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Commentary
Science Communication
1­–11
Science Communication © The Author(s) 2018
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Ritual in the Public

Communication of
Science

Gwendolyn Blue1

Abstract
This commentary demonstrates the relevance of James Carey’s ritual view
of communication for the field of science communication. A ritual view
of communication invites examination of the geographical, historical, and
material dimensions of communication where dialogues, bodies, public
spaces, and comestibles provide enabling conditions for democratic
engagement. This is an opportune time for science communications scholars
to engage with Carey’s ideas as the field moves from deficit accounts of
communication to the dialogic and cultural models that have become more
prevalent in recent decades. A ritual view highlights the importance of
theoretical, humanist approaches as complements to empirical, instrumental
accounts of science communication.

Keywords
ritual, culture, democracy, public engagement, cultural studies

1University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Corresponding Author:
Gwendolyn Blue, Department of Geography, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive
NW, Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4, Canada.
Email: ggblue@ucalgary.ca
2 Science Communication 00(0)

Life is a conversation. When we enter, it’s already going on; we try to catch the
drift of it; we exit before it’s over.
—James Carey (quoting Kenneth Burke in Carey, 1989, p. ix)

The purpose of this commentary is to demonstrate the relevance of media

scholar James Carey’s ritual view of communication for the field of science
communication. Although he is an influential figure in American journalism,
media, and cultural studies, Carey’s insights have had considerably less trac-
tion in the field of science communication. This is an opportune time for
science communications scholars to engage with Carey’s ideas as the field
moves from deficit accounts of communication to the dialogic cultural mod-
els that have become more prevalent in recent decades.
A prominent scholar until his death in 2006, Carey introduced interpretive
and critical methodologies to American communication studies and journalism
departments in the 1970s, opening the way for fields such as cultural studies to
take root (Carey & Grossberg, 2006; Clark, 2006; Grossberg, 2009; Steiner &
Christians, 2010). One of Carey’s enduring concerns over the course of his
productive career was that the communication sciences of his time ignored the
cultural and theoretical dimensions of communication, including the institu-
tional values and assumptions that shape the very models of communication
deployed in academia. He observed that, since its inception as an institutional-
ized academic discipline in the United States, communications scholarship has
tended to treat its objects of analysis in utilitarian terms in which the transmis-
sion of information is the guiding metaphor. This has resulted in an understand-
ing of communication as an instrument to achieve certain ends such as
education, learning, attitudinal change, and behavior modification. Objecting
to this understanding of communication, Carey promoted a complementary
model that emphasizes the role of ritual and foregrounds the inextricable con-
nections between history and geography that shape and enable the transmission
and expression of ideas and practices. Reviving philosopher John Dewey’s
claim that public communication is integral to the creation, maintenance, and
repair of democratic institutions, Carey insisted that communication is culture:
the glue that holds societies together across space and time.
Carey’s ritual view of communication is as relevant for contemporary sci-
ence communication scholarship as it was for the emerging tradition of cul-
tural studies in the United States five decades ago. Theorization about
communication continues to take shape in an intellectual terrain in the United
States and elsewhere dominated by models of research where instrumental
approaches to scholarship are (re)gaining currency (see Bratich, 2008, for
discussion of overall trends in communication studies). Instrumental
approaches abound: Consider, for instance, the following definition of
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science communication as “the use of appropriate skills, media, activities,

and dialogue to produce the following personal responses: awareness, enjoy-
ment, interest, opinion-forming, and understanding of science” (Burns,
O’Connor, & Stocklmayer, 2003, p. 185). Carey’s insights do not have imme-
diate instrumental utility, but they are nevertheless politically significant and
intellectually expansive. As he astutely observed, the conceptual models that
inform the ways in which communications scholars see the world are closely
tied to the types of social relations that eventually emerge. In short, theory
about communication matters not only for how we make sense of the world
but for how we interact with it as well.
In what follows, a brief overview of the trajectory of science communica-
tion scholarship is provided with the view to situate Carey’s research within
the shifting areas of focus in this field. The following section and conclusion
outlines Carey’s ritual view of communication and discusses how it links
with current approaches to science communication as well as the unique
insights it offers.

