[Conversations] “How are controversies manufactured?” Transcript and audio recording

Transcript

Monika Sengul-Jones

Welcome.

Leah Ceccarelli

Thank you for inviting me.

Monika Sengul-Jones

I want to begin by talking about the [Science, Technology, and Society Studies (STSS)] program. I’m just so impressed with the STSS graduate certificate program that you direct. It’s 10 years old, and it’s cross-disciplinary, cross-campus, and it’s also been, if I understand it right, somewhat of a labor of love. 

I think this is really important to point out. The, kind of, urgency that the program has. Because it’s enrolling students from a cross-section of departments. You’ve got students from physics, engineering, genome science, media studies, and anthropology. And the faculty are similarly from different disciplines: the School of Medicine, education, history, philosophy, communication. And, on one hand, this is, like, such an ideal at the university. This kind of learning and research that can be happening across disciplines.

But given that it’s unfunded, I’m wondering if you could share a little more about the urgency behind the program. What’s propelling it forward?

Leah Ceccarelli

Yes, thank you for asking that question. I think that with respect to students, I found that there are really two types of students who end up enrolling in the STSS certificate program. You just mentioned some of them. There are liberal arts students whose doctoral programs are in the disciplines that make up the broad field of STS, so philosophy of science and anthropology of science and communication of science, and then there are the STEM students who really want to learn more about the ethics of science and the social implications of technology and the public communication of their own scientific research.

So for that first group of students, the STS scholars, I think the program really allows them to certify that they’ve done coursework outside their home department, so they become more marketable for jobs that have STS as a part of that job requirement, or an area of expertise, a desired area of expertise. 

But for that second group of students, the students who identify as scientists and engineers, the program really allows them to sort of step back and reflect on their own practice. At a time when I think some of the most pressing problems that we face in this world are a result of the intersection of science and society, like problems that include global climate change, and global pandemics, and the post-truth disruption that comes with social media and artificial intelligence, at that kind of a time, it’s really more important than ever for people who are working at the cutting edge of STEM fields to learn how to think about the relationship between science, technology, and society. 

So that’s why it’s really urgent, I think, for the students. 

With respect to faculty, they get something else from this program. Those of us who study STS, we really thrive when we get to share ideas, not just with members of our own departments, but with people who actually study the same subject that we study, but do so using different disciplinary methodologies, drawing from different literatures, and asking really very different questions.

I mean, it’s a part of my job to share my work with other communication scholars as a member of the Communication Department. But it’s really in those moments when I venture out of my primary disciplinary home and speak with, say, historians of science or philosophers of science, that I find myself actually speaking with someone who knows the case that I’m studying, right? Who’s deeply knowledgeable about its context and fluent in STS theories that can help me to answer the questions that I have about that case. 

I think the university recognizes the value of interdisciplinary community for its faculty, even if it doesn’t go out of its way because of its structures to financially support it. So for example, often, when a department at the UW is trying to recruit a new faculty member who has an interest in STS, and that could be from many different departments—sociology, law, the iSchool, it doesn’t matter—they ask me to come meet with the candidate during the interview process so that I can tell them all about the interdisciplinary community of researchers here who share that interest in STS issues.

So although the program was originally created for graduate students, I think faculty are just as excited about it because they appreciate the opportunity for connection that it creates across departments. 

Monika Sengul-Jones

I want to pivot now just to talk a little bit about what you’ve done, in particular, because I think this idea that your work touches on different areas of expertise across the university is really compelling. And also, the kind of training that scientists or students who are studying to become or working as early scientists are getting by taking courses in the STSS program is really important to think about. 

So, you’ve studied the rhetoric of scientists and, kind of, scientific communication in general. And you’ve written about controversy and how this is distinct from scientific uncertainty. I think many of us in 2024 are, you know, probably aware and depressed by, for example, the massive resources that Big Tobacco as an industry put in to discourage the public from knowing that science, for example, shows that cigarettes cause cancer, that they make us sick. 

This is one example that you’ve brought up that scholars have identified as this kind of manufactured controversy, climate skepticism being another example. 

And in the process, non-experts or the public have come to view scientific consensus as, kind of, having two sides. One of which has been suppressed. 

A couple of years ago, you assessed how this works by looking at how, and I’m going to quote you, “skeptics come to be identified as heroes in this unfolding scientific revolution. They’re oppressed by mainstream scientists who are ideologically deaf to their appeals, and who try and silence them so that others are not exposed to their heresy.” 

And I was just really struck by this idea of scientists being the ones who are oppressing, and the skeptics as heroes.

