Strengthening interdisciplinarity in science communication education: promise, pleasures and problems

Abstract

Science communication education is fundamentally concerned with relations between and within communities, cultures and institutions. Through exploration of these relations, it develops understanding of how knowledge is produced, shared and validated. Science communication operates at the boundaries and intersections of disciplines in its professional practice and it analyses them in research and education. At its interdisciplinary best, science communication is a continuing exercise in reflexivity on science and its place in wider intellectual and public culture. From this premise, this essay reflects on the promise of bringing perspectives from humanities, social sciences and natural sciences to bear on science, the pleasures of science communication as “joyously interdisciplinary”, but also on the problems in fulfilling the promise and realising the pleasures. It closes with a proposition for giving interdisciplinarity a more prominent place in science communication education.