The coronavirus pandemic has resulted in a deluge of data: deaths from coronavirus, viewing figures for conspiracy theory videos, unequal vaccine coverage, changes in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the list goes on. While much of this data has been useful in understanding and dealing with COVID-19, there has been a noticeable excess. This has flowed into the so-called ‘post-pandemic’ world, where numbers burst from the seams of public discourse. Experts constantly update us with newfangled metrics, politicians point to the latest iteration of international league tables and journalists report on a dizzying volume of data. We need to step away from this daily churn of the quantitative and ask: what does this data actually mean?

Some approach this effort as a technical exercise. During the pandemic, Tim Harford's More or Less show on BBC Radio 4 provided an excellent weekly dive into salient numbers. The team applied statistical rigour to certain factoids, helping them to detect the pitfalls of small sample sizes, the role of nefarious categorization for political ends and how experts would communicate misleading conclusions from the data (see More or Less (2021) for an example). This was undoubtedly important work. It allowed the public to navigate the sea of data that was flowing their way.

But it often erred on the side of ‘if only they conducted the right statistical test, these numbers would not be a problem’. This meant that they missed a certain something about how numbers gained meaning in society. Quantitative facts are not just the result of mathematical and statistical processes. They are characterized by complexity and paradoxes: at once scientific and ideological, empowering and discriminatory, precise and uncertain, objective and subjective, emotive and informative, truthful and deceptive, fixed and malleable.

To untangle this complexity, I argue that we must begin by accepting two premises. First, we need to pay attention to the way mathematics and statistics combine with politics, culture, technology and economics. The technical process of producing a number – collecting data, cleaning it and analysing it – cannot be divorced from the context within which this occurs.

Whereas the previous three chapters have focused on the relationship between quantitative realism and data bounds in general terms, Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 circle back to the Trade-Off data bound introduced in Chapter 2. This chapter focuses on a data visualization that came to visually represent Trade-Off: the graph showing the number of cases, hospitalizations or deaths per day across the entire pandemic. This ‘humped’ graph – capturing how cases rose and fell across 2020 – provides a way into a discussion about the affective qualities of data visualizations – and by extension, the emotive nature of data bounds themselves. It does so by tracing the story of a particular performance of this graph by a Sky News presenter.

On 11 November 2020, the UK passed the grim landmark of 50,000 deaths within 28 days of a positive test for coronavirus. Later that day, Sky News released a two-and-a-half minute video on YouTube titled ‘COVID-19: How did the UK get to 50,000 deaths?’. The broadcast was relatively simple: a journalist, Roland Manthorpe, stands in front of a large screen containing a succession of data visualizations. He begins on the right of the screen, moves to the left part way through and then comes back to the right again – all the while expressively using his hands, posture and voice to provide his interpretation of the changing images behind him. Nothing about the components of this clip is particularly unusual – presenters will often stand next to, or in front of, a data visualization and explain it to the public.

But it was how Manthorpe performed that underpinned most of the comments below the video. One comment by Jake Jabz read: ‘Why is he so animated, he's talking about deaths in the UK like he's a presenter on Blue Peter’ (Sky News, 2020c).

For Jake Jabz there was too much animation for the severity of death, and this resulted in a performance closer to children's television (Blue Peter) than a serious news broadcast. And there is something true in this comment – the first time I saw this clip, I was struck by the oddness of Manthorpe's approach to telling this data story. It all felt a bit too energetic, lively and affective for graphs about deaths.

As cases were rising in the middle of October 2020, ITV news – a popular commercial television channel – broadcasted a roundtable of coronavirus experts. Some argued for a national lockdown to be introduced, while others called for the UK to live alongside the virus. During the debate Devi Sridhar, Chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, explained that, “Right now, we are taking a hit to the economy, major economic damage, without the public health benefit, which, in a way, is kind of a worst of all worlds” (Channel 4, 2020).

Sridhar's argument draws our attention to the two main ways of talking about the effects of the pandemic: public health and the economy. But it also emphasizes the way this conversation is often underpinned by numbers, even if they are not explicitly stated. If we rework her statement using data, we can see the implicit logic: ‘At the moment, in England, GDP growth is negative and cases and deaths linked to COVID-19 are high, which is the worst of all worlds.’ The fact that Sridhar does not need to refer specifically to these indicators demonstrates the way these metrics do not just represent the economy and health during the pandemic – they have come to stand in for these two phenomena. To talk about the economy and health, generally means talking about economic metrics and public health indicators. The numbers have become the phenomena they attempt to represent.

