we need to generate some positive legacy for the sadly fallow ‘right to science’ articulated in Article 15 ICESCR. If we do this, it might one day have a legacy of its own.

This chapter considers the meaning and role of interdisciplinary approaches to research and teaching in medical law and ethics, itself an inherently interdisciplinary field. It notes that formidable challenges persist, however, especially when navigating methodological and conceptual differences across disciplines, and operating outwith a disciplinary ‘home’. The chapter looks at how complementary strands of diverse specialisms can come together to create the constellation of critical tools needed to address contemporary legal, regulatory and ethical challenges in medicine, health care and the biosciences. In the three case studies, the authors examine the contribution of multi- and interdisciplinary approaches to pedagogy, critical scholarship and the production of practical research outputs, and how these have informed and influenced their own work, with and alongside that of Graeme Laurie. Throughout, the discussions highlight the myriad ways that his research and teaching exemplify the openness of spirit and the intellectual curiosity required to engage meaningfully in interdisciplinarity.

Over the past two centuries, apocalypse and extinction have become powerful secular tropes, and have been given new urgency in the context of escalating global heating and biodiversity loss. This chapter examines how the environmental humanities can analyse, complicate, democratise, and challenge these tropes. It addresses present-day speculations about the future of the biosphere, both within the field, and in wider culture through the activities of groups such as Extinction Rebellion. It explores the entanglements of these speculations with questions of justice, and offers an analysis of relationships humanity, inequality, and catastrophe in Mary Shelley’s novels Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826). The chapter ends with some suggestions about the role of the environmental humanities in an ecological emergency. In particular, it addresses how the field might contribute to the communal task of finding urgent solutions for social-environmental problems, while at the same time maintaining focus on issues of justice and rigorous critique of totalising narratives, including the language of solutions and of apocalypse itself.

Chapter 10: This chapter covers a broad range of practices, from science public engagement events to collaborations between artists and scientists, theatre for young people, drama education initiatives, and global activism projects. Several case studies are examined: first, examples of exhibitions, lectures, and demonstrations focusing on Michael Faraday and the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, and on public autopsy demonstrations as well; second, arts-science collaborations, known as ‘sci-art,’ with reference particularly to the work of Y Touring; and third, theatre and activism in relation to climate change, as exemplified by Climate Change Theatre Action project. The discussion is framed within the author’s own experience as a practitioner working at the boundaries of theatre and science.

This chapter reviews the core issues raised in the book, and suggests points for further research. Silvio Waisbord discusses how media scholarship might best engage publics and how it might best intervene in shaping media and public life. Given the scope and scale of current change in the communication landscape, Waisbord calls on media scholars to revisit the analytical scaffolding and normative arguments that form the basis of the field. He calls on scholars to acknowledge and work to better understand the reality of fragmented media ecologies, heterogeneous forms of public engagement, and fractured public knowledge.