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12th International Conference on Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST), Florence,Italy,18-20 April 2012. Published as book chapter in:Bucchi, M.,&Trench,B.(Eds.)(2012).Quality,Honesty and Beauty in Science and Technology Communication: PCST 2012 Book of Papers (Proceedings of the 12th International Conference"Public Communication of Science and Technology", Florence, Italy, 18-20 April 2012).Vicenza: Observa Science in Society,pp.295-298. Pcst-12 Proceedings 70. Science and Celebrity Studies: Towards a Framework for Analysing Scientists in Public Declan Fahy, School of Communication, American University, Washington, DC Introduction In 2006, Oxford University Press published a collection of essays on the life and work of writer and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. The book called him “the world famous author . [who] has come to play a prominent role as a leading public intellectual.”1 This discourse of fame has been used by commentators and journalists to describe other scientists active in the public arena. The Daily Telegraph called Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking “the world’s most famous living scientist.”2 The New York Times called American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson “a space-savvy celebrity.”3 Nature called Oxford professor Susan Green- field “a celebrity neuroscientist.”4 But what does it mean for a scientist to be a celebrity? How does a scientist become a ce- lebrity? And how can a scientist be analysed as a celebrity? This conceptual paper addresses these questions by proposing a theoretical framework for analysing scientists in public, a framework grounded in field of celebrity studies. It outlines the core characteristics of celeb- 295 rity in general and then applies these characteristics to science in particular. It then demon- strates how these characteristics are present in the media portrayals of the lives of selected high-profile scientists. Science and Celebrity Studies Celebrity is a useful concept for analysing public figures because it has come to be “a key site of media attention and personal aspiration, as well as one of the key places where cultural meanings are negotiated and organised.”5 Historian Janet Browne examined Charles Darwin as an 19th-century scientific celebrity, arguing that celebrity was an interesting area in which to “think about the manufacture of scientific identities.”6 1 Graften, A. and Ridley, M. (eds.). 2006. Richard Dawkins: How a scientist changed the way we think. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2 Bowater, D. 2012. Stephen Hawking: Women are a complete mystery. The Daily Telegraph. 4 January. Available from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/stephen-hawking/8993228/Stephen-Hawking- Women-are-a-complete-mystery.html [Accessed 4 January 2012]. 3 Martel, N. 2004. Mysteries of life, time and space (and green slime).The New York Times. 28 Septem- ber. Arts/Culture, p. 5. 4 Nature. 2004. Popularizer Greenfield is blackballed by peers. Nature. 429, p. 9. 5 Turner, G. 2004. Understanding Celebrity. London: Sage. p. 6 6 Browne, J. 2003. Charles Darwin as a celebrity. Science in Context. 16(1/2), p. 176. Pcst International Conference (Florence – Italy, 2012) The Visible Scientists (1977) by Rae Goodell identified a new type of scientist that emerged on the U.S. public stage in the 1960s and 1970s. She argued that these scientists, including astronomer Carl Sagan and anthropologist Margaret Mead, used mass media to influence public opinion and science policy, at a time when new communication technologies were reshaping social and personal life, and the mass media was becoming a venue for the public contestation of scientific issues.7 For Goodell, these scientists shared five media-focused characteristics: they had ahot top- ic, were controversial, were articulate, had a colorful image, and had a credible reputation. Goodell used the terms visibility and celebrity as synonymous, but, since her book was writ- ten, the analysis of celebrity has been an emerging academic field, with a range of writings from different perspectives on the subject – thereby decoupling the ideas of visibility and celebrity. Graeme Turner’s Understanding Celebrity gives a three-part definition of celebrity. He defined it as: A genre of representation . ; it is a commodity traded by the promotions, publicity and media industries that produce these representations and their effects; and it is a cultural formation that has a social function.8 Breaking this definition down into its constituent parts, as follows, reveals more about the central features of celebrity. 