Science communication is important in modern knowledge societies. Many societies around the world now expect scientific knowledge and technological development to be at the core of economic growth and welfare, and hope that science will find solutions to challenges such as climate change and scarcity of energy, food, and water. Such expectations imply that science communication is significant in at least three ways.
First of all, science communication is important for the welfare of individuals, organisations and nations. Many countries invest a large part of their GDP in finding solutions to problems in society, and science does indeed often deliver crucial new knowledge and technologies that change our lives for the better. Such knowledge has to be communicated to its potential users in order to take effect. Knowledge about disease prevention, water resources, or energy efficient technologies will only improve the life of citizens if it is communicated to relevant people who can put it to good use, for instance by developing new products. Knowledge about galaxies far away, or the intricacies of metabolic pathways, might not have immediate uses in the same way, but such basic scientific knowledge still needs to be communicated if it is to have effects on the way we as citizens understand our lives and our situation on earth.
Second, science communication is important for democracy. How can people contribute to decision-making in a knowledge society if they do not have a solid connection with the basis for many decisionsāscientific knowledge itself? Such a connection is not just about understanding or the ability to correctly explain scientific facts. Rather it implies that citizens should know about how scientific knowledge is produced as well as about its limitations and consequences. 1 This is not a small demand. If, however, science is one of the most important productive forces in current societies, citizens have to be familiar with the way it works. Science should be debated in democratic institutions by the general public, or we risk creating societies which are more and more polarised between those who understand, use, and make decisions about science and those who do not.
Finally, science communication is important because it relates to culture and identity. Much of everyday life is dependent on technoscience, from the food we eat to our transportation systems, communication technologies, and healthcare. Sometimes the scientific content of these aspects of life is invisible, while at other times its importance is painfully explicit (such as if we need to talk to medical professionals about the best treatment for a particular cancer diagnosis). Most of the time, however, science is somewhere in the background. It shapes thinking about social issues such as climate change, nutrition, or food security, but our experience of it is intermingled with all the other concerns that we, as citizens of knowledge societies, have. It is part of how we understand ourselves, an integral aspect of the cultural fabric in which we exist. For some people it is centralābeing knowledgeable about science can be a crucial identity markerāwhereas for others, it is blended in with other values and ways of knowing. At its core, science communication is an activity that allows us to make sense of science and thereby the societies in which we live. 2
It is this idea of science as central to the culture of contemporary knowledge societies that is the starting point for this book. Science communication is not simply about making difficult things more simple, and it is something more than the exchange of scientific knowledge from those who know to those who do not. It is an integral part of society which has huge impacts on welfare, democracy and culture. Many writers who have discussed science communication have explored the importance of science communication for the effective translation of scientific knowledge into useful solutions to social problemsāthe issue of science communicationās role in social welfare. 3 This book, therefore, focuses on the latter two issues, democracy and culture. We are interested in the relationship between science communication, culture, identity, and citizenship. Science communication, we will argue, is tied to organisations, identities, spaces, emotions, careers, futures and many other aspects of social life. It is not something that should be imagined and studied as a primarily personal or individual process, but as involving collectives and constituting cultures.
What is science communication?
What are we thinking of when we talk about āscience communicationā? An example, the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) event held in Copenhagen in June 2014, can help explain how we use this term. ESOF takes place every second year in a major European city. In 2014, it combined a science policy convention with a public festival, called Science in the City, which included different kinds of science communication activities, from a Teddy Bear Hospital run by medical students to an outdoor photo exhibition of underwater life in the Norwegian oceans. Some 40 thousand people visited Science in the City over its six-day course, making the ESOF event as a whole a mix of academics, journalists, families, school groups, policy makers, activists, artists, politicians, and PR teams. Depending on where you were at any particular moment, ESOF could be experienced as a slick think-tank discussion, a traditional public lecture by an eminent scientist, or a lively workshop run by passionate activists in a space decorated with art and hacked technologies. If you wandered into the main ESOF convention hall you would find booths about the Estonian Research Council, the research carried out by the company Johnson and Johnson, or the network for alumni of Marie Curie Research Fellowships. The event as a whole brought together bored teenagers, journalists with deadlines, high-profile policy makers, and enthusiastic university students, taking part in anything from workshops that encouraged you to move your body in order to understand scientific concepts to debates about scienceās role in society.
