Science communication in the wild

Abstract

This essay argues for the need to understand and study science communication ‘in the wild’ – as a set of practices that are not only ‘organised, explicit, and intended actions that aim to communicate scientific knowledge’, but that take on a variety of other meanings as they are realised in particular contexts. I make this point by building on my experiences of studying science communication projects and by reflecting on their internal heterogeneity in terms of what they were ‘about’ for those organising them. By showing this diversity in the meanings of science communication to those carrying it out, and in particular how this is exacerbated by the conditions of precarity and scarcity that frequently frame science communication activities, I argue for the importance of understanding science communication practice as not only being ‘about’ the communication or negotiation of scientific knowledge, but myriad other aspects, from personal prestige to the need for a job.

What is science communication about, and what is it for? The answer may seem obvious: science communication activities are ‘organized, explicit, and intended actions that aim to communicate scientific knowledge, methodology, processes, or practices in settings where nonscientists are a recognized part of the audiences’ (Horst et al., 2017: 883). Or, alternatively, science communication ‘may be defined as the use of appropriate skills, media, activities, and dialogue to produce . . . personal responses to science’ (Burns et al., 2003: 191). In these definitions, science communication is fundamentally about the communication of science to public audiences, where ‘science’ means mainstream scientific knowledge. While science communication can be oriented to its ‘processes or practices’ or to the experiences of those working in it (Horst et al., 2017), the assumption remains that the communication or negotiation of mainstream science is what is at stake, and that this is the most important aspect of activities labelled as science communication.

In this essay, I want to trouble this idea by suggesting that the public communication of science is not necessarily the only, or the most important, thing that is going on within science communication. While both scholarly and practitioner literature are often focused on how to best realise communication of scientific content to public audiences, and/or how to empower the public to engage with science, in practice, science communication takes on more meanings than are usually acknowledged. For instance, the work of Emily Dawson and others has now compellingly shown that ‘science’ may not be the priority in public audiences’ encounters with science communication (Dawson, 2018; Horst and Michael, 2011; Macdonald, 1995; Marsh, 2020; Solomon, 2013). Non-scientists may visit science museums or engage with other forms of science communication for reasons as diverse as building a particular kind of online identity (Marsh, 2020), finding a space to hang out with friends (Horst and Michael, 2011), or as part of a ‘cultural itinerary’ as a tourist to a particular city (Macdonald, 1995). As Macdonald (1995) writes, ‘science’ as a specific motivation for visiting [a science museum] did not arise in this particular sample at all’ (p. 19). ¹

In what follows, I will argue that the same is true for those who organise and carry out science communication. By reflecting on how scientists and professional science communicators approach and understand their science communication activities, I suggest that, if we look at science communication practice, there are many other meanings layered onto science communication, not all of which are to do with successful communication of science or the production of particular kinds of public responses. Indeed, public responses to science may be incidental to the other things that are taking place as science communication projects are proposed, funded and realised. This, I believe, raises important questions regarding how we study science communication.

In calling for more research into science communication ‘in the wild’, I am referencing a distinction made by Callon and Rabeharisoa (2003) in discussing patient activism and lay research. ² ‘Research in the wild’, they say, is biomedical research that takes place outside of the laboratory, often carried out by ‘concerned groups’ such as patients and their families. It is vital to acknowledge the validity of such ‘real world’ research because, as they write, ‘Laboratory knowledge cannot absorb all the complexities of the world’ (p. 202). In the same way, I want to use this essay to argue that science communication scholarship needs to engage more extensively with science communication practice ‘in the wild’ – outside of laboratory conditions – and to study it in ways that acknowledge the complex contexts in which science communication takes place. Science communication activities are made meaningful as they are realised by particular people and organisations, working under particular constraints, with particular goals and agendas. My argument is thus that it is vital to study and practice science communication in ways that are mindful that it may not primarily be ‘about’ the communication of science to those implicated in it (whether as producers or audiences), but relate to other kinds of concerns entirely.

