PhilofSciComm Interviews: Sophie Juliane Veigl
By: Philosophy Of Science Communication
Tags: Philosophy Of Biology, Science Communication, Visualization, Philosophy Of Science, Visual Design

Philosophy of biology and start-up: Q&A with Sophie Juliane Veigl

SJV with Barbara Streicher at Knowledge Room, Vienna

Sophie Juliane Veigl is currently a fellow of the doctoral program “The Sciences in Historical, Philosophical, and Cultural Contexts” in Vienna. Starting in November, she will be a writing-up fellow with the Konrad Lorenz Institute. Sophie is in the process of co-founding the Science Design Hub, a start-up providing visualizations for scientists.

How and why did you engage with scicomm?

Being a trained immunologist and “converting” to philosophy of science at the PhD level I decided for a topic that follows up cutting-edge science and builds on close collaborations with scientists. By choosing interviewing as the main method of my case study, my thesis became a mix of philosophy, biology and sociology. For this reasons, I’ve been engaging in cross-disciplinary science communication right from the start of my PhD, for I am presenting in front of vastly different audiences.

For creating posters, illustrations and presentations that communicate concepts of one discipline for audiences “disciplinized” in a different science I joined forces with a graphics designer. We decided to found a start-up to provide visualizations for scientists. Through this, I grew an interest in aspects of interdisciplinary sci-comm that bear on the theme of form vs. content, and beauty as a value in science.

How does your training as a HPS/STS scholar affect your scicomm activity?

SJV with a popular pedagogic tool on scientific methods: “what’s in the box?”

The years of working on my PhD thesis have trained me in communicating between disciplines. My upbringing in philosophy has been very much influenced by SSK (Sociology of Scientific Knowledge) — approaches. I have therefore a major interest in how narratives of scientific objects and processes are created, how the issue of consensus shapes the structure of disciplines and how the status of an “anomaly” is a social achievement. At the same time, how research is communicated by practitioners leaves out these aspects. It is therefore a specific aim for me concerning scicomm to find ways that brings one closer to the objects of scientific enquiry, and not further away.

Does scicomm influence your HPS/STS foci? How do you select the audiences to which you speak, and how does this affect your scicomming?

SJV thinking about food

As of yet I have not been participating in trans-disciplinary forms of scicomm. Interdisciplinary scicomm, that is communicating between the realms of biology, philosophy and sociology, as well as intradisciplinary scicomm, that is communicating philosophy of biology to other areas of philosophy have of course shaped my foci when doing HPS. Most importantly, the question of how can my work contribute to other areas has been shaped through such interactions.

My audiences are usually defined by the events I go to which often host different disciplinary profiles. When talking to biologists I always try to communicate at philosophical issues through the science they are familiar with. One way that I like to present philosophy of science endeavours is to show how philosophical and sociological investigations can help to tear apart issues that are commingled in scientific discourse, yet separating these issues would have epistemic benefits, also for researchers.