Building Better Bridges: Toward a Transdisciplinary Science Communication

ABSTRACT

In this article the authors envision a more durable and portable model of scholarship on public engagement with science through partnerships between rhetoricians of science and quantitative social scientists. The authors consider a number of barriers and limitations that make such partnerships difficult, with an eye toward discovering ways that researchers may overcome them. The authors conclude by articulating guidelines for reciprocal transdisciplinary work as well as specific recommended practices for such collaborations.

KEYWORDS:

• Rhetoric of science
• science communication
• transdisciplinarity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For the sake of convenience, in the remainder of this article we will refer to quantitative social scientists interested in science communication as “social scientists.”

2. We are not remotely the first to propose or conduct research between rhetoricians and social scientists, and space prevents us from including a thorough literature review of some of the projects that have come out of partnerships similar to that which we propose here. Celeste Condit, Jean Goodwin, Caroline Gottshalk Drushke, John Lynch, Carl Herndl, Jordynn Jack, and Scott Graham, for example, have all had fruitful partnerships with social scientists. We are proposing transdisciplinary collaboration as an answer to the specific question posed by this special issue, and as an opportunity to reflect on what it means to do this kind of work. For a similar reflection between rhetoricians of health and medicine and qualitative health communication scholars, see Lynch and Zoller (2015).

3. For a commentary on this point, see Ceccarelli (2014).

4. For an excellent resource for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration, see the essays in Frodeman, Klein, and Pacheco (2017).

5. One reason Merton (1942/1973) may have chosen to explicitly focus on moral norms was due to their disciplining power: the “mores of science,” Merton explains, “possess a methodologic rationale but they are binding, not only because they are procedurally efficient, but because they are believed right and good” (p. 270).

6. Merton’s moral and technical norms are not observations of actually existing practice but a summary of the values, goals, commitments, and patterns of practice that can be inferred but not measured. It is telling that Merton invokes Freud in this piece. Norms hum below the surface, guiding work as the scientific super-ego, appearing as if by magic only when they are violated.

7. This is where we should note the delicious irony of Merton’s essay, which was written not as an empirical study but as a set of theoretical observations.

8. Although we focus on Mitroff (1974) here, a number of similar points are also made by Kuhn (1977), in his discussion of the choices scientists make between different theories, which often turn on idiosyncratic factors when applications of the standard criteria for theory choice are indeterminate.

9. For a more in-depth discussion of the norms of rhetoric, see Farrell (1995). Lynch and Zoller (2015) also make this point, invoking Lawrence Prelli, who wrote that, “rhetorical criticism often, but not always, proceeds ‘through use of a well-chosen sample of one, the ‘representative anecdote’ or case study whose detailed analysis affords larger-scaled understandings of situated, contextual meanings’” (p. 500; see Prelli, 2013, p. 6).

10. For another instance of this approach, see also Graham, Kessler, Kim, Ahne, and Card (2018).

11. For more on the role of communication in transdisciplinary partnerships, see the work on epistemological “trading zones” by Galison (1997).

12. Although most writing on transdisciplinary collaboration is enthusiastic and optimistic, far more attention needs to be paid to the difficulties of this work. For a remarkable essay on this point, see Fitzgerald, Littlefield, Knudsen, Tonks, and Dietz (2014) in which the authors frankly discuss the trouble they had working together. See also Littlefield, Fitzgerald, Knudsen, Tonks, and Dietz (2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jenell Johnson

Jenell Johnson is a Mellon-Morgridge Professor and Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is also an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Life Sciences Communication.

Michael A. Xenos

Michael A. Xenos is a Professor of Communication Science in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is also an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Life Sciences Communication.