Unfurling Audience In Science Communication Research & Education

Abstract

When we talk about ‘audience’ in Science Communication what do we mean? ‘Audience’ is central to Science Communication. However, despite - and perhaps because of - ‘audience’s’ centrality to the field, concepts of ‘audience’ are often implicit rather than explicitly communicated. This Honours Thesis unravels these often implicit conceptions of ‘audience’ through investigating 1360 Science Communication research articles and surveying 45 Science Communication tertiary level educators. I found that overwhelmingly our conceptions of ‘audience’ are plural, rich, and cover a wide array of conceptual categories. This indicates that there are many ways in Science Communication to frame our thoughts of audience. Building beyond conceptions of a ‘general’ audience, I found there are clear yet entwining conceptual categories of ‘audience’ across both Science Communication researchers and educators. This thesis further divides these conceptual categories in groups. One group includes categories that singularly describe ‘audience’ in Science Communication such as demographic, embodied, interaction based, knowledge, and values. The other group contains categories that span multiple conceptual ideas of audiences such as diverse, dynamic, future, and multiple. Together these two groups of conceptual categories highlight the complexities, abundance, and varieties of understandings of ‘audience’ used by Science Communicators. This study unfurls ‘audience’ so that Science Communicators may use and hold a more rich, robust, and explicit understanding of ‘audience’.