By Karen Lunsford, Kara Mae Brown, Rebecca Chenoweth, Kenny Smith, Amanda Stansell

The above images come from the UCSB Art of Science competition. Begun in 2009, the National Science Foundation's Art of Science Project was created to combat public cynicism toward government-funded science research. In the subsequent decade, many universities and organizations developed similar programs. At UCSB, the competition invites undergraduate and graduate students to submit any type of image that connects to their scientific interests, along with two paragraphs explaining the image. Many submissions are images made during lab work. Along with exhibiting the pieces on a website, the organizers print and display the 10 winners at the UCSB main library and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, giving the students an opportunity to communicate about their science to a wider audience. The UCSB Writing Program has been involved in working with revisions for the labels and serving as judges for the best caption prize.

The Art of Science competition is an example of science communication, a term that encompasses texts about STEM topics produced in multiple genres, by multiple kinds of creators, and for multiple public audiences. Although some scholars (e.g., Illingworth & Allen, 2016) use "science communication" to refer to expert-to-expert communication, the term more typically refers to popular, rather than academic, writing. Academic forms of STEM writing tend to be labeled "scientific communication." In contrast, most researchers who publish in Public Understanding of Science and Science Communication define science communication as material directed toward any public audience outside the scientific community, including government, education, museums, journalism, media, and civic life. As editors, we use "science communication" more broadly to mean the popularization of scientific ideas beyond their narrow disciplinary niche.

In recent years, interest in science communication has soared. On one hand, motivated by concerns over the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, and new technologies, different public constituencies have made visible what happens when public discourse over STEM issues is disrupted and disruptive. For example, discussions about the effects of the coronavirus and vaccines have been divided among different echo chambers, and misinformation on media platforms has competed efficiently with conversations about scientific findings and processes. The pandemic also made visible how access to vital information and care is differentiated by race, class, and gender. More positively, different public constituencies have seen a rise in science communication engagement opportunities: citizen science projects; increased digital and in-person access to science museums; the rise of new venues for science communication videos, blogs, and podcasts; and widespread support for projects by local and national governmental agencies.

Within writing studies scholarship, we have seen a corresponding surge in interest in discussing science communication. Recent edited collections have sought to define science communication as an emergent subdiscipline (Yu & Northcut, 2017), argue for science communication's place within the humanities (Kao & Kiernan, 2022), examine how traditional and digital forms of science communication compare (Luzón & Pérez-Llantada, 2019), and address the need for scientists to become more effective communicators (Hanganu-Bresch et al., 2021; Newman, 2019). Likewise, we have seen more science communication activity in journals: the establishment of Rhetoric of Health & Medicine in 2018, a special issue of Across the Disciplines on STEM and WAC/WID (Hendrickson & Nicholes, 2022), and key articles on issues such as science communication threshold concepts (Reid, 2021) and emergent genres (Mehlenbacher, 2017).

In this special issue, Kairos offers a platform to explore the dynamic multimedia and multimodal content that characterizes much of science communication. As Bruce Kovanen, Nicole Turnipseed, Megan Mericle, and Kevin Roozen (2022) argued, STEM discourse is particularly embodied and dependent on specialized "semiotic resources including texts, talk, images, and gestures" (p. 62). Some of these topics have been covered in other disciplines/fields such as media studies, science education, and communication studies. We argue, though, that this division of science communication into different turfs adds to the siloing of STEM knowledge. Writing studies could play a role in bringing together disparate science communication elements and highlighting intersections among fields. For example, writing studies has a history of examining publication practices as they emerge and mutate and of analyzing how content producers and readers coconstruct knowledge. Practicing successful science communication also requires a nuanced understanding of audience and pedagogy, since science communication also requires practitioners to engage an audience who may not initially be interested in the topic or well versed in the field.

