Scholarly Interview with Laura A. Lindenfeld, Ph.D. from Stony Brook University on Science Communication, Food Films, and Applied Communication Research

About Laura Lindenfeld, Ph.D.: Dr. Laura Lindenfeld is Professor of Communication and Dean of the School of Communication & Journalism at Stony Brook University, where she also serves as Executive Director of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. Dr. Lindenfeld’s research and practice focus on facilitating communication among scientists and between scientists and the public, with applications to climate and environmental science, health communication, and more. Her work also explores the social and cultural politics of food and food media, as in her book with Fabio Parasecoli, Feasting Our Eyes: Food Films and Cultural Identity in the United States.

Dr. Lindenfeld’s publications appear in important applied and interdisciplinary research journals including Science Communication, Journal of Communication in Healthcare, and Frontiers in Communication, as well as chapters in many collected volumes. Dr. Lindenfeld is also an accomplished grant writer, and her research and leadership initiatives have garnered support from organizations including the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and the U.S. Department of Food and Agriculture.

Prior to joining the faculty at Stony Brook, Dr. Lindenfeld was Professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism at The University of Maine, where she also directed the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center. She received her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the University of California, Davis with Designated Emphases in Critical Theory and Feminist Theory. Dr. Lindenfeld received her Master’s degree in German and Scandinavian Literature and Language Studies from the University of Bonn in Germany, and worked in German film and television prior to completing her doctoral education.

Interview Questions

[MastersinCommunications.com] May we begin with an overview of your academic and professional background? How did you become interested in the cultural politics of food and science communication and come to your current positions as Dean and Professor of the School of Communication & Journalism at Stony Brook University?

[Dr. Laura Lindenfeld] I have a complex, meandering history. I started my graduate education by doing a Master’s in German and Scandinavian Literature and Language Studies at the University of Bonn in Germany. After I did that, I worked as a copywriter for a couple of years for the largest advertising agency in Germany. I wrote screenplays for TV, and I did this in German. But, at a certain point, I realized that I did not want to stay in Germany forever. I had lived there for 10 years, which felt like a long time. At that point, it was a third of my life, because I came back to the United States when I was 29 turning 30.

I really wanted to go on for a Ph.D., so I applied for graduate programs all over the U.S. I wound up going to the University of California, Davis (UC Davis). I got into a German program there, and, within two years, I realized I did not want to be a German professor. At the time, I was also pursuing concentrations in women’s and gender studies and critical theory. In the classes I was taking as part of those concentrations, I found myself continuously writing about food and media.

I decided that I was going to follow that urge because it felt right. I realized I had a lifelong interest in food and identity, how visceral food is, and how it influences us in subtle ways we do not even recognize. I was also fascinated by how the media shapes who we are. So, and I would not recommend this to anyone, I wound up switching my Ph.D. program halfway through my time in graduate school. This is actually a theme to my life. I have really adapted. I switched into an individualized Ph.D. program in Cultural Studies, and I wrote my dissertation on food and American films.

I think I was on the pulse of something. I have had a little bit of a knack for being ahead of the game and anticipating things on the horizon. All of these films about food came out as I was writing the dissertation. I was analyzing them as they were coming out on the market, rather than looking at a stable body of films, which was crazy.

After I received my Ph.D., my fiancé and I got married and moved to Maine, where he had a postdoc. We were supposed to stay for one year. I took a position at The University of Maine where I was essentially doing three things at once. Because of my background in cultural studies, communication, and rhetoric, they recommended that I connect with the Communication & Journalism Department. I had not explicitly thought of myself as a communication researcher. I thought of myself as a cultural studies scholar. It turned out they were right. There were colleagues there whom I really got along with.

Long story short, I developed a skill for writing grants. (Always learn to be a good writer if you can; it is worth it.) They put me on a non-tenure track research faculty line. I brought in a lot of money through grants, and at some point, I recognized that I had the negotiating power to ask them to move me onto tenure track. They did. I accepted a joint appointment with the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center, which was a very applied, public policy research center and a wonderful place to work, and the Department of Communication & Journalism, which was also wonderful. I went up pretty quickly for tenure because I had published a series of articles and had a book manuscript, which I did not publish until much later.

But as I got further into this work and halfway through tenure, I found that I was lonely. I felt a bit isolated by the single-authored publication, sitting-at-a-desk-writing-an-article lifestyle. At one point, I got a call from a colleague, David Hart, and he said, “I hear you’re a heck of a grant writer. We’re writing a large, National Science Foundation (NSF) grant about sustainability. Would you be interested?” I said, “Well, I’ve got this other grant I’m writing, and I’m really committed to it. But if it doesn’t get funded, I’m all yours.” That was the best grant I ever was not awarded, because I then wound up working in sustainability, which drew me, ultimately, to science communication.

