Past Event

Science Communication Online: Genre, Genre-ing Activities, and Genre Change on the Internet

Dr. Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher
(University of Waterloo)

Uncloistered by the web, new forms of science communication are finding their way to new audiences through once unimaginable media. As science communication has moved online, a range of genres have emerged, including crowdfunding proposals and a variety of science blogs. These emerging genres of science communication are responses used by scientists who are adapting their communication strategies to meet the demands of changing academic and disciplinary expectations as well as public audiences and participants in science. In this talk, I explore how scientists can now communicate with broader and more complex audiences and, importantly, how those audiences communicate back. By charting unique genre-ing features across multiple science-focused platforms, and their movement in complex media ecologies, I aim to illustrate the overlapping rhetorical strategies and functions in these “trans-scientific genres.” Trans-scientific genres are characterized by their attention to a heterogeneous audience including experts and broader publics, and while they operate along a spectrum of expert-public engagement, they are never wholly research process genres or popularizations. Investigating these genres reveals a complex constellation of elements creating an exigence for their emergence and evolution. This talk draws from my forthcoming book, Science Communication Online: Engaging Experts and Publics on the Internet, from The Ohio State University Press.

About the Presenter

Dr. Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher is an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo, an Ontario Early Researcher Award holder (2017-2022), author of Science Communication Online: Engaging Experts and Publics on the Internet (The Ohio State UP), co-editor, with Carolyn R. Miller, of Emerging Genres in New Media Environments (Palgrave) and co-editor of GenreAcrossBorders.org. Mehlenbacher is also a member of the Advisory Board for the Centre for Genre Research at the University of Copenhagen, and the First-Vice President for the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine.

This event is sponsored by the School of Linguistics and Language Studies