Lindy A. Orthia

Health Promotion: A Practical Guide to Effective Communication introduces students to the fundamental principles of health promotion in Australian and international public health contexts. Combining the core principles and theories of health promotion with those of effective communication, the text guides readers through the practical steps of planning, implementing and evaluating programs that empower health consumers and facilitate improved health outcomes for individuals and communities. The chapters consolidate and extend readers' understanding of key topics through case-study scenarios, problem-based learning activities, revision questions and recommendations for further reading. The 'Elsewhere in the World' sections link the text to health promotion programs globally. The final chapter brings together key concepts and highlights initiatives in action through a selection of eight extended international case studies. This essential resource will equip students with the knowledge and tools to prepare them for practice across a range of health and policy settings.

Designing exhibits that catch and hold people’s interest – particularly easily distracted children – is a key challenge for science centres. Here we apply situational interest (SI), a model from educational psychology and STEM education, to understand characteristics exhibit designers use to trigger and/or maintain interest, evoke emotions and foster relevance. Australian designers were surveyed (n = 18) and interviewed (n = 5). Analysis showed although designers did not consciously apply SI, they consistently used fundamental aspects of the model, such as selecting distinct design characteristics to trigger interest, others to maintain it, and considering how characteristics affected emotions and relevance. This demonstrates SI is applicable to exhibit design. To trigger interest, designers highlighted characteristics including accessibility, hands-on experience, user-centredness, and sensory stimulation, and to maintain interest open-endedness. Social interaction – especially having multiple simultaneous exhibit users – was the only design characteristic identified as key for both triggering and maintaining interest. Designers associated specific emotions with triggering and/or maintaining interest, including negative or bi-valanced emotions. Characteristics to increase relevance included familiar objects, prior experience/prior knowledge, novelty and familiarity and social and cultural context. This study fuses psychological theory on interest with the lived-experience of exhibit designers, providing insights useful for designers, interpretive staff and researchers.

Communities are rarely seen as the ideal level at which to focus science communication efforts, compared to the individual, psychological or mass, societal levels. Yet evidence from allied fields suggests building interpersonal relationships with specific communities over time is key to meaningful engagement, so orienting science communication towards communities is warranted. In this paper, we argue this case. We review previous studies, identifying three existing models of community-oriented science communication, which we label ‘neighbourly’, ‘problem-solving’ and ‘brokering’. We illustrate the effectiveness of the ‘problem-solving’ approach and the desirable ideal of ‘brokering’ using recent examples of community-oriented science communication from Australia.

In this commentary we are concerned with what mainstream science communication has neglected through cultural narrowness and ambient racism: other practitioners, missing audiences, unvalued knowledge, unrecognised practices. We explore examples from First Nations Peoples in the lands now known as Australia, from Griots in West Africa and from People's Science Movements in India to help us reimagine science communication. To develop meaningfully inclusive approaches to science communication, we argue there is an urgent need for the ‘mainstream’ to recognise, value and learn from science communication practices that are all too often seen as at ‘the margins’ of this field.

This commentary aims to shed light on the neglected space of queer people in science communication. In this piece, we introduce queer theory to science communication literature to examine issues from the past, present, and future. We argue that to queer our field may entail a radical interrogation of some of science communication's deeply rooted cultural traits and working towards a rainbow-tinted future.

How a discipline's history is written shapes its identity. Accordingly, science communicators opposed to cultural exclusion may seek cross-cultural conceptualizations of science communication's past, beyond familiar narratives centred on the recent West. Here I make a case for thinking about science communication history in these broader geotemporal terms. I discuss works by historians and knowledge keepers from the Indigenous Australian Yorta Yorta Nation who describe a geological event their ancestors witnessed 30,000 ybp and communicated about over generations to the present. This is likely one of the oldest examples of science communication, warranting a prominent place in science communication histories.

Fiction is often credited with shaping public attitudes to science, but little science communication research has studied fans' deep engagement with a science-themed fiction text. This study used a survey to investigate the impacts of television series ‘Doctor Who’ (1963–89; 2005–present) on its viewers' attitudes to science, including their education and career choices and ideas about science ethics and the science-society relationship. The program's reported impacts ranged from causing participants to fact-check ‘Doctor Who’'s science to inspiring them to pursue a science career, or, more commonly, prompting viewers to think broadly and deeply about science's social position in diverse ways.

What is the dominant political ideology of Doctor Who (1963-89, 1996, 2005-present)? Scholars and viewers have variously claimed the programme represents political positions ranging from far right to far left, or have denied it is political at all. In this article we offer a structural analysis that partially explains this diversity of response. Analysing three classic era Doctor Who serials with different political flavours, all of which feature political regime change as a narrative element, we identify two narrative devices that function to obscure any political ideologies present. The first, which we call the 'science-beats-tyranny' template, foregrounds the problem of a tyrannical regime rather than exploring any political alternatives to it. It circumvents the need for political debate by deposing the tyrant with a scientific fix. The second, which we call the 'ethics illusion', uses heuristic logic to effect the appearance of an ethical plot resolution, while skipping over the political details of the new regime replacing the tyrant. We argue that these devices create ambiguity about a serial's political commitments and also direct viewer attention to generic rhetoric about freedom from tyranny, rather than any more specific political ideology.