STS and science communication: Reflecting on a relationship

Abstract

This brief commentary considers the relation between science communication research and practice and the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). It outlines some key aspects of STS approaches, from an emphasis on exploratory research to considerations of normativity and the political, and discusses what they can bring to science communication. It ends by arguing for methodological and disciplinary diversity in science communication research.

Some years ago, I was visiting a class of science communication students to discuss a book I had written (with Maja Horst) and which the group had been reading throughout the semester. As we started I sensed some awkwardness, a certain hesitation in the atmosphere. What had they thought of the book, I asked. Had they found it useful? The students looked at their feet, or at the walls. Eventually one spoke up: ‘Oh, well, we liked it . . . for STS’.

Science and Technology Studies (the aforementioned STS) has, it seems to me, a mixed reputation within science communication. On one hand, the field has been influential, especially in encouraging the move towards dialogue and deliberation that took place (in particular) in the early 2000s. On the other hand, the above exchange is not an isolated incident: plenty of other science communication practitioners and scholars have expressed their view of the field to me through eye rolls or the sense that it is intimidating, exclusionary or overly critical. STS is – in my admittedly limited experience – the discipline that at least some in science communication love to hate.

As someone who locates their work in both science communication and STS, I have always found this rather troubled relationship a missed opportunity. Discovering STS was for me a process that helped make sense of my experiences of science communication and that provided me with tools to study its richness and complexity. Based on these positive experiences, I therefore want to make some concrete suggestions as to what I think STS has to offer science communication, parsing out ways that I enjoy and find it useful and reflecting on what it has and could bring to research on science and the public. In doing so, I will make explicit what I see as some of the field’s basic principles and assumptions, which may differ from those of other disciplinary traditions within science communication scholarship. (The aim here, by the way, is not to play these traditions off against each other: one of my concluding points will be the necessity and value of a range of approaches to research. I simply want to be clear about what STS is doing when it studies science communication.)

First, however, what I am talking about when I refer to STS and to science communication? With regard to science communication practice, I follow the line suggested by Horst et al.’s 2017 definition – ‘actions that aim to communicate scientific knowledge, methodology, processes, or practices in settings where non-scientists are a recognized part of the audiences’ (p. 883) – and take a broad view of the processes and products that constitute science communication. Science communication is thus, to me, everything from school gate conversations to public lectures, science-related activism or popular science magazines. As a field of study, my view is similarly catholic: I understand science communication scholarship as multi-disciplinary (Priest, 2010) in that it draws together work from diverse traditions that share a substantive focus on the processes, practices and participants of science communication. In the same way, STS is less a stable discipline and more a meeting point for research from different traditions that is centred around particular topics and problems. As the editors to the most recent edition of the Handbook of Science and Technology Studies write, it is ‘an interdisciplinary field that investigates the institutions, practices, meanings, and outcomes of science and technology and their multiple entanglements with the worlds people inhabit, their lives, and their values’ (Felt et al., 2017: 1). To that I would only add that an interest in the constructedness of knowledge (including our own) is central to my experience of STS. To me, STS is always concerned with how (scientific) knowledge is made, how it interacts with and is shaped by diverse contexts, and how it travels (and is thereby re-made and re-shaped).

We can therefore take two key ideas as a starting point for exploring STS’s contributions to science communication: STS views research-based knowledge as constructed, not discovered or given; and it has further been centrally concerned with the place of such knowledge in wider society. (Indeed, for some the field’s acronym refers to ‘Science, Technology, and Society’: Mitcham, 1999.) Importantly, within these broad parameters approaches to the field are diverse, with methodologies that range from quantitative scientometrics to ethnography. In discussing what I have learned and gained from STS, then, I am inevitably giving a partial and idiosyncratic account, and one that is shaped by those aspects of the field that I am most engaged with. Based on these experiences, in what follows I briefly outline three key tenets or ideas that I have taken from STS scholarship and which I find valuable in studying and thinking about science communication. In closing I circle back to the notion of necessary diversity. If one of STS’s contributions is an interest in how our own knowledge is constructed, an important corollary to this – I will argue – is attention to the limits of that knowledge and to the need for diverse disciplinary approaches to the (science communication) issues that we study.

