Language and Meanings
Recent years have brought a welcome and needed attention to diversity and inclusion in science communication. This diversity covers language, geography, religion, gender, sexuality — and politics. But with diversity comes complication, where our interest in public communication of science and technology comes in conflict with our identities, our politics, and sometimes even our moral positions.
Language is one of the most fundamental aspects of diversity in science communication. The different terms we use in different languages for our field aren’t simple translations, but actually convey different meanings. “Popularization” isn’t the same as “divulgación”, though it’s close. But the labels of “inclusão social” in Brazil or “apropación social de la ciencia” in Colombia carry a very different meaning about what our goals and methods can be.
The early days of the PCST Network that sponsored the symposium where I spoke were consumed with the French label of “culture scientifique”, an idea about science being perfused throughout culture in a way that the English translation of “scientific culture” doesn’t capture. So language gets us immediately to the challenges of diversity.
Addressing Language Barriers
In many countries, English is the language of elites. If science information is primarily in English, then only the privileged people have access to it, thus increasing the inequality of who has access to the reliable knowledge that science produces. Many of you are working directly to address this, doing your work in Spanish, Portuguese, or other languages besides English. I want to celebrate that, not just because you’re reaching different audiences, but because you’re directly addressing issues of inequality that are at the heart of our attention to diversity.
Citizen science (or what’s increasingly being called “participatory sciences”) also highlights language barriers in science communication. Many of us celebrate citizen science as a way of increasing access to science. But the United States has one of the largest sets of citizen science projects, and none of the major directories of citizen science projects have a way of identifying projects in languages other than English, even though in the United States, Spanish is the home language of more than 12% of the population.
Decolonizing Science Writing
Shifting away from English also raises deeper questions about the basis of our knowledge of the world, and the ways that language reflects culture. The South African science communicator Sibu Biyela has written about how he has tried to enrich stories written in Zulu by not simply translating English words, but by inventing new words or phrases to directly engage Zulu-speakers with the core information and ideas he’s trying to convey.
In the process, he can even correct problems with the English words. Most notably, he doesn’t use the word “dinosaurs”, which means “terrible lizards”. But we know now that many dinosaurs are more like birds or mammals than lizards. So Biyela uses the Zulu words “Isilwane sasemandulo”, which mean “ancient animal”, and then provides context. For Biyela, this is not just about linguistic diversity, but about decolonizing science writing.
Narrative Science Journalism and Ethical Challenges
The scholar Lauren Kilian recently wrote about the ethical challenges of narrative science journalism, especially when the science writer puts herself into the story. Her example is Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The book is about the HeLa cancer cells that have been critical for cancer research for generations. They were taken, without her knowledge, from Henrietta Lacks, a poor African-American woman who was dying of cervical cancer.
Skloot’s book was a huge best-seller, and was made into a movie with Oprah Winfrey. But the book isn’t just about the HeLa cells, or the pain that her family experienced years later in discovering that the cells had been taken and used and commercialized without their permission. It’s also about how Skloot, a young, white journalist with no connection to the African-American community, built relationships with some of the Lacks family in order to write the book.
Kilian notes that what makes narrative journalism work — as with so much of the story-telling that we celebrate in science communication — is the way it draws in the reader. Yet, in writing herself into the story, Skloot was to forever link her experiences as a journalist with the story of the cells and the family she was reporting on, ultimately raising questions about whose story it is to tell.
Diversity and Conflicts of Religion, Values, and Politics
Citizen science also lets me introduce another dimension of diversity: religion, and the meanings that people take away from our science communication activities. Many years ago, I was evaluating a citizen science bird-watching project. The project brought groups to a local science center and helped them learn how to identify different birds. The data they gathered would be used for studies of genetic change, a key element of evolution.
