Abstract
That science communication applies to both a field of practices and a field of research on those practices seems obvious enough. The very title of the 2020 book, Communicating science. A global perspective—part of an attempt to provide an overview of the way modern science communication has developed over the past 40 or so years, in 39 different countries or regions, reinforced by instructions to the prospective authors—framed the project around ‘science communication’, naturalizing it, encouraging its homogenization and reinforcing it through the peer-review and editing processes (It is worth noting that such a survey was conducted and published on the occasion of the 1994 PCST Conference in Montreal. See Schiele (When science becomes culture, University of Ottawa Press, Ottawa, 1994). But the draft chapters showed that ‘science communication’ is not a universal term. It has many definitions, and from the second half of the twentieth century researchers and practitioners have described it variously as an objective, a goal, a process, a result and an outcome. In this chapter, we have sought to list every term used by the authors and evaluate their degree of penetration of the field, understood as the frequency of their occurrence and as the number of authors using them. Close examination showed that 16 different words or phrases were used in the book for what we called ‘science communication’. Some were confined to a single country, others were applied across a number of countries. Only five authors defined the terms they used, but most did not, probably considering that their meaning was self-evident. This chapter lists and categorizes those terms, grouping them into three categories: ① most mentioned, ② moderately mentioned and ③ least mentioned. Authors tended to use the terminology interchangeably, even though most terms are context specific and tributary to national political, social and cultural trends.
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Notes
- 1.
Following Plato, science culture can be defined as an opinion justified by reason and its confrontation with reality. In a debate, arguments supported by proofs are advanced, and the demonstration of the proofs is the mark of the scientific spirit. Science culture is, on the one hand, a substrate of basic notions and, on the other, hypothetico-deductive reasoning; that is, we are able to use schemes in a reasoning process that aims to identify the causal explanations of various phenomena. A scheme, according to Piaget, describes what in an action is transposable, generalizable or differentiable from situation to situation (that is, what is common in the various repetitions of the same action), and hypothetico-deductive reasoning is the capacity to deduce conclusions from pure hypotheses or observations.
- 2.
Although the atomic bombings in 1945 were a turning point, the uses of chemistry and physics during World War I had similar effects. John Dewey also referred to those effects when he wrote: ‘It has become a common place to refer to consequences of chemistry in its application to warfare. High explosives, with their allies of steel and airplane derived from physics, are capable of destroying every city on the face of earth, and we are even threatened with bacterial warfare’ (Dewey 1934: 2).
- 3.
We will limit ourselves to pointing out the new wave of public diffusion of science in the wake of World War II, without forgetting the very significant ‘vulgarization’ or ‘popularization’ movement of the 19th and early twentieth century, which some have called a ‘Golden Age’ (see Raichvarg and Jacques 1991).
- 4.
The first conference was organized in 1989 by Pierre Fayard and took place at the Futuroscope in Poitiers, France. The Futuroscope, conceptualized in 1983 by Roger Monory, president of the Vienne Department in France, and opened in 1987, originally aimed to be an observatory of the future (it has since then become a science and futurology theme park). For Pierre Fayard, then professor at the University of Poitiers, the Futuroscope, with its window on the potential of information and communication technologies, was the place to hold this first conference on ‘public science communication’. The Poitiers conference was followed by conferences in Madrid (1991, also organized by Pierre Fayard) and in Montreal (1994, by Bernard Schiele). From Melbourne (1996, by Toss Gascoigne and Jenni Metcalfe) on, the informal PCST network became increasingly institutionalized and has become a full-blown international organization that organizes a conference every two years.
- 5.
The definition was proposed by François Le Lionnais at the meeting debate of the Association des écrivains scientifiques de France (Science Writers Association of France) held at the Palais de la Découverte in Paris on 26 February 1958: ‘any explanatory or diffusion activity of scientific and technical knowledge, culture and thought, but under two conditions, two limitations. The first, that these explanations and diffusion of scientific and technical thought must take place outside [formal] education … Second condition, that these extracurricular explanations be not aimed at the training or advanced training of specialists in their own field, because we aim to complete the culture of specialists outside of their field’ (Le Lionnais 1959: 7).
- 6.
The working definition proposed by Dijkstra et al. echoes the one proposed by the UK National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (2019: 3): ‘Science communication describes the many ways in which the process, outcomes, and implications of the sciences—broadly defined—can be shared or discussed with audiences. Science communication involves interactions, with goals of interpreting scientific or technical developments or discussing issues with a scientific or technical dimension.’ To truly illustrate the fleeting and ephemeral nature of definitions in this area, that definition disappeared from the UK National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement website in 2020.
- 7.
Lewenstein (2016) compiled a number of variants to illustrate the scope of the practice: ‘“peer to peer” science, participatory science, community science, community-based research, public participation in research, crowdsourced science, and so on.’
- 8.
The book can be found at https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/communicating-science.
- 9.
The book contains 40 chapters. Two are introductory chapters, and one focuses not on a country but a topic: health communication in a number of African countries. Those three chapters are not included in the current analysis. The remaining 37 chapters deal with single countries, except for the Scandinavian chapter, which deals with three countries. This analysis therefore covers 39 separate countries.
- 10.
See Foucault (1994: 789–821).
- 11.
UNAM = National Autonomous University of Mexico; CONACYT = National Council for Science and Technology; AMC = Mexican Academy for Science; SOMEDOCyT = Mexican Society for the Communication of Science.
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Schiele, B., Gascoigne, T., Schiele, A. (2021). Communicating Science: Heterogeneous, Multiform and Polysemic. In: Schiele, B., Liu, X., Bauer, M.W. (eds) Science Cultures in a Diverse World: Knowing, Sharing, Caring. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5379-7_1
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