The audience, as typically imagined in science communication, is the public. However, what we mean by "the public" is not always obvious, nor is it clear what method is effective for communicating science. The traditional approach has been dubbed "the deficit model," which shares many parallels with the much-derided "banking" approach to education (Gross, 1994). According to this model, the public is ignorant and therefore needs scientific facts deposited into their heads. As the public grows more educated, the story goes, they will become more supportive of scientific institutions. We can see why this model continues to be popular among science communicators. After all, the public's grasp of basic scientific facts is sometimes depressingly weak. In a set of questions appended to the 2018 General Social Survey, 32% of respondents incorrectly identified all radioactivity as being human-made. Almost 50% thought that antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria, a troubling finding given the widespread growth of antibiotic resistance (National Science Board, 2020). When faced with such numbers, the temptation is to give the public more information through everything from educational reform to pamphlets at doctors' offices. However, scholars have discredited the effectiveness of this approach. The reasons for people's beliefs are complex, and simply presenting the facts will often not be enough. Discussing science, in these situations, requires diving into a universe of interlocking cultural groups, epistemological processes, and local politics, where no single approach will be adequate.

A study on how women perceive GMOs in Australia illustrates why the public should not be viewed as a single entity. Researchers looked at how a group of Australian women made food-purchasing decisions, focusing particularly on their thoughts about GMOs (Bray & Ankeny, 2017). They conducted three focus groups with 7–10 women, stretching across different professions and educational backgrounds. In one group, the women were mostly GMO experts, including doctoral students, technical assistants, and scientists. The others were composed of a mix of women in the health professions and in different industries, and several whose highest level of education is high school. What the researchers discovered was a wide array of ideologies regarding GMO foods. The GMO experts, unsurprisingly, were unbothered by GMO products, while the other groups invoked numerous reasons for being skeptical. A preference was expressed for 'natural' food, with many talking about avoiding the processed foods that are staples of Western diets. Many raised environmental and social justice concerns, mentioning 'terminator technologies' that make seeds sterile after harvest and therefore keep farmers from replanting crops. Perhaps the most interesting distinction surrounded how people valued evidence. The GMO experts argued the lack of evidence about harm indicates the safety of GMOs, while the health professionals emphasized the lack of evidence for safety as justifying their hesitation.

We can see the problem with deficit discourse in the preceding example. Even if we gave each of these audiences more evidence, they would process it in different ways because of their disciplinary backgrounds. Given how the drug approval process emphasizes the importance of safety—not only do companies need to show the benefits of a drug to a particular population, they also must show that the benefits outweigh the side effects—the medical professions unsurprisingly emphasized the importance of avoiding harm. In contrast, the GMO experts are likely more aware of how humans have been meddling with plant genetics for centuries, using strategies ranging from conventional breeding to radiating batches of seeds. They unsurprisingly viewed the widespread consumption of GMO products as suggesting their safety. Disciplinary differences, however, are only one small factor in shaping how audiences evaluate evidence. People also bring other political and moral values into the conversation. Even different nation–states follow their own epistemological processes, which have been shaped over decades of dealing with particular exigencies. In Designs on Nature, Sheila Jasanoff (2005) argued for the importance of taking into account civic epistemologies, which she defined as "the institutionalized practices which members of a given society test and deploy knowledge claims used as the basis for making collective choices" (p. 255). She observed that Americans tend to focus more on arguments embedded in the language of data, while other countries rely more on expert consensus.

Despite the push for more dynamic, plural conceptions of audience, however, static conceptions of the public still dominate the science communication literature. According to Ella McCarthy and Will J. Grant (2024), even when researchers define audiences more narrowly, they focus on some factors ("occupation, age, and education") more deeply or frequently than others ("gender, class and disability") (pp. 412, 421). The authors concluded by calling on readers to begin, not end, by defining audiences as diverse. In so doing, they ask us to interrogate—for a particular context—what it means for an audience to be diverse and why we focus on some particular aspects of audiences while ignoring other ones.