In what follows, I develop these ideas in a number of steps. First, I briefly discuss literature on how science communication has been modelled (and therefore what it is ‘about’), as well as more recent moves towards a cultural approach to science communication. Second, I offer a number of observations based on 20 years of studying science communication, and, in particular, argue that science communication is often internally heterogeneous: projects are ‘about’ different things to different people, such that they assemble diverse concerns, priorities and temporalities. Finally, I reflect on what these empirical snapshots suggest with regard to science communication research and practice, in particular making the argument that in a context of academic capitalism, intense competition for resources and highly commercialised scientific research (Hackett, 2014; Sigl et al., 2020), science communication ‘in the wild’ may well be about personal prestige, performative acquisition of grant income or finding a regular income as much as (or as well as) giving publics access to science.

Before moving on, it is important to situate these observations and reflections. In developing my argument, I draw on science communication scholarship but also, as noted, on some 20 years of conducting empirical studies of science communication (e.g. as reported in Davies, 2008, 2013, 2019a, 2019b, 2021; Davies and Horst, 2016). During this time, I have worked in the United Kingdom, the United States, Denmark, and Austria, as well as engaging with the wider international scholarly and practitioner community through conferences and events. While I believe I can say something about practitioner experiences and science communication ‘in the wild’, this is clearly only a snapshot of a far more diverse set of practices, contexts and experiences. It is also important to note that while I draw on particular empirical moments and snapshots to make my arguments, I have anonymised all details of the projects and people involved (other than to say that I am particularly concerned with scientists and professional science communicators and have studied collaborative projects involving such actors). The findings and arguments presented here are somewhat sensitive in that I suggest that communicating science may not, in and of itself, be the actual priority for those carrying out science communication. I therefore find it vital to protect the confidentiality of the many practitioners and researchers who have generously engaged with my research. When I refer to particular empirical examples, I will not specify when the project took place or which country it was located in.

What is science communication about?

As noted, existing definitions and discussions of science communication tend to focus on its role in allowing for the communication, debate, negotiation or exchange of mainstream scientific knowledge. Importantly, this remains the case within more recent models of science communication that present it not as a one-way flow of information (the so-called ‘deficit model’; Wynne, 2006) but as an opportunity for non-scientists to contribute to knowledge production through dialogue or public engagement (Horst, 2012; Longnecker, 2016; Trench, 2008). Akin (2017), in presenting an overview of the ‘science of science communication’, notes that after an early emphasis on deficit-style communication,

the field of science communication has evolved to incorporate empirical study of not only the one-way (from media or other communicators to publics) flow of scientific information but also two-way dialogues (publics relaying insights and reactions to science and technology to scientific and policy communities) and eventually multiway (involving publics, communicators, scientists, policymakers, or others) dialogues (Akin, 2017: 25)

Even where such dialogues treat ethical, policy or other aspects of science in society, the public’s role is to relay ‘insights and reactions to science and technology’ (Akin, 2017). Scientific knowledge – and how it might travel – thus remains the focus of science communication and dialogue. This is made explicit in Horlick-Jones et al. (2007), which frames public engagement activities as information systems through which information travels and is transformed. Similarly, a ‘systemic turn’ within science communication and engagement that argues for more holistic, interconnected and even whole-society approaches to these practices (Bogner, 2012; Braun and Könninger, 2017; Chilvers and Kearnes, 2016; Chilvers et al., 2018) continues to foreground science and its governance, to the extent that Braun and Könninger write that participatory and deliberative processes that are ‘disconnected from actual policy-making or governance processes’ are ‘more or less inconsequential’ (2017: 12). Again, science communication and engagement is ‘about’ science and its governance, with other meanings that it may take on within particular contexts considered ‘inconsequential’. ³

