Rhetorical Citizenship and the Science of Science Communication
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Rhetorical Citizenship and the Science of Science Communication Jeanne Fahnestock1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract Public policy decisions often require rhetorically-engaged citizens to have some understanding of the science and technology involved. On many current issues (GMO crops, vaccinations, climate change) sectors of the public hold views differing from those of most scientists, and they often do not support proposals based on the scientists’ views. The overall cultural authority of science has also been challenged in the last decade by several negative trends in the sciences themselves, including widely-reported cases of fraud and failures in replication. With the support of professional science organizations, science communication specialists have stepped in aggressively to address science’s communication problems scientifically. This paper will examine the assumptions behind their advice on scientific information, their recommended strategies of framing, narration, and projecting trustworthiness, and their characterizations of audiences and the nature of science itself. From the perspective of rhetorical argumentation, the science communication literature does not promote addressing audiences as citizens capable of rational argumentation. But the science of science communication is likely to remain the dominant approach to public science with the professional science community. Keywords Scientific information · Rhetoric · Framing · Narrative · Scientific argumentation
1 Introduction In 2007 representatives of Shell Petroleum presented the town council of Barendrecht in the Netherlands with a proposal, already approved by the national government, to pump waste CO2 from a refinery into depleted natural gas reservoirs under their town. Despite “public information meetings,” local citizens grew increasingly * Jeanne Fahnestock [email protected] 1
Department of English, University of Maryland, 2119 Tawes Hall, College Park, MD 20742, USA
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suspicious about a project with safety issues that apparently profited Shell and the government while it decreased their own property values. Resistance grew with demonstrations and petitions from organized groups like “No to C O2,” all covered in the media. Despite ministerial approval of the project in 2009 and a new law that gave the national government the right, formerly in the hands of municipalities, to issue permits for projects considered of national importance, the Barendrecht carbon storage initiative was dropped in November 2010 (Feenstra et al. 2010; Lockwood 2017, p. 75; Kuijper 2011, p. 6232), Though proponents of this project considered the resistance “irrational” (Feenstra et al. 27), the residents of Barendrecht were exercising their rights of “rhetorical citizenship” and participating in the deliberative processes of their local government. Shell’s Barendrecht proposal, like so many in a heavily industrialized and networked world, included a significant scientific and technical component concerning geol
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