Introduction: what is a textbook of science communication?
Science communication studies have attracted continuously growing attention since the first edition of this handbook was published in 2008. The output of and outlets for journal papers on science communication topics are increasing steadily. Training courses, educational programmes and research clusters are generating demand for practice manuals and study resources. While this is a benign setting for publications like this volume, the shifting sands of science communication practice and policy create significant challenges in offering a settled view of the field. For some, this is one of the principal attractions of science communication â that it is a developing field with moving and porous boundaries and intellectually stimulating challenges. New and potentially fruitful perspectives, often very different from each other, are being offered periodically. At the same time, some offerings appear ânewâ only because they have paid inadequate attention to the history of the field.
This handbook has aimed in each edition to summarise the state-of-the-art of science communication studies at the given time, but also in historical contexts, and acknowledging the complexities and contingencies of professional, volunteer and institutional practices in the field. Realising this aim in the situations we have faced raises an awkward question: What is a textbook or handbook of science communication? The notion of handbook is, at least semantically, related to that of a manual: the book is a guide for the work of the hand. This is at the origin of an understanding of a handbook as a set of tools and tips or a portfolio of strategies to communicate science (cf. Wilson 1998). This handbook tackles a series of critical questions that every science communicator and student in this field should consider: why, for whom, in which contexts and with which consequences is science communication shared and performed? Answering these questions implies an understanding of the actors, institutions, media, and contexts involved.
So, our imagined reader is studying the field, though not necessarily as a classroom student. The classroom is the context in which the textbook is situated more specifically, at least in English. In German, the textbook is Handbuch and âtextbook scienceâ (Handbuchwissenschaft) is the term coined by German scholar Ludwik Fleck in his classic Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935). For Fleck, textbooks are where you should look for the petrified, solid-rock, state of knowledge in a given scientific domain. In papers, conferences and discussions among specialists of each field, knowledge is moving, uncertain, complex and controversial. In school and university textbooks and popular contexts, it is simplified, black-boxed, taken for granted. For Thomas Kuhn (1962), who drew great inspiration from Fleckâs work, this is the static, frozen picture of a paradigm. Traditionally, textbooks were in the same relation to the dynamic of contemporary research as astronomical images to stars â their light taking so long to reach us that what we see may be million years old. The situation of the textbook has changed dramatically during recent decades. Changes in communication technology as well as in research and communication practices have made multiple levels of science content and discussion potentially and actually available to students and lay people. The student that Fleck or Kuhn conceived was fixed in place, with a textbook and a teacher as their guiding star, plus maybe some stardust from popularisation as complementary source of information â or more likely, inspiration and fascination. In our age, the textbook is just one, and often marginal, piece of an extraordinary armoury of sources available at the touch of a fingertip. Thus, a student of physics, for example, can easily be exposed (not just in the web, but also in science festivals) to harsh controversial contemporary discussions about quantum theory that are omitted from textbooks; a student of virology may consider her/his textbook obsolete since it does not deal with the coronavirus pandemic, and so on. In this communicative landscape, the very notion of textbooks and handbooks should be addressed in a new and different way.
If this poses a challenge to any research domain, it is even more challenging in a domain like science communication. Even in Fleckâs and Kuhnâs terms, it was never fully clear what a handbook of science communication should look like, posing difficult questions to authors and teachers: what is the state of the art of science communication? Does such a thing exist? Are we going to present yesterdayâs frozen picture or todayâs blurred, moving picture? In recent years, some scholars in the field have adopted the handle of âscience of science communicationâ. Would this lead, in textbooks or coursework, to teaching the âhistory of the science of science communicationâ, or even âthe science of the science of science communicationâ?
While we are aware of those challenges, we do not have a straightforward solution. Our vision of a twenty-first century textbook in science communication is certainly not Kuhnian. Yet, we do not take the opposite â and often widespread â position that we should get rid of textbooks altogether. The first two editions of this handbook, together with other texts in the field, have been widely used and referenced. There is, we believe, still a place for handbooks in twenty-first century science and twenty-first century science communication. And, actually, based on our experience, we could go so far as arguing that handbooks in science communication have never been more needed than today, perhaps not any more as a guiding star but more as a compass and map to navigate in an ever vaster and more open ocean of resources.
Since the publication of the first edition of this handbook, comparable and related volumes have been produced by other publishers, e.g., Oxford Handbook of the Science of Science Communication (Jamieson et al. 2017) and Science Communication (LeĂmöllmann et al. 2020), which was published in a series of handbooks on communication science. From our present publisher have also come the Routledge Handbook of Environment and Communication (Hansen and Cox 2015) and, co-edited by two contributors to this volume, the Routledge Handbook of Art, Science and Technology Studies (Rogers et al. 2021). The multiplicity and variety of such publications should contribute to contemporary debates in a continuous and dynamic conversation between what research and scholarly reflection can teach us and what we can learn by relating them to present and future challenges. Some classic themes â the roles of science journalism, of scientific experts, and of museums, also the challenges of citizen engagement, the meaning of scientific culture â are still, and perhaps even more, central and our approach to these themes can now benefit from the knowledge of decades of research and reflection.
