2.3.1. The place of science communication in the STEM scholarly ecology
Horst et al (2017, p. 883) defines science communication as “actions that aim to communicate scientific knowledge, methodology, processes, or practices in settings where non-scientists are a recognized part of the audiences” (as cited in Davies, 2022, p. 306). The emergence of science communication as a field of study represents a contentious boundary. Many STEM scholars write about the communication of science (e.g. Katz, 2013; Krzywinski, 2013; Schimel, 2012), yet many science communicators do not actively conduct research in STEM fields (e.g. Joubert et al., 2019; Miller, 2008; Horst & Davies, 2021).
One contour of the boundary between STEM and science communicators is science communicators’ openness to storytelling and narrative (Dahlstrom, 2014; ElShafie, 2018; cf. Olson, 2015; Schimel, 2012). This comes into sharp relief when reading Wilson’s (2017, p. 135) thoughts against the Katz-Krzywinski-Cairo debate – “storytelling enables us to embrace multiple truths and navigate our way through uncertainty, providing a welcome counterpoint to the orthodoxy that the world is built on a single reality and an objective scientific truth.” This accords with Coen’s (2019) argument that storytelling co-evolved with the value of truth in human cultures – a co-evolution that arguably contributes to a strong divide between science’s commitment to debating what is true and story’s commitment to sharing what is resonant. As Wilson (2017, p. 129) goes on to write,
“Narrative knowledge is often dismissed as ‘anecdotal,’ even if it is professional testimony, or its value is seen merely in the form of a vehicle for the more effective communication of other kinds of knowledge. It is rarely acknowledged that storytelling might contribute (or aid in the production of) new knowledge in its own right. Instead, we have storytelling in the service of science, if at all.”
This epitomizes the common hierarchization of story and science. STEM scholars appear to entertain storytelling if it does not interfere with the objective presentation of scientific results while many science communicators seem to embrace the communicative potential of story above a strict adherence to paradigmatic modes of thought. Dalhstrom and Scheufele (2018, p. 1) frame this tension between narrative, science, and truth as the paradox of scientific storytelling: “How can science preserve its credibility as curator of knowledge while engaging audiences with a communication format that is agnostic to truth?” Science is not content shoved into the structure stories, in other words, but rather storytelling by its own set of rules (Bickmore & Grandy, 2014; Negrete, 2002). This is because science communicators seem more drawn to biological or neuroscientific research about the effects of storytelling on memory or information processing – using science to convince other science communicators about the importance of story (Cormick, 2019a, 2019b; ElShafie, 2018; Joubert et al., 2019; Miller, 2008), as well as the ecosystem of public relations and journalism (Horst & Davies, 2021; National Academy of Sciences, 2017).
Ontogenetic Reflection
Listening back, the one line that stood out to me was from Wilson, who said, “Storytelling enables us to embrace multiple truths and navigate our way through uncertainty, providing a welcome counterpoint to the orthodoxy that the world is built on a single reality and an objective scientific truth.”
One of the things that I find very interesting, as I continue to move towards thinking about Daoism and the Zhuangzi, is how this creates a kind of paradox in Western logics in terms of what to call the Dao. On the one hand, the Dao is a kind of substance from which all other substances spring forth and are formed, which makes it similar to Spinoza’s notion of God in the Ethics. But unlike Spinoza, Daoism does not follow a linear, geometric formation of the 10,000 things — as Laozi and Zhuangzi both refer to the beings on Earth below heaven.
Yet we can also see that the Dao represents a kind of singularity of objective… I won’t say truth, because as a professor told me once, “truth” is also to slip into a Western way of thinking about this notion. But there certainly is a singular flow of nature through which all things either converge or diverge. Yet on the other hand, Wilson does seem to be in alignment with the way that scholars discuss Zhuangzi as appreciating the importance of perspectives. So I would not necessarily call it “multiple truths” the way that Wilson describes it, but I will say that the world consists of multiple perspectives — multiple standpoints from which we orient ourselves towards or away from the Dao.
This presents a very interesting wrinkle, or a fold (as I will discuss in the dissertation), in what it means to think through some of these problems in applied linguistics research through the lens of Zhuangzi. I find myself needing to be more careful with language than I ever have before. Yet paradoxically, Zhuangzi also has a less essentialist stance on the meaning of words — particularly compared to other schools of thought that he competed against at the time, such as Confucianism, Mohism, or the School of Names (Mingjia).
This is also what excites me about working with STEM practitioners for my dissertation. I think that in social science and humanities fields — and applied linguistics really sits at the intersection of these super-domains of the academy — we often look down at STEM work as being too linear, too focused on a veneer of objectivity. But I would wonder what it would mean to surface or illuminate the storytelling practices that STEM scholars also move through. My question is not necessarily what I, as an applied linguist, can give to STEM scholars to improve their storytelling, but rather: what can STEM scholars, as storytellers, tell us in the field of applied linguistics?
Because I think that applied linguists have never not been storytellers. To borrow the practice of denegation, as Zhuangzi often uses: to be a storyteller who does not tell a story makes one still a storyteller. To disavow oneself as a storyteller, yet to write research, is to tell a story. This is the struggle that I see currently — and I hope that we can reflect on the ways that our research itself also constitutes a story within the storied construction of science and academic knowledge.
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