1 Constructing Communication Talking to Scientists About Talking to the Public

Recent work has started to explore “scientific understandings of publics ” along-side public understandings of science. This study builds on this work to exam-ine the ways in which public communication is talked about by scientists and engineers. The author identifies a range of ways of talking about the purposes and content of science communication to the public, arguing that the dominant framework for these is one-way communication, and that, in addition, such communication tends to be constructed as difficult and dangerous. However, the author further identifies a range of minority discourses that understand public communication in more complex terms