Re-thinking transformative visitor experience in a science exhibition: Implications for science communication theory and practice

Science communication addresses some of the contemporary world’s most challenging and intractable problems. Whether climate change or the recent coronavirus pandemic, science communication has an important role to play in these urgent issues. Concurrently, language around ‘transformation’ is increasingly used to suggest the kinds of profound changes to individuals and society needed to address contemporary problems. Science communication practice strongly values changing its publics in one way or another, be that their attitudes, values, or behaviour. But the language of transformation suggests a more profound change; what does it mean to be transformed?Taking a new exhibition, Invisible Worlds, at the Eden Project, a visitor attraction in South West of England, as an example, this thesis examines how we might conceptualise transformation in a science communication context. By combining action research and grounded theory methodologies, it has been possible to gain an understanding of both the exhibition’s development, as well as the transformative experience of visitors. Interviews, observation and reflective discussion with staff, alongside documentary evidence, traced the development of the exhibition while photo-elicitation interviews with visitors gave insight into their embodied experience.Two central theoretical categories were developed from the grounded theory analysis. Firstly, negotiating ambition describes a process of institutional maintenance which frames science communication projects as highly ambitious. Within this context, transformation can be interpreted as a discourse used to maintain an ambitious framing. Secondly, serendipitous wandering is the process through which visitors to Invisible Worlds attempted to build an understanding of the exhibition. In some cases of this serendipitous and embodied process, visitors were able to make deeper meaning, which supported and was integrated into existing life developments.The findings of this thesis suggest need to re-think transformation as both a discourse and phenomenon in science communication. Rather than provoking transformative change, it is suggested that science communication might be well-positioned to support publics through life in a changing world