Now, in the United States, many families choose to teach their children at home, instead of sending them to public schools or even to private academies. About 7% of school kids are home-schooled. Families do this for many reasons, but some of the most common reasons are for religious and moral reasons. Families want their children to be educated with a particular religious perspective, and, perhaps more important, to not be exposed to perspectives that challenge their religious beliefs. In particular, that includes not being exposed to evolution, which conflicts with biblical explanations of the origins of humans.
In the project I was evaluating, I found that a lot of participants came from the home-school community. I asked the parents, “Why?” Since the whole point of this particular project was to gather data supporting evolution, why were the parents comfortable bringing their children to participate? Oh, they knew about the evolution goal, they said. But they didn’t have to use the materials that discussed evolution. They were mostly interested in the opportunity to get out and observe birds. For them, one of the best ways to celebrate God’s power is to observe the beauty of God’s creation. Citizen science gave them an organized way to do that, a way to look for specific details (in this case, the differences among birds), that let them see and celebrate the miracle of Creation.
But is it OK to welcome a community into a science communication activity if that community actively rejects the very thing we’re trying to communicate? Here’s another example. My colleague Ayelet Baram-Tsabari works at the Technion, in Israel. She has made a substantial effort to include both religious and ethnic diversity among her students, advising Muslims, ultra-religious Jews, and Christian Arabs, as well as more secular students. Her institution is also trying to connect with these groups. However: for many ultra-religious Jews, women and men are not allowed to mix. The ultra-religious told the Technion that they (or at least the men among them) would be interested in taking courses, but only if they were taught by men. Ayelet told me: if their “inclusion” means she is excluded, that’s not inclusion.
Diversity, New Voices, and Limiting the Boundaries of Science Communication
So now we have begun to hit the constraints of diversity. The title of the Zacatecas symposium was “New voices, new knowledge”. What happens when those new voices bring knowledge that is fundamentally opposed to the Enlightenment, reductionist model of modern science?
Thirty years ago, the PCST Network published its first book, edited by Bernard Schiele, which summarized science communication in about 15 or 20 countries. Now, in 2020, Toss Gascoigne led a team that summarized science communication in more than double that number of countries, increasing our perspectives especially in the global South. Those chapters show the diversity of the field worldwide. And with that diversity comes new perspectives, new ways of thinking about what science is and what science communication is.
Five years ago, for example, this journal published a series of commentaries about feminist approaches to science communication, raising questions about who speaks for science. Similarly, the science communicator Britt Wray drew on feminist theory to suggest an ethics of “care” — that science communicators are fundamentally “caring” for science, with all the benefits for science and risks to caregivers commonly associated with the idea of care.
More recently, we have seen the opening of discussion of queering science communication. In a robust exploration of the intersection of queerness with the field, the authors collected in a book edited by Lindy Orthia and Tara Roberson examine not just the portrayal of queerness, not just the presence of queer people as science communicators, but even the possibility of “queering” science — that is, challenging what we even mean by science, technology, and medicine, trying to create different meanings of what science, technology, and medicine fundamentally are.
Exciting as these ideas are, they are the perspectives that a prominent historian of science, Gerald Holton, worried about: these works bring critical perspectives to science communication that force us to confront the limits of what we mean by new voices and new knowledge. What happens when those new voices challenge the fundamental beliefs that some of us bring about what constitutes reliable knowledge, about what it is about science that makes it a powerful way of approaching the world around us? Are there topics that are important, but that we should not label as “science” communication? Is there a place where science communication cannot — or should not — go?
Unpacking the Norms and Counter-Norms of Science
These challenges arise because we have many different goals in public communication of science and technology. Some of us are more interested in education and learning, some of us primarily want to attract young people to scientific careers. Some of us have very specific behavioral goals, such as getting people to take vaccines or use clean sanitation systems. Others of us have broader goals. We want to promote science and what we call scientific ways of thinking. Others of us want to critique some of the actions of science, such as questioning the safety of nuclear energy or geo-engineering, or calling attention to ethical problems and misuse of power.