From Linear to Cultural Views of Science

Communication
As readers of this journal are well aware, science communication is a diverse
field of inquiry that draws from multiple disciplines (Bucchi, 2008; Priest,
2010). Broadly, science communication scholarship falls into three approaches:
linear, ahistorical approaches (public understanding of science); dialogic
approaches (public engagement with science); and cultural approaches
(coconstitution of science and publics). Neat separations and linear progres-
sions between these streams of inquiry do not exist in practice; nevertheless,
these classifications are useful heuristics as they offer a focal point for exam-
ining the shifting roles that scientists and lay publics are asked to play in rela-
tion to one another as well as the models of communication that inform how
these social interactions are analyzed, understood, and enacted.
In its most narrow sense, science communication refers to linear forms of
communication between those authorized to produce and represent science
such as scientific experts and communications professionals and those who
consume scientific information such as various lay publics and policy mak-
ers. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s (1963) highly influential but
overly simplistic information model of communication is an illustrative
example. Rooted in a mathematical approach to the transmission of informa-
tion in physical systems, this model assumes that interpersonal communica-
tion proceeds in a similarly linear, decontextual, apolitical, and ahistorical
fashion. This communication model was shaped by and in turn helped shape
4 Science Communication 00(0)

the public understanding of science movement, a science-centered and sci-

ence-led initiative that emphasizes the educational and, by implication, civi-
lizing role that science plays in society. This traditional—and for many
scientists dominant—understanding of the public communication of science
is characterized by the following assumptions: Science and the public are
separate and only the former influences the latter; communication is a pro-
cess of information transfer; the media serves as an imperfect and often dis-
torted channel to convey scientific information; and the public is a passive,
ignorant, and sometimes hostile recipient of scientific knowledge (Bucchi,
2008, pp. 58-59). These assumptions form what Arie Rip (2006) calls folk
theories of public engagement that gain prominence and acceptance not from
empirical validation but from being widely rehearsed, repeated, and rein-
forced by a network of people.
The theoretical turn in the 1990s from questions of public understanding to
public engagement shifted the terrain of research and practice. This change was
informed by critiques of the linear deficit model and its implicit imaginary of
lay publics as empty vessels waiting to be filled with authoritative facts (Callon,
1999; Irwin & Wynne, 1996; Wynne, 1992). In contrast to deficit approaches,
engagement models of science communication position lay citizens as active in
their handling of scientific information and as sophisticated in negotiating deci-
sion making on issues that involve science and technology. These sentiments
are reflected in Jane Gregory and Steve Miller’s (1998) definition of science
communication as “a process of generating new, mutually acceptable knowl-
edge, attitudes and practices . . . a dynamic exchange, as disparate groups find
a way of sharing a single message” (p. 247).
In tandem with engagement models, science communication has also
taken up questions of culture in which power, identity, values, and represen-
tation are central. The cultural turn in science communication draws on a
wide range of intellectual traditions. For some, political communication fore-
grounds the ways in which agenda setting, framing, and media gatekeeping
powerfully shape and constrain the public communication of science (e.g.,
Scheufele, 2014). For those situated in science and technology studies, public
engagement models provide avenues for input from lay publics by position-
ing science as cultural, a socially conditioned, historically contingent, and
value-laden institution that upholds values and assumptions that warrant
scrutiny and debate (Wynne, 1993). Traditions of symbolic interactionism in
turn illustrate the centrality of performance, narrative, and ritual in the ways
in which experts communicate about science in public settings (Hilgartner,
2000; Wynne, 2013) and among each other (Rip, 2006). Combining the
British tradition of cultural studies with insights from science and technology
studies, Sarah Davies, Maja Horst, and Alan Irwin expand the repertoire of
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cultural accounts of science communication to include identity formation,

informal mundane practices, and the institutional and national production of
knowledge, representation, and meaning (Davies, 2011; Davies & Horst,
2016; Horst, Davies, & Irwin, 2016; Horst & Irwin, 2009; Irwin, 2006; see
also Broks, 2006; Longnecker, 2016). Situating science communication in
international contexts further illustrates the incompatible and at times incom-
mensurate identities, narratives, and values across social groups and geo-
graphical regions (Medin & Bang, 2014).
While theoretical approaches to science communication have changed
considerably over time, a tacit assumption often remains that the fundamental
role of communication is to transmit, exchange, and share ideas, symbols,
knowledge, and information albeit through diffuse pathways and myriad
interpretive frameworks. By privileging certain aspects of communication,
namely, learning, understanding, informing, interpreting, and representing,
existing approaches to science communication tacitly exclude some of the
dimensions of ritual to which Carey’s analysis invites consideration.

