View the ISCS21 Agenda at a Glance
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The 2021 Inclusive SciComm Symposium took place October 14-16. There will be virtual sessions, dates TBD.
There will be two keynote lectures that will be recorded, live-streamed, and archived on the Metcalf Institute YouTube channel.
The Symposium aims to convene science communication (SciComm) practitioners, scholars, and educators working across many disciplines, sectors, methods, settings, and topics to discuss practical approaches for advancing inclusive approaches to SciComm and public engagement. The symposium defines SciComm in its broadest sense, as any information exchange designed to engage specific audiences in conversations or activities related to science, technology, engineering, mathematics, or medicine (STEMM).
Inclusive SciComm comprises varied perspectives, including community engagement, informal science learning, arts, community organizing, journalism, community-based participatory research, inclusive pedagogy, service learning, library science, and many others. The purpose of the Inclusive SciComm Symposium is to build a community that actively challenges the dominant, frequently marginalizing norms of STEMM and deficit-oriented approaches to communication culture, and promotes science communication that values individual and group assets. Through these transformations, the Inclusive SciComm community will reimagine and change how science is conducted and discussed.
Practical approaches to inclusive SciComm are particularly important given the pandemic, ongoing racism, and structural inequities. These overlapping events and experiences have highlighted the urgent need for action. We need strategies for putting intentionality, reciprocity, and reflexivity – the key traits of inclusive science communication – into practice. Science communication is continually and rapidly changing; therefore, we must be aware of our intent and impact as we communicate, educate, and research.
2021 Inclusive SciComm Symposium Themes:
Theme 1: Decolonizing science communication
Sessions within this theme might address: introductions to decolonizing science/scicomm; successful examples of decolonizing scicomm; material actions to decolonize scicomm vs. metaphorical decolonizing; multilingual scicomm; foregrounding non-Western methods; integrating multiple ways of knowing.
Theme 2: Dismantling oppressive/exclusionary institutional structures
Sessions within this theme might explore the ways that inclusive SciComm can be used to address or discuss: scientific gatekeeping; whose voices are amplified/silenced; defining what “expertise” is and who is considered to be a “scientist”; moving from “outreach” to “engagement”; institutional change; facilitating difficult conversations across difference; ethics of the practice, role, or responsibility of science communicators and communication.
Theme 3: Building a supportive and collaborative Inclusive SciComm community
Sessions within this theme might address: building and supporting equitable relationships and collaborations with marginalized communities; supporting inclusive SciComm in your organization; moving past “firsting”; building a sense of belonging in the movement; caring for the science communicator (e.g., strategies for countering burnout).
Keynote Speakers
October 14
Dr. Max Liboiron (Michif, they/she) develops and promotes anticolonial research methods in a wide array of disciplines and spaces. As founder of CLEAR, an interdisciplinary plastic pollution laboratory whose methods foreground humility and good land relations, Liboiron has influenced national policy on both plastics and Indigenous research, invented technologies and protocols for community monitoring of plastics, and is the author of Pollution is Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2021). Dr. Liboiron is an Associate Professor in Geography and is formerly the Associate Vice-President (Indigenous Research) at Memorial University
October 16
Jessica Malaty Rivera is an infectious disease epidemiologist and science communicator. Her specialty is in translating complex scientific concepts into impactful, judgement-free, and accessible information for a diverse audience. Trustworthiness is achieved when people develop supportive and equitable relationships, and this is especially critical in matters of health. Malaty Rivera argues that the responsibility for building trust of medical professionals among communities of color must shift to reduce the risk of isolating more people in cycles of fear, shame, and targeted misinformation.