I backed into science communication through this sustainability work and retrained as a social scientist while going up for tenure. Do not try this at home — I probably would never advise anybody to do what I did. I made tenure, then I eventually became a full professor, but I really rebuilt my toolkit so that I could work more on sustainability and science communication and pursue more NSF and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) oriented grants.

Through that, I started to recognize that scientists do not necessarily know how to talk to each other. The ecologists, the economists, the engineers, and others had challenges in communicating with one another. I started Googling, “Is there anybody who trains scientists to talk to each other?” and I found the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. I thought, “Well, that’s a great idea.” At that point, I really identified as a communication scholar. It struck me that, of course, improv would help people communicate more effectively. It is about being genuine, listening, and having empathy. I decided that I would do their training, which I attended a couple of years into a large NSF project with a colleague and one of my Ph.D. students. It transformed my life. That is how I ended up coming to Stony Brook and moving into this work.

[MastersinCommunications.com] You just mentioned the Alan Alda Center, and your contributions to science communication include your work as Executive Director for the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. Would you provide us with some background on the Alan Alda Center and discuss some of the Center’s initiatives that you have found most impactful or exciting during your tenure there?

[Dr. Laura Lindenfeld] What I love about the Alda Center is how it links research on science communication with practice. We take the best of what we know about how to communicate and design professional development experiences for STEM professionals. Effective science communication is not a guessing game. When done well, it is very strategic and thoughtful work grounded in ethics.

For example, one area of science communication that I find particularly robust is the research on climate communication. It investigates how different people experience discourse about climate. It helps us understand what climate change means to them and gives us insight into what it would take to get people more engaged. What would turn people off? At the Center we synthesize literature like this, and then we bring in improvisational theater together with findings from research to develop training experiences that help scientists, and STEM and health professionals writ large, figure out how to engage in more effective oral, written, and visual communication. Improv, at its core, is about being present, listening, and making genuine connections. It is grounded in empathy.

All Alda Center programs are very carefully scaffolded, and we initially focus on oral communication. I have seen participants come to workshops worrying that we are going to put them on a stage. That is not what we do at all – we are not teaching people to do standup comedy. We are teaching them to be really present and listen. We are building different communication skill sets and competencies in scientists. What is it like when someone verbally attacks you? How can you respond in such a way that builds more trust rather than more distance?

[MastersinCommunications.com] You also noted in your response to the first question that you earned your Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the University of California, Davis. Could you introduce us to how a cultural studies perspective informs your approach to studying representations of food in media and extends to your work in science communication?

[Dr. Laura Lindenfeld] I think the overarching narrative of my career and life has been about equity and inclusion. Cultural studies finely attunes you to the power dynamics involved in people’s lived experiences.

I look at the science communication work I do now and even the work I do as Dean of Stony Brook’s School of Communication & Journalism, as differently but relatedly informed by my cultural studies background. A lot of times, we expect people to show up and just get the information we want them to have. I think as a cultural studies scholar, I have always understood that we need to meet people where they are.

This connects to what I found so intriguing about the Alda Method©. It helps scientists come to understand what it means to listen deeply, not with the purpose of saying what they want to say, but with the aim of creating a sense of connection among one another.

[MastersinCommunications.com] As we have been discussing, one main thread of your research and practice deals with science communication research and how to increase the public accessibility and impact of the sciences, as in articles like “Bridging Science with Society: Defining Pathways for Engagement.” You have taken up similar questions with respect to public health promotion, environmental communication, and forensic science. Could you highlight some of the key takeaways from this line of your work?

[Dr. Laura Lindenfeld] The question that has driven my research here at Stony Brook, and that I began to pursue during my time at The University of Maine, is, “How do we make sure that when we produce science, it is designed in such a way that is accessible to the people who may want to use it?” If you look at Pasteur’s Quadrant, you will see it breaks science down into different approaches: basic science, applied science, and then something called “use-inspired basic research.” I live in that last quadrant, which is focused on producing science aligned with societal need.

I am not at all disparaging basic research. I do not want to sound like that for a minute. I think basic research is incredibly important and it needs more funding. I also think, fundamentally, that the scientific process is the scientific process. But if we are looking to dedicate a portion of the work of science toward informing and generating solutions in urgent areas of societal need, we have to understand what people need, how they live, what would be useful to them, and how to communicate about all of this. You can hear the cultural studies scholar coming in right there, and this is really my specialty. I understand that we have to be better at aligning the production of science with people’s needs and demands.

