Turning scientists into journalists: It’s a dirty job but someone has to do it and Nicholas Russell outlines the aims and objectives of the Science Communication Group at Imperial College.
About the author: Nicholas Russell from 1995 to 2008 was Director of the Science Communication Group and from 2005 to 2008 was Head of the Department of Humanities at Imperial College. He is the author of Communicating Science: Professional, popular, literary (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
Mention Imperial College London and most listeners envisage a place committed entirely to one side of C.P. Snow’s antithetical ‘two cultures’; an institution dedicated to teaching and research in science, technology and the scientific end of medicine. Sure, the social sciences are represented in its Business School, but to nearly everyone outside the College (and to some inside) there is no association between Imperial College and the Arts or Humanities.
But all is not as stereotypical as it seems. Student societies dedicated to most branches of the arts are in rude health and there is even a Department of Humanities, originally set up in the 1970s to meet student demand for ways of broadening their specialised curricula. The Department still fulfils this function today but has also initiated other projects including starting the first dedicated taught master’s degree in Science Communication in 1991, a joint initiative of the College and the Science Museum, mediated by John Durant (then a deputy director at the Museum) with a large Leverhulme Trust Grant.
The trigger that started this off was the public understanding of science movement arising from the report of the Royal Society’s Committee on the Public Understanding of Science (the Bodmer Report) in 1985. This movement was a political initiative by a scientific community which felt that science and technology were insufficiently supported by government. Their proposed solution was to encourage greater media communication about science in the belief that this would lead to greater public appreciation of science, which might translate into political pressure for greater government support for science.
The MSc in Science Communication at Imperial College continues to this day, together with a second programme in Science Media Production started in 2001. The courses are taught by a small group of people who constitute the Science Communication Group. We graduate over 50 students a year, the majority then starting careers in print or broadcast journalism, new media, museums and exhibitions, science policy, or public relations for science-based organisations. The MSc in Science Communication is for students who want to explore as wide a range of career options as possible, while Science Media Production is designed specifically for those wanting a career in broadcasting. They have the opportunity to make a short film or radio package as their final project, rather than the traditional academic dissertation which Science Communication students undertake.
Both master’s programmes are conversion courses. The majority of applicants and entrants have science degrees but would like to take up communication careers instead of continuing with their science. Our courses aim to give them a basic practical toolkit in communication, together with a crash programme in the two humanities-based bodies of theory most relevant to them: Science Studies and Media and Communication Studies. We like to think the programmes provide our graduates with practical credibility together with necessary elements of the language and mindsets of arts and humanities graduates who dominate the communication professions.
What do our students do during their year at Imperial? The phrase ‘Science Communication’ is somewhat misleading. It might imply that there is some specialised knowledge and particular skills peculiar to the communication of science to which Science Communication Group has access and which we teach our students. I don’t think any of us believe that is true. A more accurate description of what we do might be ‘communication for scientists’. The practical skills needed for the communication of science are the same of those for the communication of anything else, we simply allow our students to develop and practise these skills in the context of science.
Academically we provide a selection of courses. In Science Studies, students look at the philosophy, sociology, and rhetoric of science together with the history of communication in science. Our students can then see what science looks like to various outsiders, often a rather different beast from how it is experienced from inside the scientific profession. We believe this helps students to understand how strange science looks to everyone who has not been educated and trained in it. In Media and Communication Studies we consider the history of media, basic communication theories, semiotics, narrative and documentary theory. We cover these areas to give our students some background in the culture, structure, and practices of the communication industries they will enter. There are also options available in areas related to these core subjects. These have included controversies in science, science ethics, science policy, science education, and science and literature.
The purpose of the Leverhulme Trust grant which set up the Science Communication Programme at Imperial College fifteen years ago was to produce scientific gamekeepers; specialists who would speak for science and accentuate the benefits of science and technology for society. It is probably true that most professional science communicators are employed in that role. But the Science Communication Group has always been keen to produce poachers as well; critical communication specialists who will examine the motivations of powerful institutions supporting science, question the assumptions and practices of the ’science communication industry’ itself, and explain the complex and shifting cultural, political and social relations between science and the rest of society through both journalism and broadcasting.
The most powerful single message we hope our students take away with them is that whatever the context of the communication of science, it must be undertaken in the cultural framework of media practice and in a language familiar to intended audiences. Popular communication of science framed in the interests of specialised communities (of either scientists themselves or of their various academic or other critics) is unlikely to succeed.
Nicholas Russell Emeritus Reader in Science Communication Imperial College London www3.imperial.ac.uk/humanities/sciencecommunicationgroup
Blog: refractiveindex.wordpress.com
Public Understanding of Science
In addition to Imperial College, London, a number of institutions and organisations in the UK and overseas offer courses on widening understanding of Science.
BBSRC: Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council www.bbsrc.ac.uk
COPUS: Coalition On the Public Understanding of Science www.copusproject.org
The Nuffield Foundation: Science in Society www.nuffieldfoundation.org/science-society
Oxford University: Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk
Science and Technology Facilities Council www.stfc.ac.uk
University of Glasgow: Public Understanding of Science www.physics.gla.ac.uk/~kskeldon/PubSci