Filter by author: Bruce V Lewenstein

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. This paper presents a number of examples, highlighting the need for science communicators to be self-reflective about their commitments and how they shape their activities as science communicator practitioners and researchers.

This special issue focuses on the global landscape of teaching science communication in higher education. Following an open call, we selected seven papers with topics including the geographical distribution of science communication programmes, indicators of quality, programme analysis, self-reporting tools, interdisciplinarity, sustainability, and competencies. Collectively, these contributions highlight how the field has grown and increased in complexity, and highlights challenges faced by educators and the significance of addressing them within local and global contexts.

The field of science communication goes by many names. This commentary explores the tensions between plain ‘‘science communication’’ and the more specific ‘‘public communication of science and technology’’. The commentary argues that science communication is not just one thing — and that’s okay.

The last three decades have seen extensive reflection concerning how science communication should be modelled and understood. In this essay we propose the value of a cultural approach to science communication — one that frames it primarily as a process of meaning-making. We outline the conceptual basis for this view of culture, drawing on cultural theory to suggest that it is valuable to see science communication as one aspect of (popular) culture, as storytelling or narrative, as ritual, and as collective meaning-making. We then explore four possible ways that a cultural approach might proceed: by mobilising ideas about experience; by framing science communication through identity work; by focusing on fiction; and by paying attention to emotion. We therefore present a view of science communication as always entangled within, and itself shaping, cultural stories and meanings. We close by suggesting that one benefit of this approach is to move beyond debates concerning ‘deficit or dialogue’ as the key frame for public communication of science.

As science communication develops as a field of both practice and research, it needs to address issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion across a wide range, including race, power, class, gender. Doing so will require deeper understanding of conceptual work and practical activities that address those issues. This brief comment introduces a series of commentaries that provide one approach: feminist approaches to science communication.

Science communication is today a well-established ―although young― area of research. However, there are only a few books and papers analyzing how science communication has developed historically. Aiming to, in some way, contribute to filling this gap, JCOM organized this special issue on the History of Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST), joining 15 contributions, from different parts of the globe. The papers published in this issue are organized in three groups, though with diffuse boundaries: geography, media, and discipline. The first group contains works that deal descriptively and critically with the development of PCST actions and either general or specific public policies for this area in specific countries. A second set of papers examines aspects of building science communication on TV or in print media. The third group of papers presents and discusses important PCST cases in specific areas of science or technology at various historical moments.

Citizen science is one of the most dramatic developments in science communication in the last generation. But analyses of citizen science, of what it means for science and especially for science communication, have just begun to appear. Articles in this first of two special issues of JCOM address three intertwined concerns in this emerging field: The motivation of citizen science participants, the relationship of citizen science with education, and the implications of participation for creation of democratic engagement in science-linked issues. Ultimately these articles contribute to answering the core question: What does citizen science mean?

This case study describes the development of a climate change information system for New York State, one of the physically largest states in the United States. Agriculture (including dairy production and vineyards) and water-related tourism are large parts of the state economy, and both are expected to be affected dramatically by climate change. The highly politicized nature of the climate change debate in America makes the delivery of science-based information even more urgent and challenging. The United States does not have top-down science communication policies, as many countries do; this case will describe how diverse local and state agencies, corporations, NGOs, and other actors collaborated with university researchers to create a suite of products and online tools with stable, science-based information carefully crafted and targeted to avoid politicization and facilitate education and planning for community, agricultural and business planners and state policy makers who are making decisions now with 20 to 50 year time frames.

The interview presents an overview on the role of scientific publications during some key periods in United States history. It describes the developing of a culture scientifique in the late XIX century and the increasing relevance of the US within the scientific world, intertwined with a new public demand for science stories; only during the Cold War some books begin to question science. The author here argues that scientific books are a key marker of the way science fits the American culture.

Why should we care about science books? After all, we live in a "new media" world where students, researchers, and the public use the World Wide Web for all their information needs. Cutting edge research appears on "preprint archives" or "open access" online journals, text"books" appear as online sites with interactive presentations and links to presentation, for creating public discussion and dialogue, and even for archiving current research. In that kind of world, what’s the purpose of looking at "old fashioned" books?