Other scholars have proposed taxonomies for examining audiences that go beyond demographics. For example, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (2024) characterized audiences according to their attitude on climate change, from "alarmed" to "dismissive." These categories were further broken down based on climate change activism, from "most motivated" to "least motivated." This framework is fitting for topics that publics tend to find polarizing; it allows writers to not only tailor their delivery and calls to action to what’s reasonable for that group, but also decide which debates to avoid re-litigating like anthropogenic climate change, vaccine safety, and so on. In contrast, Quan Deng (2024) defined audiences by the nature of their engagement, which can be predicted by their level of engagement with science communication and their prior science literacy: from "advocate/normaliser" at the highest end of engagement and strongest scientific background to "self-educator/enthusiast" at the lower end of both.

The problem with embracing any single taxonomy is that it inevitably neglects an important aspect of real-world audiences. If we were to define public audiences based on their level of motivation alone, we might miss nuances about what "least motivated" means in certain contexts. For example, many working-class communities live within close proximity to sources of industrial pollution. However, although they may be highly concerned, they may appear to be disengaged because they are unable to attend environmental activist events due to lack of access. Any act of science communication needs to take into account the audience's prior attitudes, levels of involvement, and/or possibilities for action, as these prove relevant to the science communicator's goals. We also need to define these intentionally (what exactly diversity, skepticism, or motivation look like in a given context). In the best case, these taxonomies can serve as a lens through which science communication authors and scholars can interrogate their own preconceptions about the audience, rather than an ending point for defining them.

Another important problem is that people consistently divide the world into "scientists" and "the public" as if they were separate entities. However, scientists are part of the wider public—they are, in fact, one of the largest audiences for scientific journalism. Sarah Perrault (2013) has argued one approach that captures this relationship is the Critical Understanding of Science in Public (CUSP) model, which foregrounds the multiple connections that occur between science and the larger culture. Moreover, history has repeatedly shown the dangers of trusting experts alone to guide our thinking on key controversies. Defining expertise narrowly as only existing in formal scientific communities ignores the lived histories and cultural knowledge public audiences bring to the discussion. For example, Naomi Oreskes (2019) has discussed how the male-dominated health sciences ignored women’s complaints about depression and birth control—scientists dismissed patient reports as mere anecdotes, despite the ubiquity of such stories in doctors’ offices. Advocates for Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) argue that Western science encourages an instrumental view of the environment, which might be a contributing factor in the climate crisis (Callison, 2014; Kimmerer, 2013). Each model of audience shows the porous nature of any conception of the public, and science communicators need to embrace these nuances.

Interrogating conceptions of audience brings us to the equally complicated problem of how to engage those audiences. Even though scholars have argued that science communication involves more than depositing facts in people's heads, they haven't clearly articulated an alternative vision of what it means to engage audiences. Furthermore, definitions of engagement are multiple and frequently conflicting. Susanna Priest (2013) surveyed the existing literature's use of the term, finding that scholars use 'engagement' to refer to different ideas, including everything from the level of focus during in-person interactions to whether a long-term contribution is made to the scientific literature. Meanwhile, Monika Taddicken and Nicole Krämer (2021) approached the definition by mapping three levels of engagement: "consuming," "participating," and "generating."" Even though "participating" and "long-term contribution" can seem to involve audience engagement, these models do not show how readers can participate beyond liking a post or gathering predefined data for citizen science—modes of engagement that are unlikely to influence the practice of science. To give an example, iNaturalist participants who photograph local species can only provide long-term contributions in the form of geotagged photos which are ultimately chosen or rejected by the scientists conducting specific studies; the photographers do not have a forum in which to ask questions or offer suggestions about the collection or use of this data.

The research suggests two approaches for science communicators. First, they should explicitly redefine the relationship between speakers and audiences, specifically by inviting publics to write or speak to the authors or scientists (rather than being written or spoken to) before, during, and/or after encountering a text. Secondly, they should help audiences develop the skills to engage with scientific conversations, which Priest (2013) has defined as critical science literacy. One important skill is the ability to evaluate a new study's conclusions and its relevance to the ongoing consensus. Another is embracing the uncertainty that characterizes ongoing research, seeing a study as always provisional. These skills can be fostered by presenting scientific disciplines in terms of how they are practiced, rather than simply sharing decontextualized findings.

