Faith Kearns is a scientist and science communication practitioner who focuses primarily on water, wildfire, and climate change in the western United States. Her work has been published in New Republic, On Being, Bay Nature, and more. She has been working in the science communication field for more than 25 years, starting with the Ecological Society of America and going on to serve as a AAAS Science and Policy Fellow at the US Department of State, manage a wildfire research and outreach center at the University of California, Berkeley, and bridge science and policy advocacy efforts at the Pew Charitable Trusts. She currently works with the California Institute for Water Resources. Faith holds an undergraduate environmental science degree from Northern Arizona University, and a doctorate in environmental science, policy, and management from the University of California, Berkeley.

In Getting to the Heart of Science Communication, Faith has penned a succinct guide for navigating the human relationships critical to the success of practice-based science. Using interviews and personal anecdotes, as well as her own insights as a field scientist, Faith walks readers through the evolution of science communication and how emotional and high-stakes issues have shaped communication.

Purchase Getting to the Heart of Science Communication here.

Chapter 8: Equitable, Inclusive, and Just Science Communication

Until recently, science communication advice was seemingly agnostic as to who the practitioner was, although the implicit assumption has been largely white, male, with tenure  at an elite institution. Simultaneously, many science communicators spoke to a mythological “general public,” in which everyone was lumped together. It was assumed the same strategies would work for all—practitioners and communities alike—and that factors such as race, gender, sexuality, age, ability, and class did not affect the communication and engagement process, much less power and authority. Even today, discussions about the diverse people who are doing science communication work and why that matters are held at the edges of the field.1 While marginalized, these are hardly marginal matters. In fact, they are central because who creates and disseminates knowledge, including the languages they use,2 affects not only what is considered valid but also who influences the questions that are asked and benefits from resulting knowledge. 

As a recent example, thirty-five female scientists wrote about working on the coronavirus and navigating patriarchy at the same time. “Neither epidemiology nor medicine are male-dominated fields, but women are quoted less often—sometimes not at all—in articles. What’s more, the lack of inclusion of leaders of color is striking and disenfranchising for minority women scientists of color, particularly as communities of color are being hit hardest by this epidemic.”3 Although these researchers and science communicators were speaking about COVID-19, the issues they raised are the same ones that appear over and over again in science communication practice.

Rebekah Fenton further explains how these kinds of gendered and racial dynamics affect her as a Black professional working in the midst of both the coronavirus pandemic and widespread protests in the wake of police brutality. “After the first week of the protests, I was in church. When my pastor started to talk about the current protests in the context of this very long struggle, I started to cry. That release was key for me, knowing I was going into a workweek where I’d be alongside other Black and brown medical students who serve predominantly Black and brown patients,” she said in an interview.4 “Systemic racism prevents us as doctors from promoting people’s health and well-being in a broad sense, beyond addressing disease. I hear a lot of doctors say, ‘Well I’m just going to take good care of my patients,’ in response to the protests, and leave it at that. But taking good care of your patients means acknowledging racism.”

To be sure, a failure to acknowledge the identities, knowledges, and lived experiences of diverse science communicators affects not just their careers but also the communities they work with. “We live in an era of abundant scientific information, yet access to information and to opportunities for substantive public engagement with the processes and outcomes of science are still inequitably distributed,” wrote the authors of a paper on inclusive science communication, led by Katherine Canfield, after the first national conference on inclusive science communication.5 

Because broad discussions of inclusivity are relatively new in science communication, it is also a dynamic area of conversation where even the terminology is contested. It can be seen through any number of possible lenses: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) being one—with justice sometimes added to create the acronym JEDI—representation and belonging another. Positionality is yet another term that arose in geography as a way to acknowledge where one comes from and how they know what they know, giving a way to think about and work with power differentials, access, and gatekeeping. Discussions about antiracist practices are becoming more common and commonly debated as I write this text. To be clear, these are not interchangeable terms, and each has its own rich scholarship and practice. Interrogating and contesting their varied meanings is a form of negotiating viable and just science communication practices. 

Before going further, for this chapter in particular, it is important for me to identify myself and the position that I am writing from. To restate a brief version of what I did in the preface, I am a cisgendered white woman with a doctoral degree and a non-tenure-track academic position. For some, these may seem like superfluous details, but I state them to indicate that these factors, and many more that I am unlikely ever to share widely or even recognize, inform my outlook on my science communication practice and affect whom I am able to connect with. In coming to understand this, I am grateful for the world-changing work being done by a brilliant group of practitioners with diverse experiences and expertise. Instead of layering my own necessarily limited point of view on top of the perspectives they have generously described, I am sharing their work and their words.