I think today, as we’re faced with concerns around fake news and propaganda and misinformation, this tack that you take is really important by identifying the kind of rhetorical positions that are happening here. In many ways, technology and emerging technologies offer a solution, which is, you know, we can have fact-checking or truth detectors, AI detectors, that will restore the credibility of science or give us a shared understanding of reality. And really, what stands out to me in your work is that you bring an attunement to storytelling and the moral tradition of rhetoric to help us make sense of these shifts around the kind of truth, scientific authority, and how controversy unfolds.

I wanted to thank you for that and just give you space to talk more about why rhetoric is important in this kind of moment of techno-solutionism and manufactured controversy.

Leah Ceccarelli

Yes. Thank you. I think the manufactured scientific controversy work that I’ve done is a really good example of how people looking at this, this issue, from different disciplinary perspectives can all contribute to a broader understanding of what’s going on there.

Rhetoric is my field. It’s a field of study in the humanities that’s devoted to observing the available means of persuasion, right?

Basically, it focuses on particular cases, most often of spoken and written discourse. It’s attentive to audience. It’s attentive to situation. It tends to take an ameliorative orientation. In other words, it seeks practical solutions to specific problems of communication.

In my work on manufactured scientific controversy, I analyzed some cases where certain very “interested parties” claimed there were raging disputes in relevant scientific communities, when in fact, there was a remarkably high level of consensus among subject area experts. So these “interested parties” basically just lied to the public about the status of scientific knowledge, and they did so because it allowed them to create just the right amount of doubt in order to promote their own policy agendas. Now, whether that was opposing government restrictions on tobacco or delaying the transition away from fossil fuels or instituting “teach the controversy” requirements about evolution or climate change in public schools, they had a vested interest in pretending that there was controversy when, in fact, there wasn’t.

So I asked, as a rhetorician, how might scientists best respond to efforts to mislead the public about the current state of scientific knowledge? Now, scholars of rhetoric say you need to look at the dynamics of the debate. So you can’t just dismiss the fraudsters, or those who believe the fraudsters, as fools. That just feeds their anti-elitist populism that’s become such a central part of these disinformation campaigns.

Ignoring the false claims doesn’t work either, right? Because it just cedes the ground to the liars. But neither can you debate the deceivers on their own terms, because that just makes it seem like there really is a dispute over the facts.

You’re really in this double bind.

So, scholars of rhetoric then would look at past cases to see what lines of argument might work to break out of this argumentative trap that scientists have been placed in. So for example, the rhetorical tradition has a framework called “stasis theory” that helps arguers recognize how to shift a debate from one issue to another, from a dispute over the facts to a dispute over policy, for example.

Technological solutions to technological problems can be helpful, to be sure, but those of us who need to design strategies in the moment to respond to rhetorically savvy deceivers need to know something about rhetoric, and that’s where scholars in my field hope to offer something to scientists.

Monika Sengul-Jones

I’m nodding my head as you’re speaking, so thank you for this. This is a little off the cuff, but do I understand it right – you do teach a course on science communication and rhetoric for the program, is that right?

Leah Ceccarelli

I teach a course at the graduate level, yes, in rhetoric of science. It’s often populated with, about half of the students there are scientists and the other half are STS scholars from across campus.

Monika Sengul-Jones

I want to frame this question by just kind of acknowledging that in the last decade or two, there’s been a push, maybe an acknowledgment to include more non-experts in conversations, a kind of democratizing of conversations. Some of this may have to do with qualities about digital media that were understood to be democratizing features, challenging traditional pillars of power.

That did lead to the rise of what you might call “citizen scientists,” who are able to participate in really meaningful ways from maybe lay positions. They’re not trained as scientists. This has been really compelling.

And yet, there’s also, we see now, in our moment, you know, a lot of distrust in these scientists, like the ones who are here at the University of Washington, who might be trained and have, like, a really robust skill set in helping people, and maybe a mandate to help the public understand, you know, the world that we’re living in and its risks and the ways in which it’s designed.

What I love about your work is that you take an inclusive but different tack to this tension between public access and expertise. You call it, kind of making a case for, the “scientist citizens.” I just wanted to invite you to speak a little bit more about that. What’s behind that concept?

