PhilSciComm Interviews: Lynn Chiu
From philosophy of biology to scicomm: Q&A with Lynn Chiu
Lynn Chiu is currently an associated researcher of University of Bordeaux and a visiting scholar at University of St. Andrews. She is the media and communications officer for the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis research program (currently led by Kevin Laland and University of St. Andrews) and freelancing as a science communication consultant. Follow Lynn Chiu on Medium!
How and why did you engage with scicomm?
I’ve always been curious about the role of the communicator in facilitating cooperation and understanding but never thought of it as a vocation. Yet I’ve never been self-aware of this tendency. It took a dramatic event in my academic career and a job interview with the EES (the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis Program) to realize that I’ve been spontaneously volunteering to do communications services for every organization I’m part of… for over a decade!
It started with editing the Life Sciences departmental annual magazine and writing for the campus newsletter as an undergraduate. During my M.S. in psychology, I volunteered to interpret and report for a 2008 student-led activist movement in Taiwan and took over the Newsletter of the ASSC (Association for the Scientific Studies of Consciousness). ASSC created the job Director of Communications for me, which I served way into my PhD. At University of Missouri, I proposed and co-wrote a winning seed grant for an interdisciplinary communications platform for Evolutionary Studies and Science Studies groups. After that, I served on the Media Committee of PSA (Philosophy of Science Association) and helped with the website and social media activities of PhilinBioMed (Philosophy in Biology and Medicine) during my postdoc.
While I’ve changed disciplines three times (Life Sciences -> Psychology -> Philosophy of biology focused on evolutionary biology -> Philosophy of biology focused on immunology), the only constant throughout this journey was my interdisciplinary focus and my volunteer work in communications. Well… since I’ve been doing this for over a decade, why not make this a paid job?
Now that I’ve started freelancing as a communications consultant, I’ve become increasingly interested in creating communications strategies that can overcome the gap between overspecialized disciplines in order to facilitate collaborations and mutual understanding. I’m also interested in introducing to the public special stories about science coming out of disciplines that work on and with scientists but are not within the sciences — philosophy, history, and anthropology of science as well as science studies.
How does your training as a HPS/STS scholar affect your scicomm activity?
The type of philosophy of biology I do (and did as a postdoc in Thomas Pradeu’s lab, especially) follows a school of thought that situates philosophy within the sciences (Philosophy in science, as Pradeu calls it). Philosophy in biology is not distinct from biology… it is biology. Conceptual biology. Communicating the philosophy in science is thus, to me, no different from the communication of science itself.
That being said, there are aspects of scientific theorizing that are not made explicit in the reports from scientists but are instead elaborated on in philosophy journal articles. I hope that my training can help me pick out aspects of science that are not usually reported in the news and media.
Does scicomm influence your HPS/STS foci? How do you select the audiences to which you speak, and how does this affect your scicomming?
The transition from philosopher to communicator — at least payroll-wise — has been a roller coaster ride, to put it mildly. I’m constantly terrified by uncharted terrains and uncertainty in where things are going. I’m stepping out of my comfort zone and doing such high-stakes tasks with no training. This is deeply unsettling. Though my thoughts are still developing, here are some rudimentary experiences I have so far about doing scicomm as a philosopher.
I just finished a “scicomm tour” to a science festival (Science Ground at Festivaletteratura in Italy) and a recording studio in London. I gave two interesting types of outreach talks to the public (a panel discussion with philosopher of biology Telmo Pievani and a “blackboard” event at the end of the festival) and got interviewed for the first time for a podcast, an art installation, and an outreach video. One of my blog posts (https://medium.com/philosophy-of-science-communication/science-ground-at-festivaletteratura-c9855d17c27f) will be featured in a Zine to be published by Science Ground.
Nerves and terror aside, I’ve come to realize that working alongside other scientists and — there should be a term for historians, philosophers, anthropologists, and science studies scholars of science — in a public engagement setting is dramatically different from engaging with any of them in the academic arena. The atmosphere is more relaxed, we are more curious, we are all grateful that each of us are willing to come together and get to know each other… all these natural, happy encounters helped me reflectively shape what it means to be a philosopher in this context.
Against the general public (which just means people I don’t know who are here with us today, they could be professionals from any number of fields), people want to see me think through a topic and learn from the way I think. I am not so much valued for my knowledge of cool scientific facts or numbers but the way I see things and analyze them.
Against other scientists and HPS/STS (science, technology, and society) scholars communicating about the same scientific topic, my training in analytic philosophy also becomes salient. I see how we could be interested in similar ideas but approach them through a completely different lens.
As a philosopher, then, I should ask myself to be able to give and justify judgments about scientific work — not just select and talk about the contents of science. Doing public engagement with a diverse group of scholars gave me the gift of this insight.
