Stories

Civic Science Fellow Mel Brown learned the value for journalists of slowing down and listening.

In 2022, Mel Brown walked out of a newly rented house in Eugene, Oregon, and found the street filled with smoke. At first, they assumed someone had lit a bonfire, despite the dangerously hot and dry conditions. But the smoke was from a wildfire 40 miles away, one of many in the state that year that burned a total of more than 400,000 acres.

Brown had come to Oregon that autumn as a UK-US Civic Science Storytelling Fellow hosted by the University of Oregon’s Center for Science Communication Research after a decade at the BBC making science radio documentaries. “We talk about climate change in the UK, but it’s sort of at a distance still,” Brown says. “It’s quite another thing when it lands on your front door.”

Before applying for the Fellowship, sponsored by the Fulbright Commission and the Rita Allen Foundation, Brown hadn’t heard of civic science. “When I was unpacking it, I realized that it really was the ethos underpinning my work. It was what I was trying to achieve.”        

Wildfire became a theme of Brown’s Fellowship. They visited the Cedar Creek Fire as it burned 127,000 acres, talked to fire chiefs, interviewed residents of the nearby town of Oakridge, and filed a report for German international broadcaster Deutsche Welle. “As a journalist, you’re often hopping from topic to topic,” Brown says. “After maybe a month or two, you’re onto something else. So the chance to really gain the nuance around this topic was super useful.”

The deeper reporting also led to an important insight for Brown. “You can have compelling science but if it’s not shared appropriately, people may well not want to listen or act upon it.”

The sound of science

That insight shaped the next phase of the Fellowship for Brown. A Spanish speaker with a longstanding interest in Latin America, they started asking how Latinx communities, many of them farmworkers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, received information about science and health. What they found wasn’t encouraging. During the COVID-19 pandemic, little communication had been tailored for this audience. “Yet it’s probably one of the communities more affected by it because of the nature of where people work, different socio-economic issues,” Brown says.

Networking opened an opportunity to help address the lack of good science and health information for Spanish speakers. Brown connected with Catalina de Onís, who works on environmental justice at the University of Oregon, and Arturo Sarmiento, director of Radio Poder, a Spanish-language community station in Woodburn. Then Brown forged a new connection between the station and Spanish speaking students at the University’s journalism school.

Together they created a summer radio series, El Sonido de la Ciencia (The Sound of Science). Brown hired students, trained them in radio production, helped them create stories, and led them take the lead. The stories were built around what the community wanted to know. “Meeting people where they are is so key,” Brown says.

Some episodes tackled serious subjects including wildfire smoke and farmworker safety, emissions from a local incinerator, forever chemicals. Others profiled Latinx scientists and engineers at the University, showcasing science careers, for an audience that rarely saw itself reflected in the field. Stories about native bees, gelatinous sea creatures, and the science of swimming safely were meant to inspire awe and wonder in science.

The program continued after Brown’s Fellowship ended, renamed El Sonido de la Ciencia y la Justicia, until 2024. Going forward, station director Sarmiento’s dream would be to produce a full hour of science programming each week and eventually segments in indigenous languages. The obstacle is resources, he says. “Community radio is not a commercial enterprise.”

Teaching civic science media

During the Fellowship Brown took on the challenge of designing and teaching a new university course on civic science storytelling. “So much of what you do as a journalist is kind of intuitive,” Brown says. “It’s stuff you’ve built up without really thinking about how you got those skills.” The challenge was to explain these skills to students: how to find stories, seek out contributors, and choose which voices to elevate.

The first homework assignment was to go out onto the streets and interview a stranger about what science means to them. It was like throwing the students into the deep end, Brown says. “I was quite ruthless. But that is the basis of journalism, isn’t it? Stepping out of your comfort zone.”

For their main projects, students partnered with Wallowa Resources, a rural Oregon nonprofit that brings together ranchers, environmentalists, and other stakeholders around shared goals. Brown sent the students to interview the organization’s communications team, with a simple brief: Find out what stories they struggle to tell and then figure out how to tell them.

One group made an animated cartoon aimed at children about invasive grasses, complete with a curriculum pack the organization could take into schools. Others built interactive maps of fire risk. Brown didn’t prescribe the format, instead encouraging the students to match the medium to the audience.

Four students went with Brown on a field trip to Wallowa County to interview sources in person. “It’s very different when you’re in the region talking to locals and you’re actually seeing the beautiful mountains that people are trying to protect.”

Berit Thorson, a graduate student in that class, is now a beat reporter for the East Oregonian, where she’s still thinking about an exercise from the course: reframing the same science story for different audiences. “How do I break down the science so that it’s palatable, but still accurate?” Thorson says. “That’s been on my mind a lot.”

Time and trust

“The point about civic science that I was gaining over that year is the benefits of listening and conversation, and not presuming you know the answers,” Brown says. “Having a bit of humility in one’s approach.”

Journalists typically meet someone, interview them, take what is needed for the story, and move on. “Civic science asks for something different: longer timelines, reciprocal relationships, trust built over months,” Brown says. It boils down to “time and trust.”

Though the other Fellows in the cohort had a wide range of projects, they shared the same sense of mission. “We all wanted to be part of making science have a positive impact in the world, but doing it in a way that was more equitable and inclusive, and hopefully, more humble,” Brown says. “We all fall down on that, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be trying.”

Before leaving Oregon, Brown created Civic Science Reflections, collecting interviews with scientists, educators, students, and community partners that reflect that goal.

Brown returned to the UK in 2023 to take a job with the BBC as a producer for “The Infinite Monkey Cage,” the long-running Radio 4 science comedy show. They’re now series producer, shaping how science and humor meet a mainstream audience.

And they still find ways to incorporate the civic science mission into their work, such as the BBC series “Toxic,” about pollutants in the home. Brown had been in conversation with the lead scientist on the research for a year and a half, and the trust they built helped them navigate how to present thorny issues and uncertainty in the science. “You don’t want to be like, ‘Oh, everything’s giving you cancer,’” Brown says. “But you also want to say there is evidence.”

And the trust built with the scientist has already led to a new project. The civic science approach isn’t easy, Brown says. “But knowing that that’s a goal, I’m looking for those opportunities.”