Leah Ceccarelli

A scientist citizen is an expert who considers it their civic duty to clearly communicate their knowledge to their fellow citizens when such sharing is really necessary for the public good. It’s a term that Pamela Petrucci, a former UW graduate student, and I helped to develop when we were studying the case of the Italian scientists whose failure of public communication [was] so disastrous right before the [2009] L’Aquila earthquake. We adopted this term, this concept, “scientist citizen” because it is a reversal of that other term that you so often hear in STS communities that you were just mentioning, the “citizen scientist.” The citizen scientist is a member of the public who steps into the technical sphere in some capacity in order to advance science, right, by, say, participating in the great backyard bird count or playing that computer game Foldit to help discover protein structures, or being involved in discussions about the ethics of scientific discoveries as they’re ongoing.

In contrast, the scientist citizen is sort of the mirror image of that. It is a member of the scientific community who goes in the other direction, stepping out of the technical sphere and into the public sphere when called upon to do so.

I want to make it clear that I’m not using the term “citizen” here in its legal sense, right? You don’t have to have documentation belonging to a nation-state to become a rhetorical citizen.

Instead, I’m talking about the responsibility to speak up as participants of a broader discourse community. Scientists can’t just speak only among themselves. They have to speak to others who lack their specialized knowledge, but who need that knowledge in order to make good decisions in our technologically advanced, democratically organized society.

So you know, the L’Aquila scientists that Petrucci and I studied had failed to explain the earthquake risk in the region to the government officials who had relied on their knowledge to inform the public. And when those officials spread misinformation in the name of the scientists, those scientists just kept their mouths shut. They’re like: “That’s not my job. We’re not going to refute what’s being said incorrectly in the public.”

As a result, a lot of people who would have left their homes after a moderate earthquake one night ended up staying put. They had incorrectly believed that the scientists had assured them that such earthquakes were relieving the pressure, and thus [were] a sign that the risk of a larger earthquake had been diminished.

Now the scientists had said no such thing, but neither had they corrected the public officials who misunderstood them and spread that misinformation in their names.

So, our recognition that the community believed those scientists neglected their moral duty by failing to inform the public, in this case, I think it shows that we as a society really do believe that scientists should act as scientist citizens.

Those STEM students who are joining the STSS graduate certificate program, I think they’re trying to be better scientist citizens. And they see the STSS certificate as one way to help them do that.

Monika Sengul-Jones

Thank you for the vivid example. The earthquake and the controversy around — maybe controversy isn’t the right word! — but what happened, the breakdown of communication between those scientists, where they understood their jurisdiction to end, and what the public officials did or misunderstood from what they were saying, had fatal results.

Leah Ceccarelli

Yeah, and the only people who knew that the public officials were miscommunicating to the public were those scientists, right? They’re the only ones who could know that that was not correct! And so they really, I think, had an obligation to at least object that that wasn’t, in fact, what they had said, right?

Monika Sengul-Jones

Right. If I remember right, they were put on trial for that, by the Italian legal system.

Leah Ceccarelli

They were, and the result of the trial at first, was they were convicted. But then they were acquitted later, basically, on a technicality.

Now, Petrucci and I are not interested in seeing scientists go to jail.

Monika Sengul-Jones

Sure, sure.

Leah Ceccarelli

But we do take from that case a recognition that the population, you know, the broader public, really does see scientists as having certain obligations in society. And a lot of scientists are embracing that obligation.

Monika Sengul-Jones

Yeah, that’s really great. I think, from your paper, it was kind of a difference of scientific communication as well. Whereas the scientists were maybe using humor or different registers of speaking that appeared legible to them, but there was a translation issue. And not like an English-to-Italian translation issue. Everyone was speaking Italian. But they had domain-specific ways of communicating that you pointed out as partially responsible for leading to misunderstandings about who was saying what that. […] STS and the STSS graduate certificate program offer […] strategies to help people, kind of, reflexively recognize where their language is potentially not legible to others. Because it’s a lot of work to become an expert in a discipline or domain. I’m riffing here on it, but I just love that example, because it’s such a bellwether.

I want to go back to some of the work that students in the program have done.

When we spoke before this interview, about where, and what graduate certificate programs’ [students] have gone on to do, and, in 2020, one student, Katherine S. Xue, who was studying at the time microbiology and viruses for her doctorate here at the university in Genome Science, took the moment, which was incredibly stressful with so [many] unknowns in the early weeks of the pandemic, and wrote about the evolution of viruses for The New Yorker.

Now, contributing to a well-known general interest publication like The New Yorker that has broad reach on the nuances of viruses’ evolutionary trees and what virologists who are using technologies are doing to help the public understand, seems to me both difficult and really an exemplary act of what a scientist citizen can do or be. So I definitely applaud Katherine for that work. And it’s really remarkable that she has the mastery of writing and science. But long-form writing isn’t necessarily possible for all students, or necessarily of their interest. So I just wondered if you could share a little bit more about examples of this scientific citizenry that you’ve observed in recent years?