In contrast, recent approaches that study science communication as culture (Blue, 2018; Bucchi and Trench, 2021; Davies and Horst, 2016; Davies et al., 2019; Medin and Bang, 2014) have at least partly sought to decentre science from what is going on within science communication, suggesting that it may serve ‘ritual’ functions within society (Blue, 2018), will inevitably mobilise specific ‘cultural orientations’ (Medin and Bang, 2014), or that it is ‘something that is concerned with the creation of shared meanings . . . connected to the nature and ideologies of contemporary societies’ (Davies et al., 2019: 2). Cultural approaches to science communication mobilise the view that culture is ‘the way a society expresses itself’ (Davies et al., 2019: 2). Viewing science communication in these terms thus involves studying how it participates in collective meaning-making, and the meanings that it takes on in particular settings (Blue, 2018; Bucchi and Trench, 2021; Davies et al., 2019). Such approaches also acknowledge the non-universal nature of (scientific) culture; discussion of science communication as culture is, therefore, closely connected to concern regarding the exclusions reproduced by both science and science communication, and to the need to diversify how science communication is carried out and who is able to work in it (Dawson, 2018; Dawson and Lock, 2025; Halpern and O’Rourke, 2020; Orthia and Roberson, 2023; Rasekoala, 2023).

In this essay, I build on this scholarship to further argue for decentring science within the study of science communication. While others have documented diverse ways that public audiences make science communication meaningful to them, here I focus on scientists and other science communication practitioners to suggest that there is internal heterogeneity in many science communication projects. Participants have different understandings of what they are engaging in, define success in different terms and have diverse interests and priorities. Science communication is ‘about’ different things, even within a single project. I outline some of this heterogeneity in the section below.

Assembling science communication

What does it mean to say that science communication projects are internally heterogeneous? In this section, I will use snapshots from one project in particular (a partnership between scientists and professional science communicators supported by a public funder and focused on communicating a particular scientific topic to a range of public audiences), as well as my experiences more generally over the last 20 years. In all of these cases, despite science communication projects usually having clearly defined formal goals and milestones, ethnographic engagement and interviews often revealed quite diverse understandings of what the project was about and for. For instance, some partners might be involved because their boss told them that they had to be; others saw it as an opportunity to promote their personal research and build a public profile; others again saw the project as something that would provide an income while they looked for work in another area that they were more passionate about. Often, science communication was framed as a means to an end: for some within academia, applying for and gaining funding (in this case for science communication) was an aim in itself, in that it was a means of demonstrating one’s capacity to capture ‘thirdparty funding’ and thereby boost an academic CV. For others, any kind of grant income meant that a small organisation could keep employing some of its staff. Participating in science communication might thus be a means of accessing funding and supporting existing activities or team members, or of bringing business to a colleague or friend.

Science communication projects are therefore assembled from heterogeneous elements. They not only bring together different individuals and organisations but also sit at the intersection of different goals, priorities, interests and values. Some of these may align with scholarly discussion of science communication – participants might express a desire to educate or inspire audiences, for instance, or the sense that science should be publicly accountable (cf. Davies, 2021; Kappel and Holmen, 2019). But others are quite different: to build a personal brand and social media presence; to test out a product; to continue employing a team member; to fulfil a task set by a line manager; to build a career in a related domain. In particular, I think we can identify differences across (at least) two central dimensions, which I have summarised as time and money. I briefly discuss each of these below.

First, it is clear that science communication activities often involve the intersection of different temporalities. On the one hand, different partners may have different amounts of time available or different expectations with regard to how much time should be invested in preparing for and carrying out a science communication activity. On the other hand, a project may draw together different rhythms – ways of working that embed routines and expectations across particular timeframes (Felt, 2025). One example of this is tensions between project timeframes and those of careers, research, or other activities. For instance, the rhythm of science communication projects may conflict with the rhythm of research, such as when a PhD student completes their studies or position before a science communication project is over, or when a communication project that might benefit from being carried out over many years needs to be completed within a project timeframe of just one or two (cf. Powell and Colin, 2008).

