"You have to connect with the audience" Spaces of Communication as Spaces of Knowledge Production

MARIANA CELESTE SMULSKI

Boston

Congreso; Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science; 2017

Society for Social Studies of Science

At the Unit of Applied Neurobiology (UAN, Argentina) scientists research on children´s cognitive development in contexts of poverty and seek to develop possible ways of intervening on the problem. Within the framework of the field work developed there, I have attended several internal communication spaces (seminars, presentations of research advances and doctoral theses) and external (symposia, conferences and book presentations). Being the issue of research particularly sensitive to society, how to communicate scientific knowledge and what are the best means to do so is a concern of UAN members. The different possible alternatives are debated indoors, sometimes rehearsed with colleagues and then put into practice in open spaces, in interaction with other agents. The different events of communication and the dialogical exchange create spaces of production of knowledge that circulate inside and outside the laboratory. Apart from all good intentions, a unidirectional view of communication prevails, holding a gap between expert knowledge and that of lay people. In contribution to science and technology studies I will focus on the description and analysis of the following aspects: the internal discussion on improving the communication of scientific knowledge; the transfer of that internal debate to an external practice, the staging and performance at conferences, symposia and presentation of a book of general disclosure in interaction with different audiences; and regarding all those spaces, the interaction with the ethnographer, taking into account the role assigned by others and the limits of the process of estrangement.