Conceptual Framings: STS Research for Science Communication

2.1 Introduction

This chapter introduces the STS-related conceptual frames we identify as key to studying and doing science communication. It discusses basic assumptions about the nature of knowledge, communication, and research, as well as how these are related to societal challenges. In Chapter 3 we will explore in more detail core sensitivities of STS and what they mean in practice, digging down into the details of how to mobilise them within research practice when analysing science communication. In this chapter we prepare for this by critically reflecting on the nature of communication and of knowledge through, in particular, the notions of co-production and knowing spaces. We also frame science communication as heterogeneous, as processual, and as requiring specific attention to practice. We close by thinking about values in science communication in research and practice.

2.2 Co-production: Where Ways of Living in and Knowing about the World Meet

Perhaps the most fundamental idea that we make use of in this volume is that of co-production. We understand the entities we study, and particularly ‘science’ and ‘society’, not as independent or pre-existing entities but as co-produced. To use the idiom of co-production means, [Page 16]to quote Sheila Jasanoff (2004: 2), acknowledging that ‘the ways in which we know and represent the world (both nature and society) are inseparable from the ways in which we choose to live in it’ and therefore to view knowledge or technological and social orders as being produced together. Co-productionist accounts emphasise symmetry: they call ‘attention to the social dimensions of cognitive commitments and understandings, while at the same time underscoring the epistemic and material correlates of social formations’ (ibid.: 3).

Our central framework is thus that knowledge production, and ways of knowing more generally, are always connected to particular forms of life – with science communication playing a central role in materialising this mutual shaping of science and society. Jasanoff (2004) suggests that co-production often runs along particular pathways, clustering within specific moments and places in which particular natural and social orders relate to each other. Specifically, she identifies four ‘ordering instruments’ which work ‘at the nexus of natural and social order’ (ibid.: 39–42). As will be visible in many of the chapters in this volume, these are key when studying and doing science communication, as they ‘stabilize both what we know and how we know it’ (ibid.: 39).

The first ordering instrument is the making, negotiation, and reshaping of identities, scientific or otherwise, in our case through the process of science communication. Attributing expert positions or describing human bodies and selves in specific ways – for instance, when scientists are represented as heroic or intellectually brilliant in popular media, or when human bodies and behaviours are represented in health-related narratives – are examples of such identity-related moments of co-production.

Second, institutions matter, particularly in the ways in which they become central players in defining what is to be regarded as valid and valuable knowledge. In science communication, looking at this institutional angle can be of particular interest: mass media, for instance, are powerful institutions that participate in defining what is to be seen as a given fact and what needs to be questioned. Media are also arenas for constructing institutional actors and attributing or denying credibility to institutions that make public knowledge claims. Science communication is thus shaped by, and (re)produces, institutions such as universities or media organisations.

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