From an academic perspective of Science & Technology Studies (STS), “science” is at least three things: science is a body of knowledge, it’s a way of approaching the world, and it’s a set of institutions like universities and research institutes. Those institutions hold people, who act according to a set of norms or principles. Those norms were first identified in the middle of the last century, by the sociologist Robert Merton. Some years later, another sociologist, Ian Mitroff, identified a set of counter-norms.
The norms include:
1. Communalism: the idea that knowledge is held collectively, not privately.
2. Universalism: the idea that knowledge is the same everywhere, not tied to culture or geography.
3. Disinterestedness: the idea that scientists put their work out there to be judged, and don’t have a personal commitment to the findings.
4. Organized skepticism: the idea that the institutional mechanisms for skepticism have their own momentum and commitments.
The counter-norms highlight tensions with diversity, such as:
– Scientists often hold knowledge close, not releasing findings until they are ready.
– Scientific findings are tied to specific sites, experimental designs, or methodological approaches.
– Scientists have a deep personal (and human) interest in showing their arguments to be the correct one.
– Certain journals and reviewers may be more likely to publish research based on particular theories or methods — and to reject research based on competing approaches.
This tension between expertise and democracy, between the vision of science as a universal, reliable source of knowledge and the recognition of different cultural and epistemological contexts, is at the heart of the challenges that diversity poses for science communication.
Navigating the Complexities of Diversity
The title of the Zacatecas symposium, “New voices, new knowledge”, celebrates diversity. But diversity creates conflicts that are deeper, and that make us uncomfortable. Self-reflection isn’t enough. Sometimes, there’s no simple way to proceed. Almost always in these cases, politics is part of the issue.
For example, a lot of the resistance to Covid-19 vaccines wasn’t because of lack of knowledge. Instead, people objected to elite groups making decisions for everyone. The challenge of populism vs. elitism, democracy vs. expertise, was literally a life-and-death issue around the world.
Sometimes, we have incompatible values, as the example I quoted before from Ayelet Baram-Tsabari suggests. A recent paper exploring how religious communities tailor science information to meet their needs noted that “while examining these processes of tailoring can (potentially) be used as a model for religious-sensitive science communication, our analysis also highlights their prices. We found that information about the process of making science is omitted, female scientists are pushed to the margins, and scientific epistemologies are framed as second place to religious knowledge.”
Exposing these prices, the authors question the limits of culturally specific science communication when it seems to justify the exclusion of important factual information about the world.
Confronting the Tensions Between Expertise and Democracy
We know from studies of cultural cognition that we need to work with these different sets of beliefs if we want to communicate with different audiences. Sometimes, the conflicts are about priorities, such as whether to focus on stopping climate change or mitigating its effects. But sometimes the conflicts are about what counts as reliable knowledge.
Do we need to take a stand? This is really hard: on the one hand, many of us are here because we deeply believe in modern, Western science — scientific knowledge, scientific processes, and scientific institutions. Yet simultaneously, many of us who have been active in learning about science communication believe that we need to be open to new ways of knowing, different ways of defining what counts as reliable knowledge, sharp critiques of scientific institutions, and other things that run up against our belief in modern science.
This is an explicit struggle: do we need to draw a sharp line between science and non-science? Or do we use the new voices and new knowledges that we celebrated at the Zacatecas symposium to challenge what science is? Put another way, part of the problem is the conflict between our theoretical commitment to diversity and our practical commitment to the value of modern science.
Embracing Complexity and Holding Multiple Perspectives
I still keep hoping there’s a way to reconcile them, that the most moral choice is to try to hold both perspectives at the same time. So, as we move into discussions of new voices and new knowledge, let’s use our commitment to science communication in a diverse world to help address the obvious kinds of diversity (language, gender, sexuality, geography) as well as the hard kinds of diversity — our very different positions about what is right and wrong with the world and what kind of knowledge we need to make it a better place.
Let’s use our tools of collaboration and explanation and journalism and exhibition design and community engagement to overcome both the obvious differences and the hard ones. I look forward to continuing these discussions.