In some of the work that I have done in collaboration with colleagues like Anthony Dudo, John Besley, and Todd P. Newman, we have looked at scientists and what they think they need to be able to communicate more effectively. We did this comprehensive survey of scientists informed by existing literature on “willingness to engage.” We wanted to measure and understand what scientists perceived themselves as needing and wanting before we created a product to help them.

This type of approach is critical for the Alda Center’s work, because we are in the business of providing science communication training. We wanted to know more about how much scientists felt they wanted or needed these trainings, as well as how, where, and with whom they wanted to receive them. That really helped us. It did not make us fundamentally redesign everything, but it certainly helped us realign and rethink how we talk about what we do, so, at the very least, we are not alienating people, and, at best, we are engaging people.

That provides a nice description of the art of “use-inspired basic research.” It involves moving from fundamental basic research, to testing theory, to advancing theory, and finally to using that information to drive decisions. This perspective also informed my approach as Director of the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at The University of Maine before I got to Stony Brook. I am always thinking about building evidence-based policies. That is just baked into who I am.

[MastersinCommunications.com] One of your publications on science communication is “Conversations with the Editors: Promoting Science and Combating Antiscience: A Focus on Communication Strategies.” Would you reflect on how the rise of anti-scientific discourse and scientific misinformation has reshaped the nature of science communication research? Are there important ways this context has also influenced the concerns of your work on media representations of food?

[Dr. Laura Lindenfeld] This is a very complex issue. One of the things that I learned working in, and then running, the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center is that policy is never just about bringing science to the table. Science is not going to make societal decisions. I believe science should be part of those decisions, but when you get the data or the information on the table, you have all these other things you have to consider: ethics, values, perspectives, timing, budgets. Science may say, “This is the right thing to do,” and people may say, “Absolutely not. We don’t like that,” or, “We can’t afford it.”

I think that we often expect people to simply accept science because we think it is important. That is not how people work. People live in cultures and in relationships with organizations and individuals whom they trust. Power and discourse inform our positionalities and who we are. This means that for us to change our minds about something, we have to distance ourselves from someone who has led us to believe what we believe. There is a cost that comes with that.

One of the things I love so much about the Alda Center is that improv revolves around the idea of “Yes, and.” We do not say, “You’re wrong, you’re an idiot, you’re stupid,” and humiliate you. That would completely undermine shared trust. Instead, we aim to understand, and we develop curiosity. Who are you? What do you care about? What is important to you? If we can find some common ground, we may be able to build trust in a different way. I think that it is fundamental.

The other core concept of improv is that we need to “make our partner look good.” That means demonstrating care and respect for people even if we disagree with them. Improv highlights dignity. This is especially critical at a time when science has become highly politicized. Perceptions about science vary widely, too, with respect to vaccinations, which we saw hyper-politicized during COVID-19 in a way that they had not quite been before. The way that we engage with each other on social media has created deeper divides. Distrust in news and institutions is on the rise. There is a lot of complexity out there that has nothing to do with individual scientists.

I also think how we train scientists in universities has gotten harder on people: competition for resources and funding is tight. This can be a fraught, complex environment to navigate, and it can be especially off-putting if it is a world that is not familiar to you, thus placing some people at a significant disadvantage. When we talk about science and distrust in society, we have to think about the different levels involved. How does that look internationally, nationally, within a state, locally, and topically? The discourse on climate change is very different depending on where you are and whom you are connecting with, for example. Becoming a scientist has become more and more complex, and I believe effective communication needs to be part of how we train scientists.

[MastersinCommunications.com] Are there ways that these developments change or affect how people ought to go about translational scientific work?

[Dr. Laura Lindenfeld] One of the areas I worked on as a researcher before I got to Stony Brook was knowledge co-production. I would like to see a greater focus on approaches like citizen science and knowledge co-production. I think we need more empirical research on these approaches – people have made great headway, but there is room for more, because if these approaches do generate that trust — which I think they do, because they help you think like a scientist and appreciate the process — that could be an extremely important way to combat distrust.

In one of the pieces I co-authored with Anthony Dudo, John Besley, Chris Volpe, and Todd P. Newman, we observed differences in how scientists perceive their experience of science and what science means to them based on the kind of science they do. For the “harder” sciences like physics and chemistry, individuals in the survey tended to experience joy when they thought about science. The more applied scientists, social scientists, and humanists tended to associate hope with the word science. The latter mirrors more how the general public experiences science. If science means hope to people, they tend to perceive it as something that is going to have a payoff.