1. What is happening here?

While STS is, as I’ve said, diverse, one strand of it is known for its insistence on the need to abandon existing assumptions – even theories – concerning any particular empirical situation. (This is most notably the case in Actor Network Theory (ANT), which refuses to mobilise particular macro-sociological concepts such as ‘class’ or ‘gender’ in advance of empirical encounters: Michael, 2016.) What I take from this line of work, in the context of this essay, is an emphasis on openness within research. STS encourages us to approach science communication by not (only) asking questions such as: ‘does X convince certain groups of Y?’ or ‘does Z increase public trust?’, but very simply: ‘what is happening here?’ In other words, STS fosters an exploratory, descriptive approach to science communication that prioritises understanding the practices and meanings of those involved in it in, and on, their own terms.

In doing so, it is, of course, not unique, but the field has brought its particular spin on open-ended and exploratory research through the use of the notion of symmetry. For early STS authors, research into scientific practice should be symmetrical: ‘The same types of cause would explain, say, true and false beliefs’ (Bloor, 1991 [1976]: 6). These early scholars therefore explored the development of scientific facts and theories irrespective of whether they were later viewed as correct or incorrect. In either case, the knowledge or concepts in question can be understood as being constructed through interactions between the material world and people, objects, and institutions; as Bloor writes, a ‘sociology of scientific knowledge’ should be ‘impartial with respect to truth and falsity, rationality or irrationality, success or failure’ (Bloor, 1991 [1976]). Later authors developed this notion into a ‘principle of generalised symmetry’ (Callon, 1984) which encourages the analyst to refuse to ‘change registers when we move from the technical to the social aspects of the problem studied’ (Callon, 1984: 200). Here, then, there is not only no distinction between ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ scientific facts, but between the social (people, institutions) and the technical (objects, experiments). Scholarship in this tradition understands these things as inseparably intertwined, such that it is impossible to claim that ‘social factors’ cause certain forms of knowledge while a ‘scientific method’ or ‘data’ cause others. In practice, this means that – in contrast to at least some research in science communication – there is no starting assumption that scientific knowledge is necessarily superior to other knowledge forms and practices. Rather, the analytical interest is in exploring how knowledge of different kinds is made, negotiated, transformed, stabilised or utilised. ¹

The details of these arguments are perhaps less important than the radical abandonment of existing assumptions about scientific knowledge-making that they imply, and in particular of the use of idealised or purely theoretical models of the scientific process. In the context of STS, this work broke away from Whig histories of science which portrayed a steady and triumphal series of discoveries of pre-existing ‘truths’ about the world and from early sociology of science which mobilised ‘the social’ only as an explanation for scientific error. The new line of work sought to distance itself from a priori assumptions about what was happening in the laboratory, using ‘in situ observations’ in an effort to render ‘strange . . . aspects of scientific activity which are readily taken for granted’ (Latour and Woolgar, 1986 [1979]: 29). Rather than taking for granted the nature and workings of a scientific method, or the inevitability of certain facts, it asked: what is happening here? How are scientific facts actually being produced?

