2020
Given that science communication is a relatively new discipline, its identity and thus its history are continual points of debate. The history of science communication practice is specifically linked to the institutional confining of science to academic spaces. Thus, the history (and resulting identity) of science communication is limited to a 19th and 20th century emergence in the “West”. Yet, with such a restricted historical identity is it any wonder that the discipline has difficulties in expanding its participants and perspectives beyond the modern West? To diversify science communication today, argues Orthia, its history must be radically reconsidered. To do so we must 1) “disentangle elements of present-day science communication”; and 2) “recognize multiple histories”. Science communication should be thought of as “a set of practices with something in common rather than a single, unified endeavor.”
Tensions already exist in the paradoxical efforts to incorporate all the possible aims intrinsic to science communication’s identity while simultaneously recognizing that not all aims are appropriate for science communication activities in all instances. Instead, by treating each aim independently, like science communication’s aim of sharing knowledge, a trace of the history of that aim quickly expands much further than the modern West. In this way, more people and cultures can find for themselves a satisfactory role. This paper is surprisingly one of the first to task science communication with addressing its colonial practices. I anticipate this task to be one which very much dominates science communication in the near future, a task which I hope to participate in moving forward. In particular, discussions in Canada over the need to “indigenize science” are continually plagued by poor results in the most long-establish disciplines. Perhaps, their disciplinary identities, developed in part by their traditional histories, have become too cemented and resistant to change. Yet, I believe that science communication can leverage its superficial identify by pruning itself from science and grafting itself to “the people”, and in so doing might redefine its identity as a project in service of “the people”, becoming the discipline that leads the way in decolonizing one of the “West’s” most powerful projects. Science.
Reference:
Orthia, L. A. (2020). Strategies for including communication of non-Western and indigenous knowledges in science communication histories. Journal of Science Communication, 19(2).