Hello there! Sheeva here. Today, I’m here to ask you a question: what does one do as a science communicator when science policy makes it impossible for us to live our values?
Not scientists — but science communicators. People like me. People with a science background trained in communicating to a general audience.
What I do as a science communicator is unique and doesn’t fit neatly into one box. For example, our interns have been hard at work this month publishing an explainer on the Loper Bright Supreme Court decision and explaining how science knowledge differs from law knowledge. We also shared lessons learned from Galileo’s life.
I am so proud of our interns for asking the tough questions in these times.
As for my own writing, I got super burned out in the pandemic trying to explain science to people on their terms and meeting insurmountable roadblocks. The words I wrote and had considered carefully never made it to any sort of audience that could have benefitted from them, in many cases. Other times, they fell on deaf ears. It felt like I was spinning my wheels.
At the same time, since science SciComm is still not considered a “real” job, I was watching the gaslighting of my science-adjacent profession on the news as scientists untrained in communication tried to explain their way out of the pandemic (it does not work that way, and luckily, scientists are starting to do scientific studies on the topic that validate my work as a science communicator).
Why did the pandemic make me feel so powerless and unheard? Could my voice being heard more have changed the course of the way we see science?
People sought stability amidst the uncertainty of the science through their elected leaders. The end result was not good, and it led to the popularity of our current political leaders who embrace authoritarianism and with that, reject mainstream science (if that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s what happened in Nazi Germany).
I continue to be very concerned about what this means for science and for society at large.
Not having freelancing clients in the continually uncertain pandemic and post-pandemic economy gave me so much free time that I organized part-time for Arizona Democrats in 2022 and 2024 and elected two Senators to office. I was angry that the world that I lived in was now unrecognizable to me. Sure, from 2013 to 2019, when I was just starting out as a science writer, I was by all accounts a struggling freelancer, but I assumed the world would be different in just a few years…and then it was, but not in the way I expected.
So while I’ve been busy this month, it’s not been with clients. We’ve been talking to people for our new Defunded Science Series — check out the playlist here. First, I talked to Stephanie Morrison, an NIH #FiredFed. Then, I was chatting with a local elected official in Brookline, MA, a PhD student at Harvard named Mia Sievers, who offhandedly mentioned her NSF grant was taken away. After that, I chatted with epidemiologist and former government contractor, Dr. Beth Linas, who is paying out-of-pocket for IVF now that she is jobless.
I also gave a teach-in talk with Stand Up for Science about Congress’s Article I duties and a recent report from the Congressional watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, that argues that the Trump administration broke the law in defunding grants early on. You can catch the teach-in here.
In what ways has the current political environment affected your work in science and science-adjacent fields? Feel free to reply to this email if you are a subscriber, or contact me.
The anti-science forces want scientists to go away so they can pursue their own misinformed, self-serving agenda, but that’s not how governance works. It’s up to us all to not give up in our pursuit of working together to make a better world with science policies that actually uphold and value science…like we have done for years and years as a nation. We don’t have to wake up every day and yell at our televisions — we can be part of the solution.
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