I want to suggest that such radical openness also has value in the context of science communication. We are generally not studying laboratories or the scientific method, but I would propose that at least some of our research should similarly lay aside taken-for-granted normativities or ideas about what should or does happen within public communication to simply try and figure out what is going on. Who (and what) is involved? What is at stake? What is being produced or achieved? What practices are present, and how are these explained and made sense of? Answering such questions in the context of particular instances of science communication may well confirm many of the starting points of our field (such as the robustness of scientific knowledge, and its value to society), but it may also throw up new and surprising findings about how science is present, used, and consumed in contemporary societies. Mike Michael’s 2012 article ‘What are we busy doing?’ refers to the ‘we’ of public engagement scholars and practitioners rather than that of publics, but still finds that at least part of the audience of a particular piece of science communication are indeed ‘busy doing’ something quite different to what its producers had imagined and intended (see also Horst and Michael, 2011). Similarly, Oliver Marsh’s (2018, 2020) studies of online science engagement have highlighted the ways that such consumption of science communication perhaps serves purposes of community and identity formation more than the desire to learn about science. Setting aside normativities – that science communication should have a particular aim, that it should have such and such results – and asking open questions about what science communication is and what it is for can help, I believe, not only to understand its place in our lives and societies, but perhaps also to design forms of communication that resonate with real-world practices and experiences.

2. Everything is local

The open and exploratory enquiry promoted by (much) STS comes with a number of implications. One is that such study tends to be oriented to single cases and specific and situated sites and practices. Despite the success of some of its concepts (again, we might cite ANT as one idea that has travelled into disciplines well beyond the study of science), STS scholarship is largely concerned with investigations at the micro-level: a laboratory, a citizen science project, a particular scientific practice. Its use of theory is intertwined with these investigations and is thus contextual and hand-crafted rather than something overarching and broad. As John Law writes,

if you want to understand STS – and STS theory – you need to read it through its cases . . . the STS focus on practice means that theory, method, and the empirical get rolled together with social institutions (and sometimes objects). They are all part of the same weave and cannot be teased apart. (Law, 2017: 32)

In practice, this means that STS is – or should be – cautious about the claims that it makes. Because it seeks to work with specific sites, and to understand the practices that are situated within them, it can handle a high degree of empirical complexity and ‘mess’ (Law, 2004). In reporting on that mess – including the ways that a situation or site under study might not hang together or make sense to the analyst – STS scholarship may refuse to smooth it over to make wider claims or arguments. Particular articulations of science in society are highly contingent on historical trajectories, local practices and specific configurations of actors. STS is thus cautious about transporting theories, arguments or findings developed in one site to another. Importantly, it also sees all knowledge production, scientific or otherwise, as local and contingent: as Turnbull (1997) and other postcolonial scholars have argued, science is just one of many ‘local knowledges’ (Law and Lin, 2017).

This point is a direct result of and intrinsically tied to my first. Emphasising specificity, situatedness and contingency means exploring empirical situations on their own terms – asking, as suggested above, ‘what is happening here?’ (with the emphasis on here – this site, this situation). It also means that STS rarely uses hypothesis testing as a research approach, and often builds its theory and methodological approaches ‘on the ground’, in connection with specific cases or situations. Both this theory and empirical research findings are only cautiously extendable and transportable (for instance through raising further research questions, offering sensitising concepts for other cases, or suggesting localised courses of action). If one of the aims of research is to uncover the situatedness and contingency of knowledge practices, it makes sense that results will be more about describing these in a particular context and less about generalising to other instances and sites. Erela Teharlev Ben-Shachar and Nadav Davidovitch’s (2020) case study of nutrition advice in twentieth-century Israel, for instance, paints a rich picture of the different ways that nutritional expertise and public advice was co-produced with particular historical moments and political situations. We can read it as an example of how science communication can be entangled with imaginations of citizenship, but it doesn’t make any generalisable claims about this, and it has little to say about how nutrition advice is communicated and received in other contexts. Rather, its value is in unpicking the specificities of this site (Israel) and in showing how particular historical trajectories came together to shape one science communication practice.

