Can you teach someone to be funny? Is it wrong to laugh at things that are challenging or upsetting? How can we use humour to help understand and make meaning from current university research? These are the type of questions being asked, and answered, on You’re Up Next, a new …
When you think about a Bright Club event what is the first thing that comes to mind? Science communication and comedy? Yes, of course – but what else? Think back to the last time you attended Bright Club. Maybe you remember making your way to The Black Gate in Galway, …
Five NUI Galway public engagement and education initiatives have been awarded funding of more than €175,000 through Science Foundation Ireland’s Discover Programme, to fund projects dedicated to educating and engaging with 112,000 members of the public in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) in 2020. The funding awards were announced …
We’re very happy to report the first academic paper about Bright Club Ireland, which was published over the holidays in Science Communication! As we say in our abstract: Bright Club is a public engagement initiative bringing together research communication and the performing arts since its inception in London in 2009. …
Sometimes, science can feel like a joke. Experiments don’t work, simulations produce physically impossible outcomes, and a question that you thought would take two weeks to answer instead can take two years. All too often we hide the messiness of science, presenting progress as linear rather than admitting the missteps …
What’s it like to be an academic speaker at Bright Club? Is it fun, scary, inspiring, or life-changing? We chatted to several former Bright Club speakers so that they can tell you themselves about how it feels to be part of Bright Club: If you are interested in speaking at …
Do you saunter on stage and smile reassuringly at the front row? Have you ever cheerfully announced that most of your presentation was ‘off the cuff’? Do you, prior to a presentation, look in the mirror and say, ‘Well if it doesn’t go well, what of it?’, and then think …
In the Autumn of 2019, Bright Club Ireland, the variety night uniting academic research and comedy, will fund two comedians / performers to develop material related to climate action in collaboration with a researcher from this field and the Climate Ambassador Programme. Given the urgent but overwhelming nature of this …
What an incredible experience! In the world of science communication, Bright Club is one of the best experiences any scientist can have. On its own website, they define themselves as “a variety night for lateral minds, where researchers become comedians for a night! Each event features academics from science, humanities, …
You probably didn’t realise it, but comedy is an exact science. The proof was discovered by Mark Twain, and it can be described as fundamentally as the relationship between energy and matter: (Comedy = Tragedy X Time) If we take this to be true, then scientists are surely some of …