Communication Is Culture: A Ritual View of

Communication
What does Carey’s ritual view of communication offer that is missing from
existing approaches to science communication? It is important to note from
the outset that Carey did not invent the ritual model of communication; rather,
he kept an older conversation alive by recovering a somewhat neglected tra-
jectory of American pragmatist philosophy with the intent to critique and
propose an alternative to the empirical approaches in the U.S.-based com-
munications departments of his time. Carey’s theoretical orientation drew
from a wide range of sources, including the symbolic interactionism of the
Chicago school, Durkheim’s perspectives on ritual, Weber’s social theory of
modernity, Innis and Mumford’s critical technology studies, and American
pragmatist philosophy. Of these various influences, one of the more signifi-
cant was Dewey’s insight that mundane acts of public conversation are an
important lifeblood for democratic engagement because they enable people
to live together as active citizens in a vibrant public sphere. Like Dewey,
Carey defined public conversation broadly as any discussion that influences
public life, including face-to-face encounters, journalistic prose, fiction,
poetry, and academic publications.
Carey anchored his ritual view of communication on Dewey’s claim that
“society exists not only by [italics added] transmission, by communication,
but it may fairly be said to exist in [italics added] transmission, in communi-
cation” (Dewey, 1916/1944, quoted in Carey, 1989, p. 14). According to
6 Science Communication 00(0)

Carey, the shift in prepositions signals Dewey’s awareness of a tension

between contrasting visions of communication in U.S.-based scholarship and
practice: as the transmission of information across space and as a ritual con-
stitutive of human associations over time. Carey (1989) argued that the trans-
mission view of communication, based on metaphors of transporting,
distributing, sending, receiving, and translating information, has been most
dominant, persistent, and influential in communications scholarship. This
model and its associated metaphors are inseparable from ways of thinking
established during an era of nation building that “use communication and
transportation to extend influence, control and power over wider distances
and over greater populations” (pp. 42–43). By contrast, a ritual approach
positions communication as an act of communing and associating over time,
highlighting the “construction and maintenance of an ordered, meaningful
cultural world that can serve as a control and container for human action”
(Carey, 1989, p. 19).
In formulating his ritual view of communication, Carey (1989) challenged
commonsense approaches to language that were prevalent at the time, par-
ticularly “the view of language as reference, correspondence and representa-
tion and the parallel view that the function of language is primarily to express
assertions about the world” (p. 84). Carey objected to attempts to position
communication as an object that can be discovered and revealed through a
purportedly neutral method of analysis. Emphasizing that social reality is
neither pregiven nor external to the unfolding of everyday lived experiences,
Carey argued that communication constitutes social worlds. It is from this
basis that he maintained that communication is culture. Simultaneously a
product of and a container for human interaction, culture is “formed and sus-
tained, repaired and transformed, worshiped and celebrated in the ordinary
business of living” (Carey, 1989, p. 87).
Newspapers, for instance, play a fundamental role in democratic life not
only by supplying information to and informing audiences but also by nour-
ishing, amplifying, and extending public conversations. In short, newspapers
make possible certain cultural practices of engagement while suppressing
and marginalizing others. The quotidian act of creating, purchasing, and read-
ing newspapers enrolls and connects various people, including audiences,
journalists, editors, paper deliverers, newspaper stand employees, and so
forth, in provisional relationships that otherwise would not transpire. In turn,
the simple act of reading a newspaper enhances the expectation that citizens
can and should keep abreast of recent events, focusing attention on the cur-
rent moment and less on past events and historical processes. As such, news-
papers act in a similar fashion to other technologies of modernity by providing
the conditions for norms of transparency, visibility, and contemporaneity to
take hold in the public imaginary.
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What makes Carey’s ritual view theoretically relevant for contemporary

science communication scholarship is the way in which it connects mundane,
situated acts of conversation with scaled up efforts to order social worlds.
Central to this framework is a recognition of the embodied and material
dimensions of communication:

To say that communication begins in ritual is to say it begins in conversation in

the sense that it is embodied. Conversation requires the actual presence of
bodies. To speak is to . . . enter a social relation activating and displaying all the
capacities of the body. . . . The oral and the conversational then displays the
body in its full apprehensive range; it utilizes not only sound but also sight,
touch, and smell not only the aural but also the visual and gestural. (Carey, 1997,
p. 314)

For Carey, communication cannot be reduced solely to symbolic exchange

because it also includes the material, emotional, and affective dimensions
that shape how meaning is shared and transformed over time and space. In
short, culture is not an epiphenomenon of values and norms that shape human
behavior but is entangled in and enacted through varied moods, beliefs,
desires, and practices through which order is imposed on chaos and uncer-
tainty. Ritual is an embodied form of culture that provides the forms and
shape of social relations into which people enter and through which meaning
is made, negotiated, contested, and maintained.
In foregrounding ritual, Carey offers a decidedly contingent approach to
communication in which space matters. Insistent that culture can be analyzed
not in the abstract but from a geographically, historically, and materially situ-
ated understanding, Carey argued that attempts to generalize about commu-
nication are flawed unless these accounts also address the spatial processes
through which “given cultures know, judge, and make their world” (Carey,
1997, p. 311). This account echoes Sheila Jasanoff’s (2004) insistence that
science is interpreted through the territorially bounded civic epistemologies
that give it meaning. For Carey, spatial processes are not reducible to passive
physical containers or environments external to the unfolding of time and
culture; rather, spatial processes refer to the interplay among material con-
texts, technological mediations, social practices, and symbolic acts. Taking
the spatial dimensions of communication seriously acknowledges the rela-
tional interplay among physical space in the sense of bricks-and-mortar, vir-
tual space in the sense of sharing of meaning and social space in the sense of
the assumptions and regulations that dictate who is permitted in physical
space and what is considered acceptable practices therein. For instance, the
public is a profoundly spatial concept that refers simultaneously to the ways
8 Science Communication 00(0)

in which citizens come together to make collective decisions, to the visibility

of these encounters, and to the physical spaces in which democratic practices
unfold (Parkinson, 2012).
By situating theories and methods of communication within the cultures
that sustain their maintenance across time and space, Carey (1989) was ada-
mant that a ritual view should encourage scholars to consider “the construc-
tion, apprehension, and use of models of communication themselves” (p. 32).
As such, a ritual model of communication also foregrounds reflexivity—the
capacity to reflect on one’s institutional assumptions and values—as an
important outcome of public engagement with issues that involve science and
technology (Wynne, 1993).

Conclusion
For those unfamiliar with Carey’s approach to communication, this com-
mentary serves as a brief introduction to his work. For those familiar with
Carey’s work, this commentary serves as an invitation to reengage with the
ideas he put forth. By positioning communication as a ritualistic activity
essential for the formation and maintenance of public life, Carey (1989)
argued that we cannot fully understand the transmission of information with-
out also taking into consideration the ways in which communication acts as
“a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired and
transformed” (p. 23).
To date, Carey’s ideas have not shaped scholarship in science communi-
cation to the same extent as they have with journalism, media, and cultural
studies. This leaves science communication bereft of important insights
that have long been considered foundational in other academic arenas.
Carey’s deceptively simple claim that communication is culture points to
its importance as a means by which social worlds are both described and
constituted and to the myriad ways in which democratic life is made pos-
sible by the intimate relationship between communication and political life.
In sum, engaging in conversation with the legacy of humanist approaches
that Carey revived, promoted, and transformed can enrich and broaden the
cultural dimensions of science communication scholarship. Although the
field of science communication tends to frame its theoretical models in
terms of public deficits or dialogues, an attendant understanding of commu-
nication as transmission and ritual can open the field to alternative concep-
tual frameworks and intellectual trajectories, aligning science communication
more squarely with scholarship in which issues of culture, identity, and
materiality are central.
Blue 9

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publi-
cation of this article.

ORCID iD
Gwendolyn Blue https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3510-3248

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Author Biography
Gwendolyn Blue is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the
University of Calgary. Formally trained in cultural studies, her research interests lie
with formal and informal public engagement with science and technology in areas
such as climate change, genomics, and food politics.