2025 C&E in Practice Award: Bethann Merkle
The C&E Section is proud to present our annual C&E in Practice Award to Bethann Merkle for her publication Use your power for good: Collective action to overcome institutional injustices impeding ethical science communication in the academy and related work!
About the article
Ethical science communication is vital, given that we hope society will use science to make policy, civic, and personal decisions. Unfortunately, institutional and systemic hurdles in academia complicate, constrain, and undervalue efforts to share science effectively and ethically. To change this dynamic, we need to be able to recognize and understand what the prestige paradigm is and how it works. However, the prestige paradigm is so embedded in academia that it is mostly invisible. We all need a nap, and a magic want that resets the world to the way we individually and collectively think it should be. But the reality is that we are the magic wand. We wave ourselves, as academics. We can’t help but think of this as an opportunity, albeit a challenging one! We spent two-plus years articulating an overview of specifically how the prestige paradigm needs to change. We’ve also developed a framework for how you can reflect on what level of influence or change-making capacity you may have individually. And, we’ve drafted an extensive action plan of what you can do now, and then next. The entire framework was published in the peer-reviewed journal BioScience, and you can access it (and the supplements) here, on my website. You can also access the striking illustrations we commissioned to illustrate the current paradigm and what we can do individually and institutionally to foster scicomm instead. Those illustrations are available here as printable posters you can download, print, and display! We’re now building on the ideas in this paper right now, with a recently funded $1-million NSF grant to support scicomm training for graduate students. Learn more at https://www.scicommlift.com/.
About Bethann Merkle
Bethann Garramon Merkle is a Professor of Practice at the University of Wyoming, in Laramie, WY, USA, where she teaches and studies science communication and scientific writing and is the founding director of the UW Science Communication Initiative. She is a transdisciplinary researcher who melds art, writing, and social science research with her previous career outside academia (including but not limited to science outreach, journalism, and consulting) to understand and enhance how we train scientists. She is an Early Career Fellow of the Ecological Society of America, co-founder/past-chair of ESA’s Communication and Engagement Section, and co-founder of Meteor: The (Overly) Honest Podcast About Scicomm with Impact. She has held many leadership positions in and beyond academia, publishes widely in academic and popular outlets including her blog School of Good Trouble, and her book Teaching and Mentoring Science Writers: An Evidence-Based Approach is now available for pre-order from University of Chicago Press (use UCP NEW for 30% off!).