There is, then, a difference between people who are more process-oriented when it comes to thinking about science and people who are more payoff-oriented. I hope that this helps lead to a solution for some of our communicative difficulties. It does not mean we should try to make all chemists think science is hope, but rather that it is important to understand that most of the audiences they will interact with — the funders they meet with, the legislators they talk to, the kids in schools and their parents — hear “payoff” when you talk about science, not “I love the process.”

As a scientist, you have to talk about the work you do differently. Your audience does not want to go into every single detail. They do not necessarily share the joy in details that you experience. Put differently, when my car is broken and I get it fixed, I really do not care how the mechanic fixes it. I care that the process they use to fix it works, that they give me a fair price, and I can drive out with my car. I am drastically oversimplifying this, but I think we need to take people’s cultural affiliations into consideration when we think about communication and connection.

I do feel some of that is the responsibility of the scientific community, but this leads to another question I am very interested in. Who should be the spokespeople for science? There is a lot of stress in the scientific community. It has been hard on people. Should we be expecting this communicative labor from individual scientists? I would love to see the communication discipline help scientists who want to be able to engage publicly do so effectively, and provide scientists who do not want to be public-facing great tools to connect with people who can do that on their behalf accurately.

I also think communication as a discipline needs to think specifically about communicating science and research. We must take a two-pronged approach. While critical, it is not enough to train scientists to communicate. We also need, as communication professionals and researchers, to more deeply engage with how we can help communicate science and connect that work to society. At Stony Brook, we are part of the vanguard of universities looking at this and educating future communicators to focus specifically on science, science communication, and more closely connecting science and society. Several years ago, we started offering a Master’s in Science Communication, which is an application-focused and social science-driven professional program to help address what we see as a critical need in society.

That is where my own commitment to strategic communication and journalism comes in. We need to build connections between scientists and professional storytellers so that they can help bring that content to audiences in the ways that they are brilliant at doing, and which we cannot expect scientists to do while running a lab. That is also part of the reason why I was drawn to my Dean position.

[MastersinCommunications.com] As you just mentioned, you are Dean of the School of Communication & Journalism at Stony Brook. Would you introduce us to your role as Dean, perhaps reflecting on how your approach to this leadership position has been impacted by your scholarly background?

[Dr. Laura Lindenfeld] I came into this job with the understanding it would be a temporary, one-year position. Then the faculty supported me to become permanent Dean. Together we reshaped the school into the School of Communication & Journalism. I am not going to say that was an easy climb, but I felt that there was a need in the world for a communication and journalism school that was deeply engaged and committed to solutions. We continue to grow.

Communication schools as a whole, from my experience, do not tend to prioritize thinking of themselves as partners to scientists. That is how I think about the School of Communication & Journalism at Stony Brook. We work together alongside colleagues in the sciences to understand the context in which science operates and how it can operate better through improved communication. A group of our faculty just did incredible work on ozone pollution in China, exploring how Chinese citizens perceive messaging about the ozone and their health and what we can do to help people engage in this messaging more effectively. That work is at the intersection of air quality science, climate change science, and public health.

This kind of engagement and solutions-oriented work is the core goal. That is our priority here, and that is where I am driving the school. We recently reconceptualized our vision. We are focused on being a leading STEM and health communication school. Being at a place like Stony Brook, an extremely strong STEM campus that conducts incredible work and is home to a full-fledged hospital and medical school, it seemed like a natural connection to bridge what was happening in the Alda Center for Communicating Science with our work in the School of Communication & Journalism.

When I was working on large NSF grants at The University of Maine, I started studying stakeholder perceptions of universities and soon found myself studying interdisciplinary teams and how they collaborate. Being at Stony Brook has given me the opportunity to think more about interdisciplinary collaboration and problem solving and how the School of Communication & Journalism can assist with that. We should also be involved in these interdisciplinary teams.

Journalism schools do not always think about themselves in this way because they tend to focus on training journalists to be journalists. We want that too, but we also want our faculty to have the mindset that they are going to be part of a team. Journalism is not just you working alone. We want to expand journalism and communication education and application to include, even require, this idea that you are working together with other people and doing interdisciplinary work.

[MastersinCommunications.com] Your publications on food and media include your co-authored book, Feasting Our Eyes: Food Films and Cultural Identity in the United States and the recent article, “Food and the Senses in Film.” Would you introduce us to your interest in media representations of food and how these representations offer a lens for understanding politics and culture?