Divergences and debates
Over the past two decades, institutionalisation, professionalisation and diversification have become increasingly evident in both the study and practice of science communication. These trends help solidify the infrastructure and strengthen the culture of science communication, but they also can create tensions, and these have the potential to be constructive or disruptive. For example, the formats and actors of science communication can be seen to diversify, in part at least as a consequence of media innovations, while the professionalisation of science communication through training and qualifications and its institutionalisation in research centres, higher education institutions and state agencies tends to support more or less standardised strategies. The practices of volunteer science communicators may not always sit comfortably with those of the newly emerging cadre of science communication professionals. How these tensions are negotiated in the coming years will have a critical influence on the development of the field of science communication. These tensions relate also to the challenges to science communication research that we identified in the introduction to the second edition of this handbook, including those we named as New mediations, Collapsing communication contexts, Plural science and plural publics and Quality and evaluation. All of these have been taken up in research and commentary of recent years, from various angles and with various outcomes.
As testified by our previous and present contributors, also by an anthology of âmajor worksâ in the field (Bucchi and Trench 2016), history of science, anthropology, media studies, social psychology and other fields have all enriched our understanding of science communication and strengthened the quality of theoretical reflection and empirical research. Science communication studies include philosophically distinct tendencies to emphasise audience analysis through social research methods, or to emphasise understanding changing institutional contexts through sociological analysis or yet to emphasise interpretation of media and other social representations of science through discourse analysis and other cultural studies approaches. We might hope to see divergent tendencies in science communication research as signs of maturation of our field, but much depends too on how these divergences are articulated. This relates to a discussion of a decade ago of science communication as a discipline. In a contribution to that discussion, we referred to science communication as âan emerging disciplineâ (Trench and Bucchi 2010). We now consider that this view of science communication as a discipline-in-the-making should give way to one of science communication as an inherently, even joyously, interdisciplinary field.
From the early 2010s, the case has been made, mainly in the US, that there is or can be a âscience of science communicationâ. This proposition has been put forward by leading scholars in the field, has attracted others from neighbouring fields, notably political communication and social psychology, and gathered support from major funders. In considering the feasibility of a âscience of science communicationâ we need to address the larger question, particularly pertinent in the English language, Is there a science of communication? In French and German, for example, this is hardly a question: les sciences and Wissenschaft cover almost the full range of formal knowledge production. These designations of science include what is in English generally bracketed out as social sciences and humanities, to distinguish them from hard or exact science, namely the physical, material and life sciences. Philosophically, that distinction resides in the separation of the subject-researcher from the object-nature; this does not apply in the study of society, language and culture, for example, in which the researcher is themselves thoroughly enmeshed (for more on this, see also Cassidy in this volume). For there to be a communication science, this distinction needs at least to be acknowledged. But some enthusiasts for the science of science communication (e.g., Kahan 2015) argue just to get on with the work, and not to dwell on the definitions. A more recent collected volume, published in a German series on communication science, refers to science of science communication and science communication research as interchangeable, drawing on decades-long disciplines in the humanities, notably linguistics (LeĂmöllmann et al. 2020).
A longer-running, though related, argument has been collecting strength through the decade, that there is a harmful gap between research and practice that needs to be closed, principally by reorienting research. A commissioned report (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine 2017) set out an agenda for research in the field that could support more effective science communication practice. In this agenda, achieving effectiveness is strongly linked with applying notions of strategic communication to science communication, that is, targeting closely defined publics with tailored messages. The science communication research underlying this approachâas reflected in the NASEM reportâs bibliography â presents the field as recently emerging and largely US-based; the strategic pitch for political effectiveness reduces the history, geography and complexity of the field.
Some protagonists in this debate seek to ascribe to research a role in service of practice or in provision of evidence to guide practice, while others insist on the relative autonomy of research as a practice in itself. There are echoes here of a debate in communication studies over 60 years ago between âadministrativeâ and âcriticalâ research, the former dedicated to solving âreal-worldâ problems, the latter more focused on generating new theories and concepts. In science communication, there is, at the very least, a widespread awareness of the pertinence of this relationship. However, some forms of the argument for closing the gap appear as a case for a full instrumentalisation of research serving practice.
Much science communication research is properly directed to working out conceptual relationships that may, sometimes remotely, underpin approaches to policy and practice. Understanding how science communication really works means bringing the tools and theories of social research in general to bear, and the resulting analyses may often not translate to practical recommendations. LeĂmöllmann (2020: 679) observes that the perceived gap between research and practice in science communication is the
the same gap between science and its transfer to laypeople or practitioners that other fields grapple with ⊠Not every practical problem is examinable with scientific methods, and not every scientific outcome from science of science communication research can be translated into practical advice.
More recently, advocacy has emerged for âevidence-based science communicationâ, as a way of addressing the research-practice âdouble disconnectâ (Jensen and Gerber 2020). This argument has clearly some relevance since it would be unreasonable to practice science communication today as if the rich body of knowledge and results produced by research in this area did not exist. This is, indeed, also what this volume is about: to lay out a common repertoire and repository of empirical study and theoretical reflection. This has obvious value for readers who will engage themselves in research on science communication but also for readers who are, in different ways, professionally involved in science communication activities: as scientists, communicators, staff working in research organisations, public institutions, policy makers, companies, media outlets. Being exposed to existing research on science communication may help them better understand their roles and practices a...