ESOF involved many activities that we think of as science communication. This was not just the public-facing events: the workshops for schoolchildren, public lectures, or hands-on demonstrations. We do not want to distinguish between the activities that took place in the convention hall for ESOF delegates and the Science in the City displays and engagement activities. All of the audiences present at ESOF, whether schoolchildren, policy makers, or scientists themselves, were important recipients of the messages about science put forward at the event. The point here is that science communication happens in many different contexts and is designed, consciously and unconsciously, for many different types of audiences. It also communicates diverse things and has many different effects. At a gathering such as ESOF participants do not just learn about specific scientific endeavours and facts, but engage in communication about, for instance, the meaning of the word science, the identities of organisations like the EU or particular universities, or the opportunities and value of a scientific career. Science communication is consumed as part of everyday life, whether that is personal (a day out with your family) or professional (the opportunity to support your employer by communicating your research).
We define science communication as organised actions aiming to communicate scientific knowledge, methodology, processes or practices in settings where non-scientists are a recognised part of the audience. 4 This is a broad definition. It includes mass media presentations of science; information materials aimed at patients or user groups of particular technologies; science in museums; science festivals, events, and workshops; public lectures and debates; and science online and in social media. Science communication therefore takes place anywhere from the stop-smoking leaflets given to you by your doctor to the āI Fucking Love Scienceā Facebook page or when governments run consultations on GM crops or nanotechnology in order to gauge public views on new technologies.
We are using the term āscienceā, but we could just as easily talk about research communication. Science communication is an established term in a way that research communication is not, and we use the phrase for that reason. Research, however, suggests a broader set of practices than science (in that respect itās like the German word āWissenschaftā, which also includes humanities and social science). Traditionally, there has been rather little attention to the communication of social scientific or humanities research, although this has begun to change. 5 While acknowledging that most practice and study in this area is about natural science and medicine, we do not see our definition as excluding communication of other forms of research-based knowledge. Similarly, we use āscienceā as a shorthand for ātechnoscienceā. Modern science is intricately interwoven with technology, and science communication often relates to aspects of technology and technical development. 6
What are we not using the term āscienceā communication to refer to? Our definition does not directly include formal science education. This is because this area is a well-defined field in its own right; here, then, it will not be our primary interest. It also does not include science fiction or other uses of science in fictional films, TV or books, or accidental references to science, for instance, in daily life or policy discourses. The reason for this is that we do not want to make the definition so broad that it loses its meaning. If science communication is everything related to science, then it covers so much that it is impossible to talk about it coherently. However, it is obvious that coverage of science in fiction, or its role in popular culture and discourse, is important for how people make sense of science, especially for those who do not have many other connections to science. Depending on the context, then, it may be necessary to recognise that there are other areas of culture and communication which have to be included in discussions of particular examples or aspects of science communication.
Science communication as ecosystem
Science communication is not straightforward. One metaphor to capture its complexity within contemporary knowledge societies is that of an ecosystem. The Science in the City festival was home to research-oriented events, exhibitions, workshops, debates and demonstrations, while at the ESOF policy convention communication took place as university PR officers networked, companies boosted their brands by handing out free pens, or research organisations showed videos about their activities. Thinking of these diverse activities as part of an ecosystem of science communication is useful for capturing the heterogeneity and multiplicity of this landscape of science communication, more generally as well as at ESOF specifically. We do not use this, we should emphasise, to imagine a stable structure in which everything has a particular place and is connected in very specific ways, but to signify a space teeming with different life forms, all relating to each other in different ways. If science communication is an ecosystem, it has many niches in which different practices of communication sustain themselves and others in a complex web of interdependence and autonomy.
Some of these niches are well established and have been home to science communication for a long time. This is true, for instance, of the media, which has its own tradition of science communication, both with regard to science journalism as a part of general news coverage and in specialist science documentaries and programmes. 7 In recent years, there have been dramatic changes in the media system, driven by digitalisation and the development of social media platforms. 8 These changes have enabled an enormous increase in content produced by many different actors including citizens, activists, organisations, research institutions and other professional producers. We have already mentioned the Facebook page āI Fucking love Scienceā, but other additions include a growing field of science podcasts, TED talks, and YouTube videos as well as the use of Twitter (e.g., to live tweet science press conferences or events). Universities and research organisations have also expanded their communications departments and the channels of communication they use over the last decades.
Another well-established form of science communication is the public lecture or popular book written by an individual scientist. In many ways, such formats have been the most classical and widespread way to increase public understanding of science over more than a century. 9 This is often seen as the quintessential format of science communication and is one reason why many people think of science communication as something that is primarily done by individual scientists on the basis of their own ambition to inform publics about their field. Scientists are still important for science communication, but new formats have been added to the traditional written or oral presentation. This includes different kinds of ...