1. First, celebrity as a genre of representation means that there is an intense person- alisation in an individual’s media portrayal. The individual is portrayed as unique, distinctive, and coverage attempts to describe their authentic nature. There is a 296 merging of their public and private selves in their representations. This intertextual representation occurs across various media.9 2. Second, celebrities are commodities. They become commodities to sell their own books, broadcasts, and cultural products. Also, they can promote another commod- ity, such as a book or television show or magazine, their name serving as what An- drew Wernick called a promotional booster for these products.10 3. Third, a celebrity’s social function involves the way celebrities represent something more than themselves, supplying what scholar Jessica Evans called “a human dimen- sion to the public world, personifying or personalizing things that may otherwise be quite abstract.”11 Scholar Sue Holmes said celebrities with lasting popularity have a “deep, structural relationship with the ideological contexts of their times,” meaning that their image becomes a means of working over useful questions of their times.12 7 Goodall, R. 1975. The Visible Scientists. Boston: Little Brown and Company. 8 Turner, 2004, p. 9. 9 For detailed discussions of celebrity, see: Dyer, R. 1988. Stars. 2nd edition. London: BFI Publishing; Evans, J. 2005. Celebrity: what’s the media got to do with it IN: Evans, J. and Hesmondhalgh, D. (eds.) Understanding Media: Inside celebrity. Maidenhead: Open University Press; and Marshall, D. P. 1997. Celebrity and Power: Fame in contemporary culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 10 Wernick, A. 1991. Promotional Culture: Advertising, ideology and symbolic expression. New York: Sage. 11 Evans, 2005, p. 6. 12 Holmes, S. 2005. ‘Starring . Dyer?’: Re-visiting star studies and contemporary celebrity culture. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture. 2(2), pp6-21. p.12. Pcst-12 Proceedings Characteristics of Celebrity Scientists Based on these ideas from celebrity studies, I argue that there are five salient characteristics of famous scientists. As I outline these characteristics, I will illustrate how these characteris- tics are present in the lives of selected scientists that have been described using discourses of fame. 1. The scientist’s represented images feature a blurring of their public and private lives The point at which someone becomes a celebrity is when media coverage moves from re- porting their public lives to describing their private lives.13 Stephen Hawking is a strong il- lustrative example of how this principle can be applied to a scientist. As well as his scientific work being reported, his former wife wrote a book about their life together, Music to Move the Stars (2000), that featured intimate details of their emotional and romantic lives. Also, there was media coverage of his divorce and second marriage. For example, Vanity Fair ex- plored the police investigation into a series of apparently suspicious injuries that Hawking suffered during his second marriage.14 2. The scientist is a tradable cultural commodity Communicating with broader audiences through trade publishing or commercial television involves the branding and marketing and promotion of the scientist as author or presenter – often involving cross-media promotion. For example, Richard Dawkins’s book The God De- lusion (2006) was released around the same time as the television documentary Root of All Evil? (2006) was aired on Britain’s Channel 4. 3. The scientist’s representations feature the tensions and contradictions inherent in fame 297 The Visible Scientists noted that high-profile scientists had an “overrated credibility with the public.”15 This is also a pattern in the representation of scientific celebrity: the tension between public profile and scientific status. As an example, the scientific output of Oxford professor Susan Greenfield has been criticized. In one case, an anonymous scientist was- re ported in The Observer newspaper as saying: “A lot of what she says does not pass muster academically. Britain is very strong on neuroscience and compared to the leaders in the field, she is simply not in the same league. She is never cited in research papers.”16 4. The scientist’s public image is constructed around discourses of truth, reason and rationality The fame of various professions is tied to different discourses. David Marshall in his book Celebrity and Power (1997) said the film star is constructed around discourses of individuality and freedom, the television star is constructed around discourses of familiarity and wide- spread acceptability, and the popular music celebrity is constructed around discourses of authenticity.17 I argue that celebrity scientists are constructed around discourses of truth, 13 Turner, 2004. 14 Bachrach, J. 2004. A beautiful mind, an ugly possibility. Vanity Fair [Online]. June.
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