First, unlike STEM and STS, science communication contains a plurality of practitioners over researchers. In other words, more people who identify with the field of science communication would emphasize the practice of science communication over research on the practice of science communication. For example, in a survey of attendees at a science communication conference in the United Kingdom, Miller (2008) found that only a small percentage of attendees regularly read the field’s premier scholarly journals (i.e. Public Understanding of Science and Science Communication), and only a small minority were active science communication researchers. He therefore concludes that “there is little solid ground on which to build up a picture of the relation between research into science communication and day-to-day practice” (Miller, 2008, p. 276). Noting this caveat, this section focuses on some common methods of analysis regarding storytelling in science communication research.
Others draw from experimental traditions redolent of educational intervention studies to examine audience responses to varieties of science communication (e.g. Phipps & Rowe, 2010 in audience interpretations of multicolored map data). Negrete (2002), for instance, through a mixed methods analysis consisting of post-test and delayed post-test recall and qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews, reports that while fact-based expository writing contributes to greater short-term recall of information, information packaged into a fictional narrative leads to more long-term retention among students. This aligns with a consensus among science communication researchers that narratives increase audience engagement and can make scientific concepts more sticky in terms of participant recall – particularly in the domain of medicine (Bekker et al., 2013; Dalhstrom, 2014; Kanouse et al., 2016; National Academy of Sciences, 2017).
Unlike STS, which relies mostly on social theory and ethnographic or other qualitative methodologies to unearth the inner workings and entanglements of science and society, the practitioner-driven field of science communication entails more quantitative pragmatism. In other words, experimenting about what modes and messages “work” in terms of audience engagement, attitudes, and learnings take precedence over theorization and analysis of discourse. However, if we recall Law (2009), this number-driven approach can place science communication in an antagonistic relationship with STS, as such quantitative methods depend on paradigmatic modes of inquiry – namely a priori categorization of stimuli into genres, and categorization of participant across intersecting social categories. In other words, it is STS’ task to scrape away the self-evident in methods to understand and question how they format the world (Law, 2017, p. 40) while science communication stresses the importance of “[using] a combination of methods that over time will allow strong inferences to be drawn about how audiences respond to various approaches to communicating science” (National Academy of Sciences, p. 87). Yet Law (2017) does not advocate methodological anarchy in the same vein as Feyerabend (1974) but rather argues that one method alone will be insufficient to tame the incoherence and difference of the world.
Ontogenetic Reflection
When I listen to this read back to me, I find myself coming back to applied linguistics. Surprise.
Applied linguistics also struggles with its own tensions engendered by a researcher-practitioner divide. Vygotskian Sociocultural Theory researchers try to integrate these two domains of theory and practice through praxis. But I would also argue that most researchers lean one way or another. Researchers either lean towards empirical investigations drawing upon theory to guide their efforts, while some are very interested in the ways that theory shapes the questions to ask, the data to collect, or whether or not we should call it data collection at all.
Recently, I’ve been reading some of the older publications by Michael Silverstein. Old Silverstein has an interesting pattern of argumentation where he brings up the structural linguistic paradigms of other linguistic anthropological researchers and questions the sanitized placement of linguistic forms into paradigmatic boxes. Rather, he argues that one cannot engage with the structure of the language without considering the social use of the language. And thinking about the social use of the language provides key insights into the structures of language. Both mutually reinforce each other, and neither are adequate in isolation.
I find myself turning this conversation of form and meaning towards the act of writing itself. I find it frustrating that despite many applied linguists’ calls to decolonize forms of knowledge production, there’s an overemphasis on the centering of diverse intersectional identities as opposed to a rethinking of the presentation of knowledge itself. Though I will argue that Dr. Sinfree Makoni challenges this problem of linear literacy head-on in his Unbooking project, a collective effort to both expose the coloniality of the book and to rethink the ways that knowledge is not only produced but also represented. He once told me that once you write something down, once you make a theoretical commitment, once you make a methodological commitment, all of these foreclose on other possibilities of knowledge production.
I find writing to be one of the most interesting acts of foreclosure, particularly when I think about the influence that the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi has on the development of my thinking. According to Zhuangzi, writing and language are both essential tools for the function and organization of people, while also being hopelessly limited in their ability to inscribe the boundless potentialities of meaning. Even to think through meaning is to foreclose on the affective or the non-representational aspects of experience. The minute we name something, we have already severed much of the potentiality of that thing. For language users — ergo most of us reading this post — this is tragic and unavoidable.
So I won’t finish this post with some particular call to action except for to write and to read. Sometimes when I have conversations with people in the field, I wonder about each of their relationships to writing. Some seem to talk about writing as a very enjoyable and pleasurable activity for them, and others seem to talk about writing as a final-step nuisance to the publishing of their research. And as we arrive in this post-AI age, I think that it is incumbent upon applied linguists and also researchers within other disciplines to take seriously what writing means to them and to ask ourselves whether or not we are outsourcing our voice for the sake of convenience. And in that outsourcing, we further foreclose what research and more specifically representations of research can look like.
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