Science Communications and Communicators: Conceptualization and Basis for Professional Identity in Russia

Abstract

Considering several definitions of “science communication”, the article defines it, unlike academic communication, as deliberate actions intended to channel scientific knowledge and results of research to a broad audience, which is not limited to scientists and specialists in a specific topic. By 2019, the professional field in Russia as a concept and reality can be recognized as fully developed. Around this time, the expression “science communicator” became widely used in official speeches and informal communication as a collective term for activities in the field that existed at the intersection of science, PR, and journalism. Russian science communications are conceptualized under the influence of the international tradition. They adopted some ideological principles of the “diffusionist theory” of the main actors, channels, and processes in this activity and the ideology of the Public Understanding of Science. The article presents the main stages of the development of science communications in Russia for the last fifty years. The most significant of them is the period between 2013 and 2021, which the article considers in great detail. It characterizes the state of science communications at the beginning of this period and the successes achieved by 2020. At the current stage, started after 194 July 2022, science communicators, thanks to social media, retain a high involvement in professional communication and a sense of community. The article shows that this professional area, in the most significant way, began to crystallize around the events held by the Association of Communicators in Education and Science. The association’s founders and, at the same time, the most active members of it brought their vision, concepts, and values to this area of activity. Interviews with the founders and members of the association’s board reveal the supporting semantic structures and meanings that formed the basis of “science communication” in Russia and reasons why other concepts, perhaps more familiar to the native language (such as “popularization of science” and “science journalism”) were rejected for the name of a new professional field.