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The field of science communication is plagued by challenges. Communicators face the difficulty of responding to unjustified public skepticism over issues like climate change and COVID-19 while also acknowledging the fallibility and limitations of scientific knowledge. Our goal in this paper is to suggest a new model for science communication that can help foster more productive, respectful relationships among all those involved in science communication. Inspired by the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, we develop an experience model, according to which science communication consists in people’s experiences with science and the meanings they develop from those experiences. Three principles are central to the model: experience is cumulative, context matters, and audiences have agency. We argue that this model has significant implications both for communication research and practice, which we illustrate by applying it to the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy. We show how science communicators can help to identify and alleviate structural factors that contribute to skepticism as well as fostering opportunities for meaning making around shared experiences.

The last three decades have seen extensive reflection concerning how science communication should be modelled and understood. In this essay we propose the value of a cultural approach to science communication — one that frames it primarily as a process of meaning-making. We outline the conceptual basis for this view of culture, drawing on cultural theory to suggest that it is valuable to see science communication as one aspect of (popular) culture, as storytelling or narrative, as ritual, and as collective meaning-making. We then explore four possible ways that a cultural approach might proceed: by mobilising ideas about experience; by framing science communication through identity work; by focusing on fiction; and by paying attention to emotion. We therefore present a view of science communication as always entangled within, and itself shaping, cultural stories and meanings. We close by suggesting that one benefit of this approach is to move beyond debates concerning ‘deficit or dialogue’ as the key frame for public communication of science. Science stories as culture: experience, identity, narrative and emotion in public communication of science Copyright The Author(s). This article is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution — NonCommercial — NoDerivativeWorks 4.0 License.

This article explores Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as an “object of care” for use in examining the relationship between creativity and responsibility in the sciences and beyond. Through three short sketches from different disciplinary lenses—literature, science and technology studies, and feminist studies—readers get a sense of the different ways scholars might consider Shelley’s text as an object of care. Through an analysis and synthesis of these three sketches, the authors illustrate the value of such an object in thinking about broad cultural issues. The article acts as a kind of boundary object by creating distinct, yet overlapping narratives from an object that is owned by many social worlds. The three sketches reveal Frankenstein as a thoughtful consideration about what it means to care for, or fail to care for, one’s creation, rather than as a cautionary tale about the evils of scientific hubris. Although infrastructures at universities often prevent interdisciplinary dialogue, the article concludes that purposeful boundary objects created around objects of care like Frankenstein can help build bridges and create shared meanings for new interdisciplinary spaces.

This article explores entanglements and frictions between labour advocates and their relationship to technologies in future of work narratives in the United States. Drawing on literature from science and technology studies and media studies, we argue that there is an opportunity to move beyond discussions of technology as a ‘black box’ in order to deepen these entanglements and expose the frictions within these discourses. As a means of engaging with the ways in which the future of work is being imagined and opening up discussions around technology, we conducted a one-day participatory design workshop that uses a game in order to reveal the philosophies embedded in labour activism and technology. doi: 10.15307/fcj.26.189.2015 issue 26: Entanglements Activism and Technology

In this article, we examine the way images make arguments about science. The two examples we put forth make arguments about Darwinian theory. Darwin’s theory is a useful example, because the artists make visual arguments in many different ways, and the examples we present here expose the role of aesthetics in making scientific arguments. The first image, Plate 67 from Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature, shown in Fig. 1a, depicts Chiroptera, or bats, evenly spaced on a white field. The second, Charley Harper’s Darwin’s Finches from The Giant Golden Book of Biology, shows 13 finches, also placed next to one another on a white field (Fig. 1b). Although these two images appear to have little in common, they can both be viewed as arguments for some aspect of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. This paper will analyze these images in light of the image-makers and their styles. We will show how these images connect to broader scientific discourses. In doing so, we hope to show that visual style is intimately connected with scientific practice. As we shall see, just as artwork may always be understood in terms of style, to neglect to take account of the style of a scientific image is also to miss something about its content. Aesthetic components are not auxiliary to scientific representation but are required to make sense of images and to understand the scientific discourse they represent.