So, STS encourages attention to the contingencies and specificities of instances of science communication and is cautious about making large-scale claims about science and society as a whole. But there is one further implication of this emphasis on situatedness, and this concerns our own research practices and knowledge production. As John Law (2004, 2017) has argued, STS’s investigations of scientific methods have led to a similar sensitivity concerning methodological practice in social research more generally. STS is thus particularly aware of the ways in which our methodological choices, as well as the bodies and actions of researchers themselves, help produce research findings. Just as in other disciplines, social science knowledge is co-produced with its methods. Indeed, methods can be seen as making much more than knowledge alone: they imply whole worlds and thus help bring them into being. In his article ‘Seeing like a survey’ (Law, 2009), Law demonstrates this ‘performative understanding’ of social science research through a discussion of the Eurobarometer survey instrument, arguing that this particular method enacts ‘the consumer as an individual rational-ethical subject’ and ‘the EU as a neoliberal political site’ (Law, 2009: 249). The survey, in other words, assumes that certain things are the case (that ‘consumers’ act as individuals, for instance, or that the EU exists as a particular kind of political entity) and thereby reinforces their stability and presence in the world. Similar analyses could be performed on any of the methods widely used in science communication: some approaches to qualitative interviewing, for instance, take for granted that individual experience is the key site of sense-making about the world (Roulston, 2012) and therefore enact this version of personhood.

What does this mean for science communication? While these arguments are at their core not new (there is a long tradition of methodological reflection in science communication and beyond), they act as a helpful reminder not only of the contingency of our findings but of the need for reflexivity concerning our research practices. This, then, is one thing STS can teach us: everything is local, even our own research.

3. All research is political

A final sensitivity I take from STS concerns the political nature of knowledge production. This is true both of the sciences that STS studies – which are understood as value-laden even at their most ‘objective’ (Jasanoff, 2004) – and of STS and science communication knowledge itself, which (as described above) similarly brings particular worlds into being, rendering others invisible or ineligible. In both cases, there is a responsibility to consider what knowledge production is doing, and to ask whether it should in fact be done differently.

This is one area where it seems that STS can’t win: it has, on different occasions, been accused of being both too political and not political enough. (The latter charge was levelled at ANT, in exactly for its rejection of the use of structural factors as explanatory devices (Jasanoff, 2004); the former is perhaps more common given STS’s normative arguments for the democratisation of science and its perceived involvement in twentieth century ‘science wars’ (Lynch, 2020; Taverne, 2004).) To my mind there are two key ways that STS encourages us to acknowledge, and reflect on, the political nature of knowledge production that have relevance for science communication research and practice. The first relates to the normative position that many in STS and science communication take on questions of science-society relations, democracy, and public value. Put bluntly, many of us work with an assumption that democracy is good and should be nurtured, in the context of science and beyond. Brian Wynne, Jack Stilgoe and James Wilsdon have written, for instance, about the need to consider the ‘public value’ of science:

Science has major social benefits and thus ‘public value’. Yet crucially, as recent controversies have underlined, this value cannot be assumed and taken as automatic, no matter what scientific research is done, or under what conditions. We need therefore to shift from noun to adjective, by asking not only: what is the public value of science? But also, what would public value science look like? (Wilsdon et al., 2005: 25)

Asking these questions encourages us both to open up to public view (and scientific reflection) the values, assumptions and goals that drive scientific research (Stirling, 2008) and to support forms of public deliberation and engagement that could enhance the public value of science (Stilgoe et al., 2014). Such ideas have been extensively developed within science communication research and practice, but also resonate well with recent work that has explicitly considered who has access to science and whose values matter in it. Concerns regarding equity and diversity in science (Nicolaisen and Achiam, 2020; Prescod-Weinstein, 2020), the audiences that science communication imagines and reaches (Dawson, 2014, 2018; Kennedy et al., 2018), and epistemic and other forms of justice (Medvecky, 2018; Williams and Moore, 2019) all build on a widely shared normative position that science is a public good and that public goods should be widely distributed and democratically governed (Davies, 2021).

