October 5, 2024
Science for the People seeks proposals for articles, art, and other content for the upcoming issue on “Scientific Communication” (Volume 27, no. 1, Autumn/Winter 2024).
Science communication has always been central to the mission of Science for the People.1 Throughout our history, we have recognized how conventional modes of science communication have championed militarism, reified biological essentialism related to gender and race, and reinforced the notion that there is a natural or scientific basis for inequality and oppression. Choices about what language, analogies, and metaphors to use when communicating scientific concepts to the public have strong political implications. While science itself is never neutral, science communication adds a further layer which can be weaponized, for instance, providing fuel for attacks on transgender rights and identity.
As scientists and science workers who seek to transform society, we must examine and oppose the mechanisms behind that weaponization. In theory, the purpose of science communication is to make scientific knowledge widely available to the public. In reality, the industries that communicate science often serve as “brand marketers” for the institutions (or machines) that generate knowledge products, rather than as efforts to demystify or de-jargonize. For this issue, we seek to engage with the topic of science communication to explore: (1) how people want scientific thinking to inform their lives, (2) how science can best be guided and utilized in partnerships between scientists and communities, and (3) to envision the kind of science humanity could collectively produce if knowledge production was not hoarded by individuals and institutions.
Through this issue, we aim to sketch out a vision of what radical science communication looks like. We hope to move beyond a unidirectional, “deficit model” of science communication that seeks only to improve the “scientific literacy” of the public, and towards collaborative and co-created approaches that seek to put people’s needs first. As Paolo Freire has illuminated, people who have an intimate understanding of their own material conditions engage with new information differently than the Western K-12 educational model would prescribe. From market-driven science journalism that emphasizes sensationalism and individualism to “gee whiz” digital media products, science communication is often a Promethean project that aims to guide and direct non-experts towards enlightenment. Our goal is to imagine what science communication freed from its current constraints will look like. Rather than a subset of journalism, we see science communication as a continuous process by which insights from deploying the scientific method come to life.
We propose the following topics for the upcoming issue. These are not meant to be exhaustive, and we are excited to receive pitches that reflect on the theoretical aspects of science communication, as well as examples and visions of what radical science communication can be:
- What are the goals of science communication?
- Historic and modern perspectives: what do/can radical approaches to science communication look like?
- What seeds public distrust in science; how is distrust in science weaponized; and what is the role of science communication in addressing mistrust?
- How does miscommunication lead to misinformation? How is misinformation weaponized by the media? At its best, communication is truthful and agnostic; at its worst, it weaponizes contradictory information to drive engagement and influence beliefs and behaviors.
- How to make science a dialogue, a bidirectional exchange of knowledge and information, not a unilateral approach of scientists proselytizing to non-scientists.
- Examples from the world of Public Engagement.
- Building trust and communicating science through storytelling
- What is the role of visual representation in science communication?
- What are the roles of analogies, metaphors, and creative description in science communication; and how do choices about language reify or subvert dominant ideologies and political assumptions?
- How do scientific journalism’s origins as a tool of propaganda influence science communication today?
- Has mainstream “science communication” become mere public relations for science?
- The needle for measuring scientific authenticity is constantly moving, which erodes trust (e.g., informed consent guidelines not introduced until 2000; disclosure of all clinical trial results, including failures not introduced until 2016; p-hacking; replication crisis, etc.).
- Communication issues related to nutrition, health, psychology, green technology, climate change, mathematics, computer science, statistics, and others.
Details for submitting pitches are included below.
Submission Guidelines:
Submit proposals here (English) or here (Spanish).
Deadline for submissions: November 12, 2024
- We ask prospective authors to provide a detailed outline.
- We accept proposals for features, opinions, book and media reviews, artwork and more. You can read more about the kinds of articles we publish and our rates here.
- Please keep outlines under one page and image uploads to 20 Mb total.
- Science for the People articles are geared toward non-specialists, and are written in a journalistic format and from a radical perspective. We consider submissions from scientists across the STEM fields, scholars working in science and technology studies, as well as non-scientists and non-specialists. We especially encourage submissions from activists and those organizing in the sciences, and those working in the humanities and arts at their intersection of science and technology. We particularly welcome women, people of color, non-binary individuals, and others traditionally underrepresented in these fields to send submissions to Science for the People.
- Ben Allen, “Radical Science Returns” Science for the People, https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol22-1/radical-science-returns/; Camille Rullán, “Se réapproprier la science”, Science for the People, December 27, 2021, https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/online/se-reapproprier-la-science/.