Partners on the same project may also work with different rhythms. One participant in the project mentioned above explained that they work with a particular local community in a way that is, of necessity, slow, trust-oriented and often challenging. In contrast, other partners needed to do things with ‘hustle and bustle’, meaning that they simply dropped in for a particular event and, as a result (the other partner said), were not able to communicate well with their audience. There was a disconnect between the rhythms associated with these different partners’ work and, therefore, their expectations of how long particular tasks should take. Similarly, different capacities for spending time on the project often caused challenges. While most partners expressed that there was simply not enough time for everything that was planned, some had better availability than others, meaning that they might be waiting on other partners to complete their tasks or to have time for a meeting. One partner talked about their own expectations of frequent meetings and a lot of shared preparation for a particular event, and the realisation that another participant, a senior academic, was so busy that they only had the capacity to show up to the event and participate on an ad hoc basis. It was in such ways that the project drew together diverse temporalities and became something slightly different according to these: science communication takes on a different meaning, for example, if it is understood as an ongoing process or a one-off activity.

Second, financial aspects have consistently been a central theme, with differences emerging around what money is for (i.e. why funding is being acquired) and how it can and should be spent. Overall, and just as with time, it is clear that there is never enough money. Financing has thus been a central theme in my research: money is a motivator for participating in projects, an essential resource that is fought for, and a means to meeting particular ends (which may not always be directly connected to realising science communication – as noted earlier, gaining funding for science communication can also be a way of ensuring a personal income or other forms of financial stability). What emerges in particular is what has been termed, in a different context, an economy of promises (Audétat, 2015; Jones, 2008). When applying for funding for a science communication project, participants must promise so much for a particular budget (in order to be competitive against other proposals) that, in practice, it is extremely difficult to realise their ambitions. The competitiveness of funding drives up promising, resulting in a budget that is insufficient for what has been planned and (importantly) for the person-time that is necessary to realise this. Hence, as we have already seen, a situation where there is not enough time to do what has been promised. In addition, these economic issues mean that using unpaid labour is often essential for realising a project – for instance by relying on PhD students or other ‘volunteers’ (where participation might not, in fact, be entirely voluntary if a senior colleague is requesting it) or by requiring key participants to work far more than the hours that the project was paying them. As one participant in the aforementioned project somewhat ruefully noted, such projects function best when driven and led by a particularly passionate junior colleague who is able and willing to devote significant energies (and unpaid labour) to realising them.

Money also features as an end in itself. Acquiring funding is sometimes more important than realising the science communication it is directed towards, such as when it is used to employ a team member who would otherwise need to leave, or to add to the freelance income of someone with a portfolio career. In this project, one of the initiators explained that they developed the concept and applied for funding more or less because the possibility of doing so was there, in the shape of a particular funding scheme. They saw the project as an opportunity to build some new connections (with the other partners), but the possibility of funding triggered the project idea, rather than the other way around. These dynamics are particularly central in university settings, in which any kind of third-party grant income bolsters academics’ CVs and universities’ performance indicators. In this sense, gaining funding might only partially be ‘about’ realising science communication, and much more about signalling the capacity to be fundable. In contrast, for other partners, funding was indeed about realising a particular form of science communication about which they were passionate (or, again, about providing some stability for precarious organisations dependent on soft money).

These two ways in which science communication may be understood and practised differently are only the most immediately visible themes that emerge from my engagement with scientists and practitioners involved in science communication. Ultimately, my point is that ‘in the wild’, science communication is ‘about’ many different things: participants have different aims for it, assess success differently and see it as serving different purposes both within their own professional contexts and in society generally. While it is usual that science communication will have multiple goals (Davies, 2021), what is particularly striking in the project I have taken snapshots from is the way in which rather familiar aims – inspiring wonder, giving citizens access to scientific knowledge, recruiting young people into science – sit alongside goals that are much less discussed in the literature: building a personal brand and carrying out self-promotion; working with and supporting a particular vulnerable community; making money; getting to know colleagues from across a university or region. Indeed, far from lofty discussions about enhancing democracy (Davies, 2021), some of these goals are things that we might be hesitant about. Does it matter if (publicly funded) science communication activities are used as a means of building a personal career as a ‘sci-fluencer’ (Iqani, 2025)? If ‘success’ is simply acquiring funding, and that participants care less about a particular science communication project and more about simply having an income? Or that there may be some sleight of hand going on as organisations manage project budgets so as to best ensure that their members have stable positions? (We can, of course, also ask the inverse question: does it matter if those who consume science communication use it not to engage with science, but to build social relations or a sense of community (see Horst and Michael, 2011; Marsh, 2020)?) The way in which we answer those questions is, of course, itself to do with how we (as individuals and as a scholarly community) think about what science communication is about and for.