A second form of STS concern with the political is thus far perhaps less visible in science communication, and builds on the work on performativity of methods described above and on related interest in ‘ontological politics’. If (research) practices make realities, and if these realities are multiple, co-existing and at times conflicting – then how should we intervene in the world? What kind of politics can we engage in (Mol, 1999)? Asking such questions has led both to interest in how subaltern realities may be enacted and promoted (for instance through social movements: Papadopoulos, 2018) and in how we should think about the realities that our own methods enact (Law, 2004, 2017). As Law writes,

methods, social scientific and otherwise, powerfully enact [such] incidental ‘collateral realities’ by assuming them . . . It is one of STS’s tasks to scrape away the self-evident to understand and question how methods structure the world. (Law, 2017: 40)

To understand how our methods structure the world, yes, but also to consider the politics of how they do so. Where are different realities being enacted, what are the differences between them, and how – to use another STS phrase – can we, as communities or societies, live well together across difference (Law, 2017; Verran, 2002)? What work is being done by our methods, and what realities are they benefitting?

One does not need to wholeheartedly commit to the study of ontological politics in order to take these questions seriously. They remind us of the value of interrogating our methods and assumptions and of exploring the effects that they may have – in Law’s terms, by enacting ‘collateral realities’ that have not been consciously chosen, but simply taken for granted. As we choose our topics, research foci, methods, and theories it is, I believe, always helpful to ask: what worlds are these building? What actors are benefitting? What other choices are possible?

4. Conclusion

What does all of this mean for science communication research and practice? What I hope I have illustrated are a set of orientations that STS can bring to empirical study, in particular, but which more generally encourage an attitude of reflexivity and reflection. It is this attitude that, in combination with an emphasis on the local and contingent nature of science communication processes, I find particularly central. We may or may not want to engage with ideas of ontological politics, the performativity of methods, or symmetry, but, to me, the constant reflection on taken-for-granted methods, languages and practices that STS encourages us to engage in, alongside an openness to what may emerge in specific sites of practice or scholarship, are genuinely valuable to all with interests in science and society. Science communication is often under-funded, hurried and only rarely evaluated (Gerber, 2020): in this context, STS can help us to step back and ask open, unstructured questions about what we are doing and why. This is the case whether we are studying public opinion, developing prescriptions for science communication training, carrying out public events, creating exhibitions, or talking to the media about our research.

Similarly, attention to what our methods (and science communication practices) are doing or making forces us to acknowledge that things could be otherwise – that we could make different choices, which might allow different kinds of insights, and have different kinds of impacts. Such reflection is particularly urgent in the context of the publics that science communication imagines and thereby creates, whether that is public engagement that continues to reinforce models of public participants as docile recipients of scientific knowledge (Irwin, 2001) or communication that, as Emily Dawson has forcefully argued, straightforwardly excludes certain populations (Dawson, 2018). But such methodological reflection will also inevitably remind us of the necessity of science communication scholarship being comprised of a range of approaches (ideally in dialogue with each other). As I have suggested, STS often involves fine-grained, ethnographically oriented research that attempts to capture the mess of real-world practice and which highlights contingency and specificity. Studying science communication in this way certainly has many benefits, but the work that I have described itself emphasises that any single method or approach will never be enough to tame the difference and incoherence of the world (Law, 2017). We need work that comes from different paradigms, mobilises different methods, and draws on different disciplinary traditions. All are valid: as Donna Haraway (1988) writes, ‘[o]nly the god trick’ – the imagination that our methods give us a view from nowhere, rather than allowing us to look at one limited slice of a particular social world – ‘is forbidden’ (p. 589). I therefore think it is vital to develop science communication research that mobilises diverse methods, concepts and approaches; that constantly reflects on the affordances and politics of these; and that is modest in the claims made from within any one tradition. In developing a scholarly community that incorporates diverse methodological approaches to science communication and science-society relations, and that is able to discuss what particular methods are doing to our scholarship and to the world, we can, I would suggest, find increasingly robust ways to collectively study science and the public.