One of the most popular science podcasts, Ologies with Alie Ward (2017–present), is a good example of science communication that leans into this approach: It invites listeners to gain critical science literacy with a peek behind each scientific field and to participate bidirectionally by submitting questions for experts. Ologies sets the stage for critical science literacy by making the history and nature of each field transparent. Each episode's expert—known as the "ologist"—explains how they stumbled into their field of study and/or specific research project. The ologist also frequently explains what members of their field (including themselves) don't know. They spend the entire second half of each episode answering audience members' questions about their field and the materials it studies. As the host, Ward periodically recaps her own understanding of the field, or recommends previous episodes from other ologists that have touched on similar topics, in conversational voiceovers delivered with the tone of one friend commenting to another. Through these combined approaches, the podcast is structured to acknowledge conflict, uncertainty, and ongoing assessment of the field's knowledge—not only acknowledge them, but position them as natural, even reassuring, aspects of the scientific process. Listeners get a window into the process of science through stories about how individual research projects unfolded, and they get a look at multiple perspectives of a topic as it’s studied by scientists.

Creators achieve this engagement by cobbling together resources on multiple platforms and cultivating communities that are motivated enough to follow them. In the case of Ologies, for example, fans of the show respond through reviews read aloud at the top of every episode. Before or after listening to a particular episode, ologites—the audience—navigate to social media platforms that offer greater levels of author–audience engagement: The Q&A session is accessible to all patrons who contribute $1 per month to the show, while Instagram posts share fan art inspired by the topic. Public audiences have some agency to interact with the authors or engage with texts, findings, and fields of science. As this example shows, science communicators and their audiences are experimenting together with the many affordances of this multimodal world.

The webtexts in this special issue pick up these themes of dynamic multimodal content, the relationship between scientists and the public, and the best methods for engaging audiences. The focus on public engagement is central to "Bite-Sized Science," in which the authors interviewed 21 undergraduates about their responses to science communication. In "We Lied to You…," the authors engage with similar issues, as they examine comments to a YouTube video that explicitly raises questions about trust in science communication. Questions of public engagement have been particularly important to environmental studies, which is why several articles, such as "From Information to Action," "North Woods," and "Exploring Sustainable Design" focus on the topic.

These diverse approaches to engagement connect to broader questions of pedagogy in both formal and informal learning sites. "Hello, Black World" shows how interactive data displays impact how visitors interact with physical museum exhibits. "North Woods" shows that while we live in an increasingly digital world, technologies like quilting and flower pressing offer productive ways to engage with science. In "From Information to Action," the authors demonstrate how virtual reality displays can engage audiences in conversations with government agencies, which leads to larger reflection on the relationship between technical and science communication. Several submissions in this issue address science writing that is produced by and/or aimed at younger audiences, from the undergraduate level ("Bite-Sized Science," "North Woods," "Profiles in Science Communication") to middle school students ("Exploring Sustainable Design"). As two of this issue's editors have argued elsewhere, students should be introduced to science communication techniques long before they "become scientists" (Lunsford & Stansell, 2023).

As the Art of Science competition demonstrates, science communication can happen in the most surprising places. A splash of vibrant colors can invite someone to click on a caption, which invites them to learn more about how microbes can interact with conductive polymers. A swirling black-and-white vortex reminds the reader of a science fiction movie, and they discover that it is a sophisticated computer simulation of a black hole. Later, they might find themselves journeying onto a Wikipedia page or purchasing a book on the topic. These dynamic experiences demonstrate a more expansive perspective of science communication, one represented by the webtexts in this issue. Following Ed Yong (2021), we encourage you to reflect on "What even counts as science writing anymore" now that "the pandemic made it clear that science touches everything, and everything touches science." We hope you enjoy spending time engaging with the following webtexts' discussions of science communication in a multimodal world.