This is an invitation to science communicators to approach people as individuals and communities as unique with an eye toward reducing potential harms for all. The people and initiatives in this chapter demonstrate why relating—rather than theorizing—is vital to releasing the field from communicating in abstractions.

Developing Trusting Relationships

“I was invited to the Grand Canyon for the hundred-year anniversary of the park, but there was no acknowledgment that the land was there long before, that there were people there long before,” says Sergio Avila, a scientist and outdoors coordinator with the Sierra Club in the southwestern United States.

“Viewing humans apart from nature is a myth and a very European invention. There is a history of racism in the field of conservation that has resulted in scientists being comfortable talking about ‘prehuman’ time in places where humans have always been,” he adds. “As part of communicating science, we need to break the paradigm that environmentalism and conservation are separate from social justice.”

Born in Mexico City and raised in Zacatecas, Mexico, Avila says he is following in the path of his parents, both of whom are scientists, though he is taking a slight turn from their careers as professors. “I’ve had a lot of access, privilege, and comfort with learning and navigating academia.

As I started out, I could easily see myself on that traditional path to success—many publications, a big lab group. Instead, I worked with Indigenous people and found a different calling. I realized that for me, the path I was on was not going to give communities what they needed. They had immediate needs I could help with, but it would have to be in a different role.” 

Avila was researching endangered jaguars along the border between the United States and Mexico. In addition to working with Indigenous peoples, he had to learn to engage with numerous people with distinct lived experiences. Simply finding jaguars and gaining access to their territories for data collection was difficult. To do that, he had to work with landowners and quickly saw that “there was no instruction for this part.” 

“I had to explain my work to landowners and realized all the tools I had to do that were exclusionary,” Avila says. “Too often, scientists create language that is actually meant to exclude people. We build ourselves up as the experts. And then we’re supposed to ‘dumb down’ or simplify our language, which just leads to more feelings of superiority. Scientists walk into a place they don’t know at all, acting like they do know it all. In fact, it is very humbling to meet landowners who truly know a place in a way I never will.” 

Avila says that unfortunately there are still a lot of bad research and communication practices that persist. “It makes the people we need to work with skeptical. And that’s hard because we scientists, especially people of color, have to do a lot of emotional labor.”

Emotional labor is the process of managing one’s own feelings and expressions to fulfill the requirements and expectations of a job, which is enforced by the dominant culture. This functions to keep others happy and is largely invisible, unrecognized, and unpaid, which results in a mental load or burden not carried by everyone, though it can also be explicitly taken up to help “share the load” as well. 

“We scientists and science communicators don’t always see that we are asking communities to do more than their fair share of emotional labor too. It can lead to community burnout.” Science is a tool, but it can’t be used to exclude people, notes Avila. “The idea of ‘science literacy’ is not inclusive. We ignore so much—language, learning outside of classrooms,

eating meals together.”

Avila learned that efforts like shared time are crucial, but sometimes he had to learn the hard way. “I can be pretty funny and I tend to talk a lot, and while it can be useful sometimes, I’ve also been told that I need to tone it down at times. Those community interactions lay bare who

you are as a person, aside from the degrees and institutional affiliations.

“I’ve had to learn to listen more, to offer less ‘solutions’ and advice that nobody wants. You have to talk about things you have in common and see where things go from there. I have a lot of ranchers in my family, so I was able to start there to create some trust with ranchers whose land I was trying to access.”

Trust is also key for Avila: 

In Mexico, there is virtually no public land, unlike in the United States, and so the dynamics when it comes to research access are also quite different. Ranchers and landowners on both sides of the border have their own community and talk a lot; therefore, they tend to view predators like jaguars in similar ways. Mexican landowners might fear their lands being taken away if they disclose there are jaguars, not necessarily seeing that in the United States many people are working on public lands with grazing allotments that have to be renewed. Developing trusting relationships, following through, is the only way to do this work.

From Getting to the Heart of Science Communication by Faith Kearns. Copyright © 2021 Faith Kearns. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C. https://islandpress.org/books/getting-heart-science-communication