PhilSciComm Interviews: Rebecca Hardesty
Communication and Science Studies: Q&A with Rebecca Hardesty
Rebecca Hardesty is currently a postdoctoral scholar in UC San Diego’s Biological Sciences and Teaching + Learning Commons. Her research is supported by UC Irvine’s Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation through several grants from the National Science Foundation focused on studying STEM education at the University of California. She received her Ph.D. in Communication and Science Studies from UC San Diego in June 2019. Follow Rebecca Hardesty, Ph.D. on Medium!
How and why did you engage with scicomm?
I started engaging with science communication by accident. For my dissertation, I conducted an ethnographic study of a neurobiology lab. Despite my graduate work being in communication, it took me the entire three years I was in the lab to really get that I was looking at communication with respect to science pedagogy. For me, this was a light-bulb moment. I really understood how much of everyday scientific work involves communication in the form of teaching peers or novices within their field.
After getting some great feedback during my first year on the academic job market, I began to see the relevance of my work to improving public understandings of science. I began to look for ways to apply my training in the social sciences and philosophy to both study and improve scientific literacy. I am currently developing a “communicating ethics in science” certificate program with UC San Diego’s Center for Ethics in Science and Technology. The goal of this is to give students training in ethical frameworks which they can apply to develop informed opinions about current issues in science. I also want this program to give graduate students tools to speak to ethical issues in their research or, minimally, be aware of the ethical implications (good and bad) of what they want to do. I’m also leading an impact study to assess the Center’s public outreach programs at the Fleet Science Center. Additionally, I am co-leading Philosophers for Sustainability’s social media team.
My postdoctoral work also has implications for improving science communication in classrooms. I am particularly focused on making STEM courses more accessible to students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds. One of the students I am supervising is starting a project with me on how to translate teaching methods from biology classes at a research university to mentoring programs for at-risk high school students.
How does your training as a HPS/STS scholar affect your scicomm activity?
On a practical level, my background and scholarship in STS and philosophy of science has let me collaborate with philosophers on science communication issues. Even prior to my science communication work, I had been doing interdisciplinary work with philosophers and biologists. I had gotten used to speaking to issues in fields that were not in my home discipline. Basically, through my training, I learned how to show that what I did mattered to people who would not normally be interested in how scientists talked to one another. This has helped enormously when thinking about how to express something so that it is accessible to a wide audience.
Thinking about the topics I work on, they are usually philosophical ones: How do models represent reality? How does justification work in biology? What are the epistemic criteria for a claim to be plausible in science and are they dependent on context, broadly construed? However, my methods are empirical which is from my STS training. This makes my science communication data-focused, sympathetic to scientists (because I know what they go through in their everyday work), and focused on what is necessary for people to understand scientific findings.
Does scicomm influence your HPS/STS foci? How do you select the audiences to which you speak, and how does this affect your scicomming?
Absolutely. I think it would be safer to say that STS, HPS, and philosophy of science impact my science communication foci. I think my background has been interdisciplinary enough that doing public-facing science communication wasn’t too much of a shift. I am used to being the person in the room who is kind of an outsider. This is always the case at philosophy and education conferences. Even at communication and STS conferences, my background is analytic enough that I am kind of an outlier. Now that I am doing more public-facing work, I am a bit more comfortable. There are different barriers that dictate who has the authority to say what in science communication writing or in developing scicomm-focused programs. The standards seem to be: can you communicate well, can you get things done, do you have professional and personal integrity? While these are important in academic fields, these seem to be more explicitly valued in public-facing science communication.
I tend to focus on directly communicating with people who are actively trying to improve public understandings of science. This has made me figure out Twitter and get comfortable with having an extended research/work network. I frequently am thinking about how many hours ahead my collaborators are and what languages my work needs to be in.
In my actual work communicating science, I am most concerned with reaching people who are skeptical or distrustful of science and medicine. Even if they are not interested in what I have to say, I want to write and speak in ways that are inclusive and non-judgmental. I want to understand where they are coming from because that will improve the efficacy of my work. I think of the students I have had who come in feeling like they are not represented in the field of study or not welcome because of their background or their lack of prior exposure. In my opinion, science communication should not be a clique-y thing: it is about introducing new findings and viewpoints and, most of all, educating ourselves and each other.
