Difficult Questions in Science Communication

Written by Ellie with the support of the Science London collective. 

Already in these past weeks Science London has begun posing a number of difficult questions in the field of science communication: we’ve asked questions like In what ways is science racist? How can we do anti-racist science communication? How are pay structures in science communication unequal? 

This week we’re going to start thinking about difficult questions from a different perspective - rather than addressing the structures of science communication and asking difficult questions, we’ll be thinking about what addressing “difficult” topics in events looks like. 

What does “difficult” mean?

I (Ellie) think “difficult” is quite a loaded term - when we say that questions or topics can be “difficult” we should think about who finds things “difficult” and what that experience is. 

Through the weeks so far, we’ve thought about how science communication as a field centres on whiteness: white educators, white-focused science, white audiences, white histories. As a white science communicator, I started the preparation for this week understanding “difficult” to mean something that pushed me to unearth histories that challenged my accepted understanding or celebration of received histories, or talking about topics that brought me discomfort.

For example: Where did the money of “independently wealthy gentleman scientists” come from?

Mostly these researchers were wealthy from complicity and participation in the transatlantic slave trade. Some, such as James Watt, are understood to have bought and sold Black people in the UK to work for wealthy aristocrats; others enslaved and profited themselves. The Royal Society (and a number of its fellows) were recipients of funds from, or involved in the running of the Royal African Company. Many scientists used the triangular slave trade boats as ways of getting to Africa or the Americas to collect specimens that currently reside in UK Museums which they could then also sell for profit (this is also pertinent to questions about why we have natural history collection that are dominated by species and specimens from particular locations…). Industrialists were not significantly better -- for example this database documents those who developed the UK railway system whose money for investment came from participation in enslavement and exploitation of Black labour.

However, it’s important to pause and think about who these things are “difficult” for. Some “difficult” questions are uncomfortable for me to think about because they are abrupt, unjust, sometimes horrific events that juxtapose with how I’ve been taught to think about and talk about science. They are often not events that I personally (or anyone I am related to or descended from) have experienced, so I had thought about them as “difficult”: something to work through and resolve. 

However, these “difficult” problems are not abstracted from the world around us and the society we live in - and these feelings and experiences are unequally distributed, and cannot always be satisfactorily resolved. In her blogs, Rokia encouraged us to reflect: 

Given all the ways science perpetuates oppression, we need to be more open to - and unashamedly create space for negative or conflicting reactions to the science we are communicating. Careful questioning as to why participants feel this way could be a great way to open up discussions of racism and social justice in your science communication work.

While the case I’ve given above is mostly historic, the legacy and emotional impact of these actions live on in social and economic inequality. Further, many avenues of inequality - algorithmic oppression for example - are current actions of “difficult” problems that it might be easier to pretend not to see. Experiences of injustice are very real to many people*. They are experiences and events that affect folk of the present, the past, and very probably, the future. So, the luxury of thinking that something is “difficult” - a challenge to engage with on a theoretical level - is in itself a privilege of whiteness that I want to face up to in building the content for this week.

Can we re-frame “difficult” questions?

When I originally conceived of this week, I thought about the moments in science communication events where members of the public ask questions about the topic at hand that cause discomfort. The leader of the event might not know the answer, they might deliberately move around the actual question asked to answer a question that is similar but less awkward, they might know and explain the answer in a complicated way that makes the topic uncomfortable and therefore seem like something we shouldn’t be talking about.

For example, in a show about the Apollo 11 journey to the Moon, a young person in the audience asks “Why is everyone on mission white?”.

Answering the question, the presenter talks about Katherine Johnson’s work on calculating trajectories for the Apollo 11 mission. Describing Black mathematician Johnson’s work, shows that the mission wasn’t entirely white. But this dodges the question - it allows the science communicator to side step the fact that in 1969, America was deeply unequal. Racial injustice was rife, it was only 5 years since the Civil Rights Act had passed, and only one year since the shooting of Malcom X. There had been plans for Captain Ed Dwight, a Black astronaut-in-training to be part of the mission, who was believed at the time not to have been selected because of his race; and there was significant protest against the mission by Black folk in the USA in popular culture songs like “Whitey on the Moon” and through in-person civil rights campaigns. By side stepping the question - and suggesting that there was racial diversity in the mission - the idea that this wasn’t universally supported, and that there was at least some racialised impact of the mission was shut off, and perhaps makes race seem like something that is not as important as the “great leaps” of science in the Moon landing.  

So, while I had thought about this week being a toolkit of sorts to help scientists and science communicators to prepare for these moments, to develop anti-racist, equitable, inclusive and diverse practices around these kinds of questions, or occurences; I believe this is not helpful. It doesn’t tackle the problem. It might instead allow privileged educators to feel better about their work, without engaging with the challenges but rather learning how to resolve issues later.

Instead, I want to use this week to think about what it would mean to address these “difficult” ideas head-on. What would it mean to not prepare for the questions that might come up, but to centre these questions in the piece of science communication itself? What would it mean to specifically develop events or resources that gave space for exploring these ideas in a constructive way  rather than to make raising them shameful or uncomfortable? Would making space for such thoughts help broaden who sees themselves in science communication? 

Remedial solutions, engagement with ideas, and changing practices

This week across the blog, and on social media, I’ll start the week with some examples of how to tackle and highlight “difficult” problems, and try to understand how to re-orient public/science communication to bring these issues to the front. Because there are some good examples from other cultural sectors, we’ll be reaching beyond science communication for some of these examples. Later in the week we’ll be thinking about the challenges of doing this work. Much like any form of anti-racist, inclusive activism, it is not simple. It is unlikely to be picked up and work well without resistance, and there is often push back from people served by the status quo. We’ll have a think about what might help tackle these issues. 

*Note: I wrote this before the UK 2020 exam results, but feel like the use of algorithmic bias in deciding grades is a nation-wide example of the ways injustices can be built into and perpetuated by science.