Innovative Popular Science Communication? Materiality, Aesthetics and Gender in Science Slams

This paper is about the communicative construction (Knoblauch 1995, 2017) of science communication in a popular genre called the science slam, and more precisely within the context of materiality, aesthetics, and gender. In science slams, we can observe how popular scientists position themselves. Although seeing the success of female performances (for example Giulia Enders) might lead us to hope for new norms of gender, technical jargon, and visual practices in scientific communication, these hopes are not wholly realized in the science slam genre. Our empirical observations (ethnography, video analysis, interviews) have shown that even if the new genre seems to enable all kinds of revisionist representations of science for men, women remain silent and invisible. Although the technical jargon and visual practices of science slammers are quite different from those used in university lectures, the marginalization of women, among other groups, remains an issue. Drawing on typical tropes of patriarchal societies, successful science slam women are presented as objects of desire, hardworking assistants, or aunts, mothers, and grandmothers. In this way, the science slam can be understood as an expression of still-problematic gender relations in science.