This is not unusual – it has become common to use ‘the economy’ and ‘GDP’ interchangeably. But the pandemic witnessed the rapid establishment of two contradictory data bounds that rested on the ability of numbers to stand in for health and the economy. Trade-Off was the dominant way of thinking of the pandemic in England – it positioned official measures to combat the virus as improving public health but coming at the cost of the economy. In her quote above, Sridhar was talking from the second, less popular, data bound: Protect Both. It emphasized that public health measures could protect both the economy and health, whereas a lack of state intervention would mean both the economy and health would suffer.

On 27 May, WIRED UK online (Temperton, 2020) reported that The Plandemic conspiracy documentary had been ‘viewed more than eight million times across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube’. Just over three weeks later, on 18 June, the UK section of Yahoo! News released an article titled ‘COVID conspiracies: 7% of Britons think there is no hard evidence that coronavirus exists, poll suggests’ (Wells, 2020a). Both statistics attempted to capture the public's belief in misinformation.

One number looked to tie belief with views: eight million people had viewed The Plandemic – a documentary that argued SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately released to control the world's population. The other figure was based on a traditional approach to public opinion: a set of survey questions asking people about their belief in misinformation. These two statistics were given their life through the narrative of the ‘infodemic’. This portmanteau of information and pandemic is described in most detail by the World Health Organization (WHO, 2020c):

It is at this point in the chapter that I face a juncture. I could take the section above as contextual – the foundation upon which a piece of research would examine why people believe in misinformation, where people receive disinformation from or how researchers can prevent people from believing in fake news. This is the path taken by much of the research on the infodemic – see the work of Brennen et al (2020) and Roozenbeek et al (2020) for two noteworthy examples from early in the pandemic. The approach by this chapter, however, follows a different tack. To do so, we must begin with the premises of the infodemic itself.

Political activism is an important domain in which science communication is used to support, or oppose, social change. In the recent past, queer activism has employed science-related arguments with varying results. Like many of the topics covered in this book, the academic literature on science communication in queer activism is sparse to non-existent. Accordingly, this chapter offers a retrospective examination of some of the science communication used by queer activists in the West, identified by examining historical newspaper articles, the archives of independent queer newspapers, audio-visual compilations of queer activism curated by libraries and museums, and the extant relevant academic publications. It is hoped that this foundational research will provide a starting point for future researchers to refine and fill the gaps. A further aim is to support and improve queer activism in the future by scrutinizing the role of science communication in queer activism in the past.

Nearly 75 years ago, in 1952, the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-I) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) declared anything that deviated from cis-heteronormativity was a form of pathological psychosis (APA, 1952). This included a variety of non-heterosexual attractions and activities, as explained in more detail later. The inclusion of non-cis-heteronormality as a psychotic illness persisted across different editions, through direct and indirect references until at least 1987. Activism helped direct a long process of change until the APA board of trustees elected to remove the definition of homosexuality as a form of psychosis from the DSM (Drescher and Merlino, 2007). In 1990, the World Health Organization followed suit by removing homosexuality from the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10). It took even longer for transgender-related classifications to be removed or amended in the DSM and the ICD, again under the influence of activist pressure. In 2013 the DSM-5 dropped ‘gender identity disorder’ as a diagnosis but replaced it with ‘gender dysphoria’, which many trans activists still consider problematic (Whalen, n.d.), to the point that the Danish government officially removed the ‘mentally ill’ classification of trans people in 2017, overriding the DSM's classification in Denmark (Russo, 2017).

Given its inevitable influence in all stages of our lives, medical discourse is a significant form of public science communication and one that is especially relevant to queer people. Queerness has often been included within dominant discourses of pathology in public medical discourse and queer people have been at the active receiving end of this institutionalized oppression. For instance, the implicit assumption of cis-heterosexuality as the by default biological/clinical norm continues to otherize and alienate queer people in various capacities in clinical communications. This of course runs hand in hand with cissexist and heterosexist societal values that are mirrored by major social institutions of medicine, law, heteronormative family structures, and religion.

In this chapter, I examine the construction of queer identities in clinical communication along two distinct disciplinary trajectories: first, the framing of queerness as mental illness by the mental health sciences; and second, the idea of ‘risky sexuality’ in public health discourse centring the AIDS epidemic. It is convenient and tempting to see clinical communications arising out of public medical discourse as inarguable facts that are objective, neutral, and apolitical. Yet histories of knowledge production regarding queer identities in clinical disciplinary frameworks speak otherwise. This will be my central argument in this chapter. In this context, I will be looking at the evolution of clinicians’ characterizations of ‘homosexuality’ from a site of pathology to a normal variant of human sexuality. I will also be taking note of the radical shift in clinical communications from pathologizing of transgender identities to acknowledgement of the gender spectrum and the diversity of gender identities, expressions, and experiences. For transgender individuals, the current clinical consensus is focused on alleviating dysphoria or distress (if any) due to felt incongruence between their sex-assigned-atbirth and experienced gender.

