Studying science communication from different academic disciplines: reflections on our research day
Updated: 5 hours ago
At the 2026 BE SciComm research day on 18 September, we focused on how different academic disciplines can build on each other's work in the study of science communication.
Science communication is a highly interdisciplinary research field. It has its roots in communication science, more specifically the study of persuasive communication (as Priscilla Van Even highlights in her PhD dissertation [1]), but it has since branched out. Different humanities and social sciences disciplines are involved in the study of how science reaches diverse audiences. Moreover, academics in all sorts of scientific domains have conducted research on how broader publics engage with their discipline, for example in medicine or (astro)physics. They publish in their own journals, while other research finds its way to science communication mainstays such as the Journal of Science Communication, Science Communication, or Public Understanding of Science.
This disciplinary fragmentation has been named one of the great challenges of science communication research.[2] Each discipline casts a different lens on the object of study and comes with different publication traditions, conferences, methodologies, concepts, and, more fundamentally, different paradigms and underlying beliefs and assumptions. These differences make it difficult to connect with others who might, in essence, be working on more or less the same thing as you are. This is all the more so when there are no dedicated science communication research groups, which is the case in Belgium.
Research on science communication is scarce in our country, and it is one of our goals at BE SciComm to connect academics working on the relationship between science and society with each other as well as with international networks. Luckily, a major share of Belgian scicomm researchers is already represented in our board.
On our research day, we invited researchers who broadly work on the public communication of science, whether they call that science communication or not. The people who attended had highly diverse profiles, with backgrounds in fields such as urban studies, medicine, or statistics. Quite a few attendees were also firmly rooted in the practice of science communication.
Human bar charts
To get conversations going, our board member Sofie Verkest (Ghent University) kicked off the day with a session inspired by the Dialogue Toolbox Initiative in which we got to know more about each other's background. The group was prompted with a number of statements about science and science communication and formed human bar charts. A few examples:
When scientific knowledge and other forms of knowledge conflict, priority should always be given to scientific knowledge.
The goal of science communication should be to create trust in science.
Research cannot be successful without stakeholder participation.
There is no such thing as objective or neutral science.
The differences in our underlying assumptions quickly became clear: two of the three participants from the exact sciences strongly believed in 'objective or neutral science', while the others (mostly humanities profiles) were firmly convinced that that doesn't exist. It sparked an interesting conversation about the ideal of value-free science and the daily realities of scientific practice.
In the afternoon, we formed groups around three themes central in many conversations about science and research: trust, uncertainty, and mis- and disinformation. Each group worked out a hypothetical study, building on each other's expertise. In parallel, they were also asked to reflect on how that process went. Julie Mennes, postdoctoral researcher at the Ghent University Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, joined us as a discussant. Her work draws on insights and methods from the philosophy of science, science and technology studies, epistemology, and linguistics to better understand and facilitate inter- and transdisciplinary knowledge exchange and integration.
In less than two hours, the three groups came up with quite concrete research ideas:
A mixed-methods study of whether and how AI chatbots are perceived as trustworthy when giving health advice.
An experiment on playful approaches in countering misinformation among parents of children with autism.
A mixed-methods study of how politicians interpret and communicate scientific uncertainty.
In many ways, coming up with a sandbox idea does not fully reflect actually working together across disciplines. We could ignore all practical constraints, while the reality is that much of the data we wanted to collect would be very difficult to get access to (Would you share your entire AI chatlog with researchers so that they can analyze if and how you discuss your health?). And of course, we didn't even begin to think about what kind of funding our imagined projects would need.
As can be seen in one of the reflections, sketched out by participant Jorn Ockerman, bridging disciplines was nevertheless easier than expected, since our particular setting encouraged collaboration, mutual learning, and breaking traditions. There was a strong eagerness to learn from each other's expertise. One group concluded that they immediately accepted each other's authority and expertise, with members eagerly noting down methodologies they hadn't heard of before.
Academic silos
Unfortunately, the reality is that academia is strongly siloed, and this is reflected in all aspects of research. I myself have experienced this first-hand through my research on science communication and the circulation of scientific knowledge to news audiences from the field of translation studies, a discipline that has little experience in this domain. To supplement the theoretical backbone of my research, I also dove into the disciplinary traditions of communication science. This has led to a few observations:
One word can mean different things in different disciplines, or different words might be used to describe the same thing. For example, the term 'translation' has quite different definitions in medical research, communication science, and translation studies (it doesn't help that in the latter field, researchers can't seem to agree on what it does and does not involve).
A PhD has to be obtained in a particular discipline (with interdisciplinary degrees being notoriously difficult to arrange administratively, or at least that is what colleagues tell me). Often, tenure track positions ask for a particular degree in a particular domain, which automatically excludes people who in practice worked across (more than) two domains and have just one named on their degree. Moreover, having a supervisor with experience in only one of the domains relevant to your work can cause insecurity and limits potential (working with co-supervisors can greatly help here).
Requests for funding have to be submitted to a particular panel, which is usually an overarching category such as human and social sciences at FNRS (which includes as a subtopic 'social studies of science and technology', though this implies a strong sociology component as well as a focus on exact sciences) or 'communication sciences and political science' at FWO (less suited for research with a strong focus on language, among others). Interdisciplinary panels exist, but are often a gamble.
Conferences revolve around specific disciplines, and time is limited. I've been to translation studies, communication science, medical humanities, and science communication conferences, and have felt like an outsider at most of these.
Choosing a particular journal implies choosing a particular disciplinary framing. This shouldn't necessarily be a problem, though supervisors might expect you to stick to publication channels in your main discipline.
Although these are genuine obstacles, discussant Julie Mennes gave us some hopeful take-aways: not every form of interdisciplinary research needs to fully integrate two or more disciplines. Interdisciplinary work always implies some form of disciplinarity (“there is no interdisciplinarity without disciplines”). Taking inspiration from other disciplines, she argued, can be easier and possibly more rewarding. That is exactly what we saw happening throughout the day, as participants were eager to learn from each other and to question traditions where they stand in the way of progress. I personally also learned that in conversations about science communication, it is always useful to start by discussing the fundamentals: what does science do, how does it do that, and for whom? As our human bar chart showed, these questions always lead to stimulating conversations.
Want to discuss further? Feel free to reach out!
This event was made possible by the financial support of NeFCA and the research fund of KU Leuven – Antwerp, Sint-Jacob campus.
Notes
[1] Transcending the Horizon of Public Science Dissemination (Priscilla Van Even, KU Leuven, 2023), p. 42–45.
[2] See Science Communication Research: An Empirical Field Analysis (Institute for Science and Innovation Communication, 2020), and “Vijf grote uitdagingen in de wetenschapscommunicatie” (Ionica Smeets in Tijdschrift voor Communicatiewetenschap, 2021).
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