Canadian Science Publishing interviews me about creative ways of doing science communication and sharing science

I was invited to serve as the People’s Choice Judge for Canadian Science Publishing*’s 2021 Visualizing Science contest (which you can enter now!). In the course of launching the contest, CSP interviewed me about my take on creative approaches to visualizing science and doing science communication.

Here are the cliff notes:

1. I came to a career scicomm in a round-about way, only to later discover I had been doing scicomm most of my career.
2. My “creativity+scicomm” soap box centers around 3 principles: (1) Creativity can be practiced and enhanced. (2) Cross-training is essential. (3) Few innovations happen overnight or solo. 
3. Despite the constraints and our conditioning in academia, we must ground our science communication and public engagement efforts in what our audience or target stakeholders value. “No amount of beautiful art or accessible color palette […] will salvage a visual communication effort that is developed in an echo chamber.”

Article: Using collages & surveys to understand public opinion about managing agricultural landscapes

Screenshot of article

I was fascinated and delighted to join a group of researchers who used art (collages made by community members) to better understand what citizens in the United Kingdom want agricultural landscapes to look like post-Brexit. The published article clarifies that Brits want to look at bucolic landscapes, but perceive renewable energy infrastructure as more environmentally friendly than livestock on the landscape.

I initially joined the research team to bring an arts perspective to the writing of the manuscript. As I dug in, I came to see the research approach as broadly useful. Here are a few excerpts from a UW press release about the study that effectively sum up my take:

I see it having a lot of relevance for us in Wyoming and North America broadly, as it uses a mixed-methods approach to better understand what citizens actually want to see on the landscape. We are deep into these kinds of discussions in Wyoming right now, so these kinds of public consultation studies can be valuable for us, too.

IMPACT project receives UWyo Grand Challenges funding

Screenshot of UWyo press release

The University of Wyoming’s Grand Challenges initiative recently announced the winners of the first round of funding from this major university initiative. I am delighted to report that a project I am leading was one of the five projects selected. This press release provides a brief overview of all five projects.

In short, our project is about enhancing transdisciplinary capacity at the university, because the problems of today (and the challenges of the future) cannot be solved by a single discipline. Through “IMPACT — Innovative Methods to develop Adaptive Capacity through Transdisciplinarity,” we aim to transform UW’s approach to research, and enhance public trust in research and information. We’re taking a cross-cutting, institutionally empowered, transdisciplinary approach in which science, technology, engineering, mathematics, arts, humanities and social sciences are equal partners.

Words Matter For Scientists—Here’s Why: Public Radio covers a paper I co-wrote

In an audio interview and edited transcript, Wyoming Public Radio reporter Ashley Piccone interviewed me and Nell Smith (a student) about an article Nell led which discusses the importance of word choice for scientists.

In the edited article, Meaning-Making in Science Communication: A Case for Precision in Word Choice, we discuss how important it is to actually interpret results with nuance and attention to the different meanings one word can have to various people or interest groups.

Read the interview transcript here. Read the ‘Word choice matters’ paper here.

Canadian newspaper covers Her Flag project & Wyoming event

Click here for the full Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph article (paywalled).

Follow this link for details about my inspiration, my process, and the nationwide Her Flag project.