Summary
Contents
Subject index
Exploring Science Communication demonstrates how science and technology studies approaches can be explicitly integrated into effective, powerful science communication research. Through a range of case studies, from climate change and public parks to Facebook, museums, and media coverage, it helps you to understand and analyse the complex and diverse ways science and society relate in today’s knowledge intensive environments. Notable features include: • A focus on showing how to bring academic STS theory into your own science communication research • Coverage of a range of topics and case studies illustrating different analyses and approaches • Speaks to disciplines across Media & Communication, Science & Technology Studies, Health Sciences, Environmental Sciences and related areas. With this book you will learn how science communication can be more than just about disseminating facts to the public, but actually generative, leading to new understanding, research, and practices.
Science, Emotion, and Identity Online: Constructing Science and Selves on ‘I Fucking Love Science’
Science, Emotion, and Identity Online: Constructing Science and Selves on ‘I Fucking Love Science’
Reflections and Connections
Emotion is an integral part of both science and science communication. In this chapter, Oliver Marsh unpicks the role of emotions in one particular online space, the hugely successful Facebook page ‘I Fucking Love Science’ (IFLScience). He shows that interactions based around this site are not only about expressing enthusiasm for science, but also about articulating a (shared) identity as a ‘science lover’.
Such identities are, however, not always unproblematic to perform. Marsh also argues that discussions about and within IFLScience feature boundary-work. Within such discussion, some emotions and behaviours are framed as appropriate to the identity of science lover, while others are policed as inappropriate and unscientific. Loving science is thus performed in specific ways, and behaviours that are not in line with these – such as only ‘liking’ the spectacular, rather than the dull or difficult, aspects of research, or expressing criticism towards a scientific consensus – are criticised or reprimanded.
The chapter further highlights that exchanges around science take place through a broad variety of utterances, which in this context mainly consist of very brief comments expressing support, anger, or ridicule, or are expressed through (written or visual) jokes. This allows the creation of a distinction between an in-group and an out-group, thus constructing specific publics and their relation to science.
We thus see the co-production of (a version of) science with a particular community. It is significant that this takes place within a specific online space, with a particular atmos–phere that structures norms of behaviour and emotion. As Marsh suggests, some of this atmosphere derives from the conventions of online interactions.
9.1 Introduction
Science and emotion can be uneasy bedfellows. Thinking of science – or science communication – as a single, universal concept can lead to disagreements on a proper role for emotion. If science is an objective process, then emotion must be kept out in order to minimise bias (Merton 1942). But scientists know that emotion is an integral part of their daily lives, a factor which directs career trajectories and drives research projects (Gilbert & Mulkay 1984). Meanwhile communicators must work out how to incorporate appropriate emotions in their work to motivate engagement, without overstepping a line and encouraging ‘unscientific’ types or levels of emotion (Davies & Horst 2016).
Under an STS framework, which frames ‘science’ in more context-dependent terms, these issues become less problematic. Science and associated emotions are constructed differently in different contexts, and there need be no universal standards of ‘appropriate’ emotion. But instead, a series of other questions arise. Do emotions shape the ways in which science is performed; and, in turn, what different emotional responses might these performances generate? When actors speak of ‘appropriate’ emotional responses, is this related to their view of ‘legitimate’ science – and how (if at all) are these views policed? Can examining the co-production of science and emotion deepen our understanding of key ordering instruments within STS, from identity to patterns of discourse?
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