Styles of Science Communication in Germany and the US

The project examines science communication as a cultural, social, and epistemic practice that is shaped by its historical contexts as well as its material and medial conditions. It is focusing mainly on two popular science magazines, Bild der Wissenschaft and Scientific American, established in West Germany in 1964, and in New York in 1845 respectively. Both magazines and their relationship are part of a history of "imitation" and "emancipation" and thus an extremely complex example for processes of producing popular knowledge. They are framed by a two-way transfer that extends from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in Berlin to the Air University in Texas, from aero-medical human experiments in Dachau to space medical tests in Ohio, from Wernher von Braun to Walt Disney. The entangled histories of Bild der Wissenschaft and Scientific American allow the history of political and scientific developments to be blended with a media history of visual and rhetorical innovations of communication strategies. The project describes the social, political, and economic conditions of Bild der Wissenschaft and Scientific American, and analyzes the collectives of authors and editors, their concepts of science, Bildung, and of science communication. It demonstrates that both magazines are deeply informed by the particular biographical and political experiences of the central figures and their networks. Beside this historiographical perspective the project is concerned with the material and medial conditions of popular science. It analyzes language, pictures, layout, and print as epistemic agents validating communicated knowledge as true and relevant. Finally, the study examines the Weltbilder and political epistemologies of Bild der Wissenschaft and Scientific American. It describes the meta- narratives, the utopias and dystopias, the concepts of gender, of expert, layman, and amateur that implicitly directed the transmission of knowledge and at the same time emerged out of the magazines` histories and materialities. The diverse levels of examination are tied together by the concept of style. Following its methodological use in literary criticism, Bildwissenschaft, and art history, it firstly paves the way for analyzing the specific "poetics of (popular) science" (J. Rancière), and thus the rhetorical, visual, and editorial production of authority and truth. Secondly, the term style refers to the science historical concept of "thought style" (K. Mannheim, L. Fleck, J. Harwood). As such it focuses on historical, sociological, and political contexts of the respective collectives of editors, authors, and illustrators. "Style" serves as a methodological link between the materiality and the content of both magazines, between contexts and worldviews, between socio-political developments and communication strategies, and therefore enables popular science to be interpreted as a historically, socially, and epistemologically situated and saturated practice. In 2011 the monograph won the award of the German Society for the History of Medicine, Science and Technology (DGGMNT).