Leah Ceccarelli

Yeah, long-form essays aren’t for everyone. Short-form essays, though, are another powerful means of communicating with the broader public. I just completed a couple of research articles with another UW grad student, Collin Syfert, a former grad student here, on scientists who try to persuade opposition audiences through newspaper op-eds.

In one of those studies, we found that scientists who take an antagonistic stance against the climate change denialism of the current Republican Party are developing a righteous appeal, but one that is not well-designed to persuade those Republicans or even really swing voters.

On the other hand, scientists who address climate change from a perspective of fiscal responsibility, who draw evidence from the US military, who build a shared local identity with their readers, they’re designing more rhetorically savvy appeals.

Likewise, with another study that we did of scientists trying to persuade Republicans to accept restrictive COVID policies. We found that those who set out arguments from the authority of science and who dismiss opponents as stupid, well, they might feel better after having expressed their feelings in these op-eds, but they aren’t likely to shift the needle on the subject.

On the other hand, scientists who draw on the values of their opposition audience and place trust in their readers can develop a much more rhetorically sound argument.

Now, of course, there are times when what’s needed really isn’t persuasion of an opposition audience, that that opposition isn’t going to be persuaded. But what you need to do is motivate a friendly audience, or you might want to agenda-set, right, to inform an uninformed audience.

And that’s where a different type of rhetoric called epideictic rhetoric, or rhetorics of praise and blame, are called for.

So another activity that I find scientist citizens are doing, and that I’ve been studying lately, is science activism. I’m about to publish a close reading I did of the founding document of the Union of Concerned Scientists, which is an activist group that first formed in 1969 and is still going strong today.

I found that their use of visceral appeals in their founding document, which had called for a one-day work stoppage in order to protest the Vietnam War, I found these appeals really remarkable. Basically, they justified their legitimacy to speak in public in a way that really countered the very thing that authorized their scientific voice, right, disinterestedness, objectivity.

As their very name suggests, these are concerned scientists. They’re overwhelmed by their feelings. That’s what I’m calling, sort of a visceral public, right?

So much to the point that they had no choice but to speak out, right?

They said, ‘we can no longer remain uninvolved.’

That study is going to be a part of a book that I’m co-editing on scientists and the public, with a special focus on the scientist citizen.

So those are just a few of the genres.

Other genres that scientist citizens can participate in are — and some of my students have studied these — are social media posts, public speeches, TED Talks, public debates, documentaries. The forms they use are really varied. But the fact that they’re getting out there and they’re addressing non-experts is really what I want to celebrate, and help to support by teaching these scientists how to become better public rhetors.

Monika Sengul-Jones

I’m just nodding as you’re speaking here. Thank you for all these examples.

I was hearing you describe kind of two kinds of like communicative bridge work, which is this idea of bridging domain specific expertise — to learn how to communicate with the public, and then, the example, you had a specific name for it that I have since forgotten, — rather than calling someone stupid, which never really goes over very well, finding alignment with their values, and then making an argument that kind of uplifts that other, that other party, or way of thinking. That’s a kind of bridge work too. That does require some nuance in thinking, in training to how to do that empathetic work.

Leah Ceccarelli

It really does. You need to be able to identify with your audience.

And there’s, you know, a major difference between scientists and non-scientists.

But at the same time, I like to say, when you get your PhD in the sciences, it doesn’t mean that, you know, you have to, you’ve signed away your citizenship rights, right? You’re still a member of the broader civic community. So, we don’t often give scientists a lot of time to practice their civic participation, but I think it’s really necessary.

Monika Sengul-Jones

That was Leah Ceccarelli, in Conversations with Society + Technology at UW. Leah is a Professor in Communication and the Director of the Science, Technology, and Society Studies Graduate Certificate Program, and also part of the Society + Technology program leadership. You can learn more about the program, STSS, and Society + Technology at UW at societyandtechnology.uw.edu. Thank you again Leah for your research, your leadership, and for this conversation today.

Leah Ceccarelli

Thank you, Monika.

Transcript and Audio Remix Production by Monika Sengul-Jones
Recording by Russell Hugo of the Language Learning Center, S+T Affiliate
Image Credit: Portrait of Leah Ceccarelli (2024) by Russell Hugo

Related links

• UW’s Science, Technology, and Society Studies graduate certificate program
• Leah Ceccarelli’s op-ed for The Seattle Times on manufactured controversy
• Katherine S Xue’s writing for The New Yorker