Delighted to have been invited to present in the panel, Science communication as political communication? Scientific experts, policy-making, and media in the digital age, at this year’s ECREA conference.
My paper will give a bit of the theoretical framing to the panel, discussing the dominant “medialization/mediatization of science” framework and examining how relevant it still is for understanding the changes to science communication we’re seeing in our contemporary, platform-dominated media landscape. Here’s my paper abstract:
Scientists are increasingly called upon to enter the realm of public deliberation. Issues such as climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic, and to a lesser extent Anglo-European colonial history and questions around gender, have all called upon academics, scholars, and scientists to participate in intensified public engagement in recent years. Media research has traced and mapped a range of important controversies in which scientific knowledge features as part of public contestations. However, there has been a relative lack of focus on understanding the role of the media environment, itself.
the changing politics of the media environment, itself, has important consequences for the content of public deliberation about issues involving scientific knowledge and expertise.
The contemporary communicative environment in which scientists/academics engage with the public is undergoing profound transformation. The current ubiquity of social media usage, and the far-reaching effects of the rise of powerful platforms, are substantially changing the media landscape that academics step into when participating in public engagement activities. These changes warrant revisiting the main theoretical framework we have for understanding the relationship between media and science in society: the “medialization/mediatization of science” thesis. Does this idea – originally developed to understand mass media phenomena – sufficiently capture how contemporary platform processes shape the relationship between media and academia? This paper addresses the above question by focusing on the political implications of the increasingly platform-oriented media landscape for the public status of scientific knowledge.
On the basis of a literature review that brings the concept of platformization further to bear on how science is mediatized, the paper argues that the changing politics of the media environment, itself, has important consequences for the content of public deliberation about issues involving scientific knowledge and expertise. A key implication of the paper’s argument is that new conceptual and methodological approaches are called for if media scholars seek to comprehensively understand the influences of social media platforms on the way scientific/scholarly knowledge enters the realm of public contestation. Directions for the design of future research are presented that foster empirical investigation of social media’s influence on user, institutional, and political economy levels.
Donya Alinejad 