This projects organizes the European Researcher's Night (ERN) in 16 cities in France. The general goal is to strenghen the links between science and society.
Research and Innovation are essential tools to face climate change, rising pollution, social divide and other challenges that we have to deal with today, and are expected to aggravate in the future decades. While researchers are already extremely active on these matters the public does not quite understand their work. But this does not impede it from being trustful toward them. Media debates during the pandemic showed that people can be surprised by the uncertainty inherent to research. This could contradict their vision of a stabilized science. In the project FREETOACT we create the room for public and researchers to meet, and to focus on “science in the making”, to shift from a “public communication of Science” paradigm to a “public understanding of Research” paradigm. For that, it is essential to create the adequate conditions and close encounters that are more conducive to deconstructing fixed opinions.
The project resulted in 2 successive years of organizing the ERN in France, in 16 cities. A total of 3000 researchers, 72000 visitors, and 40000 schoolchildren participated in our events. More than 350 activities have been organized to adapt to all publics and to researchers. All researchers have been trained, accompanied by science communication professionals to ensure the quality of the exchanges. In our event, people stayed 2h25 on average, and 70% of their interactions with researchers were real conversations they were implicated in, and not only passive listening.
Our presence online, focused on giving floor to researchers even in the awarness campaign, results in more than 8 million views, on Youtube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and X.
Our project continues to inspire many other institutions that are not in the consortium to reproduce and adapt our ideas, and give more part to real exchange with researchers in their activities.
