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That science communication applies to both a field of practices and a field of research on those practices seems obvious enough. The very title of the 2020 book, Communicating science. A global perspective—part of an attempt to provide an overview of the way modern science communication has developed over the past 40 or so years, in 39 different countries or regions, reinforced by instructions to the prospective authors—framed the project around ‘science communication’, naturalizing it, encouraging its homogenization and reinforcing it through the peer-review and editing processes (It is worth noting that such a survey was conducted and published on the occasion of the 1994 PCST Conference in Montreal. See Schiele (When science becomes culture, University of Ottawa Press, Ottawa, 1994). But the draft chapters showed that ‘science communication’ is not a universal term. It has many definitions, and from the second half of the twentieth century researchers and practitioners have described it variously as an objective, a goal, a process, a result and an outcome. In this chapter, we have sought to list every term used by the authors and evaluate their degree of penetration of the field, understood as the frequency of their occurrence and as the number of authors using them. Close examination showed that 16 different words or phrases were used in the book for what we called ‘science communication’. Some were confined to a single country, others were applied across a number of countries. Only five authors defined the terms they used, but most did not, probably considering that their meaning was self-evident. This chapter lists and categorizes those terms, grouping them into three categories: ① most mentioned, ② moderately mentioned and ③ least mentioned. Authors tended to use the terminology interchangeably, even though most terms are context specific and tributary to national political, social and cultural trends. |
