Experimental Curiosity Lecture Series: John MacNeill Miller, Ph.D.

Unsustainable Storytelling: Conservation Narratives and the Problem of Science Communication

John MacNeill Miller, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English
Allegheny College

www.johnmacneillmiller.com

The explosive rise of the field of science communication (often represented by the hashtag #SciComm) in recent years has provided a useful and widely popular model of what interdisciplinarity looks like. Professionals trained in science communication learn a particular way of thinking about how the arts and sciences work together: scientists gather objective knowledge from their data, and humanistic storytellers work to communicate that highly technical information in appealingly subjective ways to a broader popular audience.

This talk will question such models of interdisciplinarity, challenging the underlying principles of science communication as a field. The talk traces the particular vision of interdisciplinarity popular among science communicators back to the nineteenth century, drawing on cultural history to show how literature and science came to be understood as oppositional forms of writing about human experiences of the natural world.

Highlighting current examples of science communication from children’s literature, social media, and environmental education shows how these practices actually reinforce disciplinary divides by segregating skill sets and forms of knowledge according to questionable ideas of what the arts and sciences "really" are. As this version of interdisciplinarity divides up our ways of knowing and privileges some above others, science communication ignores a more fundamental truth: the reality that scientific knowledge is conceived and shared through language. A more fundamental reckoning with how language operates has the power to radically alter our sense of where storytelling enters the sciences—and why both science and storytelling matter deeply.