With changing frames of clinical understandings, the reference points for what constitute the binaries of the ‘clinically normative’ and the ‘deviant’ subjects also keep shifting. This shift has massive implications for it is accompanied by rapidly changing frameworks of care. ‘Conversion’ of queer individuals to compulsory cis-heterosexuality was once recognized as ‘cure’ and now the same has been discredited by major mental health professional bodies around the world.

The story of ‘one billion items of PPE’ begins at an English government press conference on Saturday 18 April 2020. These daily briefings, streamed live across radio and television broadcasters, comprised of one elected politician from the Conservative Party and one or more scientific advisers to the government. These officials provided an update on the latest data, the policies being introduced and implemented, and the longer-term strategy to deal with the pandemic.

At this particular press conference in mid-April, Dan Hewitt from the popular television broadcaster ITV asks three questions to Steven Powys, the National Medical Director for National Health Service (NHS) England, and Robert Jenrick, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. It is worth outlining each in full:

• 1. How have we found ourselves in the situation where we are dangerously low on PPE?

• 2. Why hasn't the government had a plan B here, getting small, medium, large manufacturers to produce PPE?

• 3. Do you accept the worries of NHS doctors and nurses that we have spoken to today that by downgrading your PPE guidance, by not providing proper PPE, you are putting their lives at greater risk? (BBC News, 2020a)

Robert Jenrick, after a brief stutter, emphasizes how the public are in awe of social care and NHS staff and how nobody wants to see these people worried about whether they will have the correct equipment. He emphasizes how the government has to do more to get the PPE to the frontline but also stresses how it is a huge challenge given the global demand for equipment. Despite this, he explains that the government is making progress: “Today I can report that a very large consignment of PPE is due to arrive in the UK tomorrow from Turkey … which will include 400,000 gowns” (BBC News, 2020a).

This statement starts a strange ball rolling in government rhetoric around supply and distribution of PPE – one that bounced along from Saturday to Sunday to Monday to Tuesday and, finally coming to a stop, on Wednesday. It is important to provide a day-by-day play of how this panned out.

What would it take to queer science communication well? In the first instance, ‘well’ must mean responsible, morally good, and respectful engagement with LGBTIQA+ people and their lives. Queered science communication is about individuals and communities – recognizing their context, the history that informs current and future interactions with areas like STEM, and their needs, which could be met by well-designed science communication. Queer science communication also goes beyond localized cases and asks us to take seriously the question of who and what we represent in wide-spanning, public science communication work, and improving who is bestowed with agency – who speaks and is heard. Queered science communication requires that those with power become uncomfortable, acknowledge the structures and biases that support them, and challenge those structures to make room for others to reclaim the space that is rightfully theirs.

The collection of chapters and spotlights presented in this book represent a first attempt to create an authoritative text on queering science communication. We emphasize first attempt because what it means to queer science communication, to celebrate and explicitly centre LGBTIQA+ people, is still in its earliest stages. We anticipate contributions that build on and contest assertions put forward in this book.

To conclude the book, we here discuss the themes that emerged within it and then what gaps still need to be filled.

Queered science communication is all around

Contributions from our spotlight authors demonstrate that while queered science communication has yet to fully emerge in the research domain, practical queered science communication is starting to flourish in different forums. Drag is increasingly used to communicate scientific topics to broad audiences and platform queer people as described by drag performers Aznar-Alemany and Suciu and colleagues in their spotlights. Queer people are organizing stereotype-debunking events within queer networks, such as the Mardi Gras event detailed by Motion and Sauquet, and injecting queer concerns into science-related art collaborations such as Alifuoco and colleagues’ ‘Endosymbiotic Love Calendar’ and Kaplinsky and Krish's ‘GENDERS’ exhibition. And queer people are self-publishing and networking online via blogs and social media, as we see in Part II's spotlights Using #QueerInSTEM and Queer Science Blogs. LGBTIQA+ people are active in practical science communication.

Media representations of scientists have been a mainstay topic of science communication research for decades.

In addition to examining representations of scientists and other STEM professionals such as engineers and mathematicians in news media, science communicators have examined their representation in fiction texts such as films, television, theatre, novels, and comics. They have conducted this research for a range of reasons including to evaluate equality of representation among scientist characters by genders, ethnicities, and disciplines (for example, Long et al, 2010), and to investigate how characters in sciencethemed fiction promote particular ideologies such as scientism (for example, Orthia, 2011).

