Communicating the social sciences and humanities. Specific challenges - and broader insights for research communication

Abstract

The field of science communication tends to focus on the communication of the physical, chemical and biological sciences alongside disciplines such as medicine, mathematics and engineering. Relatively little attention has been paid to how the social sciences, arts and humanities are communicated. This chapter gives an overview of relevant research, which remains scattered across many disciplinary areas and does not always think in terms of ‘communication’ in the first place. Rather than considering public communication of humanities and social sciences a ‘special case’ of science communication, it argues that the differences observed provide crucial insights into broader questions of how knowledge circulates and how expertise is constituted in the changing public sphere of the twenty-first century.