The following pages reveal what makes science communication at an arts university special, the challenges that it entails, and the concrete projects and measures through which the mdw is shaping dialogue with various groups of people within and outside of the University.

In the following conversation, Therese Kaufmann (head of the Office of Research Support), Anna Wukovits-Zethner (Office of Research Support), Ralf von Appen (professor of Theory and History of Popular Music), and Bianca Jasmina Rauch (film scholar and freelance journalist) provide mdw Magazine with some impressions from their experiences with science communication.

Science communication is often thought of as conveying scientific findings to others in an accessible way. And while that is true, it’s only part of the story. In actual fact, science communication doesn’t begin only once research has been completed, when it’s time to explain its outcomes to a wider public. It actually begins wherever and whenever scientific or scholarly knowledge relates to societal issues, experiences, and conflicts.

TENOR 26 Vienna is part of the research project “Sound as Score”, elements of which are being funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and organised in Vienna by the mdw and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). Of the over 100 submissions that the conference received, 30 papers, nine workshops, four posters, and 18 sound-based works were ultimately presented.

“These days, when I look back, I sometimes ask myself where I got the self-confidence to go out into the big wide world,” says Anke Schad-Spindler with a laugh. Now general manager and scholarly head of EDUCULT as well as a freelance businesswoman, this mdw alumna studied in Germany, Italy, England, and Austria—and her dissertation on cultural governance was awarded a state prize by what was then Austria’s Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research.

How do kids and teens learn about what’s being researched at universities? And where can the findings of scientists and scholars be directly perceived in our everyday lives? Science communication formats aim to enable people situated outside of academic fields to encounter topics from the realm of science and research in the most accessible way possible.

“External science communication” refers to the practice of communicating and lending visibility to research results, protagonists of academic life, and entire research disciplines for the benefit of non-academic audiences of all ages.