Science communication in the wild

I want to emphasise that my analysis here should not be read as an evaluation. In parsing out the different meanings that science communication projects have and the different purposes they serve, I do not want to suggest that some are more worthy or valid than others. Rather, my point is that science communication practice will inevitably involve such multiple goals and meanings, and that we should be attentive to these in our research. When we research science communication, we should engage with it ‘in the wild’, not decontextualising it or assuming that it is only ‘about’ the communication of science to those involved in it. We should be open, in our analyses, to the other things that may be going on – even those that might be quite alien to existing scholarship (such as science communication as a money-maker or a means of creating a personal brand). In line with others who have argued for a cultural approach to science communication (Blue, 2018; Davies et al., 2019), I therefore think it is useful to decentre scientific information (and its transfer and transformations) and to attend to the other meanings that may be at play within science communication activities.

Such meanings will be multiple and will far exceed what I have observed. But there is one aspect of my analysis of what science communication can be ‘about’ that I think is important to foreground as having wider relevance. This is the centrality of financial aspects in meaning-making about science communication. Money, as we have seen, threaded through many participants’ accounts: it was an end in itself, something that was vital to sustaining individuals and organisations, something that there was never enough of, given the over-promising required to access it. The significance of money to interviewees relates, I would suggest, to the conditions under which science communication is carried out (at least in these contexts I am familiar with), and in particular to the way in which project participants largely work under conditions of precarity (in short-term positions) and scarcity (of highly competitive funding). In an academic context, this has been described as academic capitalism, in order to signal both the financialisation of academic work and the marketisation, projectification and competition that have accompanied this (Hackett, 2014; Slaughter and Leslie, 1997). The pernicious and often discriminatory impacts of this – such as the need for junior scholars to constantly seek out funding or positions and a related need to ‘publish or perish’ or otherwise signal excellence (Sigl et al., 2020) – have now been thoroughly described (Felt, 2025; McKenzie, 2021) and have certainly been visible in my research. It is not surprising, in other words, that funding for science communication was at times primarily seen as a means of employment when the alternative would be losing a university job, or that participants increasingly thought of science communication activities as a means of bolstering personal prestige or their brand as a researcher.

Similarly, though much less well-described in the literature, it is clear that professional science communicators and science communication organisations also exist in a state of precarity, with high dependence on soft funding and time-limited projects. One effect is the economy of promising I have described; another is certainly forcing science communication activities into the shape of short-term projects rather than long-term community engagement (cf. Powell and Colin, 2008). In my research, these dynamics meant that many smaller organisations’ involvement in science communication was driven at least in part by the entirely understandable goal of keeping their staff employed, even if only for a few extra months. The way in which science communication is funded (or not) and how this shapes what science communication is and can be has not, to my knowledge, been much discussed in science communication literature. My view is that it is vital to do so, and to gain a better understanding of how money (from public and private sources), labour and the realisation of science communication activities are intertwined. As with purely academic settings, this may well also involve situating analyses of science communication within a wider context of competition, commodification and marketisation and investigating what science communication is ‘about’ when it is part of a wider landscape of entrepreneurship.

In sum, my call is for science communication scholarship that studies science communication in the wild, not as an idealised space in which it is only the ways in which scientific knowledge travels or is transformed that are at stake. In line with other research that takes a cultural approach, I think it is vital to understand science communication as not only being about the communication or negotiation of scientific knowledge, but myriad other aspects, from personal prestige to the need for a job. Explicating these many aspects and meanings will be a fascinating (and important) task for future research.