The ultimate rationale is often to understand what impact fictional representations of STEM professionals have on public discourse, for example on people's concepts of what scientists are like or who can be an engineer. Sometimes this is framed as investigations of fiction's role-modelling capacity for STEM careers (for example, Steinke et al, 2012). In other cases, the rationale is to sample fiction as a manifestation of existing public discourse, to find out what a particular society already thinks about science, its personnel, and the ‘others’ it contrasts itself to (for example, Haynes, 1994).

However, almost none of this work has attended to fictional representations of queerness. That is the case whether it refers to diversity in scientific characters’ sexual orientation, gender, and sex characteristics, or fiction's depictions of queer issues in science.

Indeed, diversity in gender and sex characteristics has been rendered still more invisible than usual by the field's analytical conventions. Most studies examining the gender or sex of scientist characters look only at differences between ‘women’ and ‘men’, implicitly assuming a cis-binary model of gender and sex that is not questioned or even mentioned. Such assumptions patently exclude gender diverse people and people with diverse sex characteristics who don't identify as female or male. Non-heterosexuals are also often overlooked by analysts who presume characters are heterosexual unless canonically proven otherwise. As well as perpetuating harm to queer people specifically, such analytical decisions do the field a general disservice by keeping discourse about inclusion at a superficial level.

Queering the scene at the science institution

While approaches to queer interrogation/integration within arts and socio-historical museums are well documented (for example, Sullivan and Middleton, 2019), there is little yet written on the value of extending this approach to public science institutions. In this chapter, we think about queering public science institutions. Here we argue that that queer/ing can (and should) be an equally valuable lens for science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medical (STEMM) institutions. We use the phrase ‘public science institutions’ to describe a myriad of locations where everyday STEMM learning is performed and received publicly through science communication. We also recognize that many of these public science institutions are active sites of scientific research too (for example, Singapore Botanical Gardens, American Museum of Natural History); and as such they are not only representing science but also creating the very knowledge they represent. Thus, we collate here some ideas and directions spanning zoos, botanical gardens, natural parks, farmyards, makerspaces, aquaria, open air science sites, as well as science museums and science centres, that are aimed to direct the reader to ways of engaging queer theory in science communication practices and institutions in all these contexts. However, in writing this chapter we acknowledge that any queer work can never be definitive: thus we encourage unpicking and redeveloping these in any future queer interventions into science institutions.

Public science institutions have multiple valences for publics as sites of leisure, sites of learning, or sites of (un)official pedagogy. Underpinning these, such institutions are also part of projects to create and uphold the social and structural norms of societies they claim to represent. This can be seen in existing science institution theorizing that focuses on who is in the audience at the institution, highlights who is not ‘learning’ to be part of the society, and interrogates what norms are being communicated as knowledge to learn (Dawson, 2019). As per other scholars (for example, Cassidy et al, 2016), we thus recognize the political implications of ‘rendering things up to be viewed – [as] a key means of apprehending and “colonizing” reality’ (Macdonald, 1998, p 10) in the process of display and representation of (scientific) knowledge.

What might queer perspectives offer science communication theory? In this chapter, inspired by queer theory's metaphorical potential, we challenge the science/public binary that underlies most of the science communication models at the centre of science communication theory. We focus on models because they constitute the most well developed area of science communication theory (Trench and Bucchi, 2010). We argue that queering science communication models offers liberatory possibilities for science communication by undermining the hegemonic authority of Western institutionalized science and by granting epistemic legitimacy to marginalized people, including LGBTIQA+ people.

In the spirit of queer pluralism, we take two simultaneous paths to arrive at that point. The left option takes a straighter academic path and examines two queer case studies that illustrate key problems with science communication models. The right option takes a queerer path, using an extended metaphor to explore the gendered and sexual dimensions of the relationship between science and science communication to show what is in desperate need of change. Choose whichever you prefer to read first, then read the other if you like. The paths come together at the chapter's end for conclusions applicable to both.

Queered science communication models and the role of trust

The participatory model has let us down by purporting to be the solution to disenfranchisement and marginalization, when in fact it polices and even protects those unequal power dynamics. Metaphorically speaking, and to an extent non-metaphorically, science communication is an airless, suburban bunker of oppressive, cisgendered heteronormativity. Like a controlling husband, Western institutionalized science prizes a fundamentalist scepticism characterized by routinely questioning everything. That very act of questioning removes power from marginalized people when they are rendered science's objects.

Dialogue and participation cannot reinstate that power. Rather, they force the marginalized to negotiate truth with an oppressive knowledge system whose adherents think they have something useful to contribute to every question. As far as current models are concerned, science communication's imperatives reinscribe Western institutionalized science's claim that it is the gold standard of authority.