[Dr. Laura Lindenfeld] I think food films offer us interesting insight into something fundamental to any society. You have to eat. You cannot stay alive if you do not eat. Because of that, I think food is an area that we then often take for granted. That makes it a great site to do some ideological analysis. Food is one of the things that we think is normal and normative but is really socially constructed. We all have to eat, but we do not all have to eat the same things, in the same way, at the same times.

When you start teasing food apart, you discover all these fascinating things about gender, ethnicity, age, religion, and many other aspects of cultural identity that are embedded into food. If you add the layer of media on top of that and attend to how we communicate about food, you uncover a site of discourse where there are conflicts that get worked out through the narrative, and you can learn about tensions in a society.

The work I have done on food, and especially in Feasting Our Eyes: Food Films and Cultural Identity in the United States, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author Fabio Parasecoli, examines food films, the discourse around them, how people engage with them, how they write about them, and what they do with them. The book also discusses what this all reveals about social fights that we are having about issues such as gender, race, and status. Who belongs in the workplace? Who does not belong in the workplace? What is the proper way that we think about femininity or masculinity? Food media is a fascinating area to start to tear some of those questions apart and interrogate them.

Let me give you two contrasting examples. There is a series of films about women — and, in this case, pretty much white women — who are professional chefs and end up moving back into the domestic sphere. For instance, in the film Julie and Julia about Julia Child, she was in the workforce, but the film really is about her move back into the domestic sphere. She moves out of the workforce and into her home. This is a pattern across films of this kind. They basically put women back in the home. I found that really disturbing.

In contrast, there are a series of food films like Eat Drink Man Woman by Ang Lee, where the lead character is the chef of a major restaurant in Taiwan but finds himself back in the home raising his daughters because his wife died. The film takes up the question or the tension around how a man can be domesticated when his place is in public. These films seem to be progressive. They seem to be saying, “Hey, we’re going to let women be in the workplace and have them appear as leaders. Hey, we’re going to let men appear in the domestic sphere.”

At the same time, recuperation of gender norms is one of their main themes. In these films, you often see men portrayed in shots with pronounced phallic imagery in the background that bolster their masculinity, lest you doubt that they were real men. You might see a prominent display of knives in the background. They are most histrionic at times in their repetition of, “Don’t forget, this is a real man.” These men have to marry younger women or move back into the workplace to reestablish their masculinity.

In films that feature women of color, this is even more disturbing. There is a whole discourse and history of women of color being treated as objects of consumption. This plays out very explicitly in Woman on Top, where the main character, played by Penélope Cruz, has a scent that draws men in, and they cannot resist her. There is film after film where the women then visually become equated with food. They become objects of consumption. If you look at the poster for Woman on Top, Cruz’s lips are juxtaposed against two hot chili peppers. You would never see that with a man. That is an example of the kind of things you see when you start to unpack these films, and then you look at how people react to them, how they write about them, what they do with them.

By the way, this is really different from earlier, international food films like the Danish film Babette’s Feast or the Mexican film Like Water for Chocolate. There is a sense of empowerment and autonomy in Babette’s Feast, in which a woman who is a professional cook has to leave France and go undercover in Denmark. There is a different sense of sexuality and autonomy in films like these, as compared to the American films that they influenced.

[MastersinCommunications.com] Based on your research and experience, do you have advice for students interested in food media, science communication, or publicly engaged research who might be considering pursuing a graduate degree in communication?

[Dr. Laura Lindenfeld] Well, they can come talk to me. I like to talk to people. [laughs]

I love what I work on. I think it is very hard to pursue a career if you are not invested in the work. Try to drill beneath the layers of your day-to-day talks to where the actual work is. Do you care about the outcomes of this? What does this mean for you? There are times when this work is not easy. Being a dean is not always easy, let me tell you. It is invigorating. I love it. But you have to have your values driving you. That is, I think, very important for anyone looking to pursue this work. Especially because when you become a scientist, a researcher, or an academic of any kind, it is a career.

Personally, I am extroverted and take energy from being around other people. But I realize other people are more intrinsically motivated. My advice would be to figure out how you like to work and set yourself up to do that. I do think networking is important. Conferences are such a great space, not just to present your work and get that CV line but also to make connections. I met Fabio Parasecoli at a conference when I was in grad school, and I thought, “What a wonderful human being.” We wound up writing the book we were just discussing [Feasting Our Eyes: Food Films and Cultural Identity in the United States] and many articles together. We are really good friends. Those things matter.

I would not necessarily advise students to replicate the roller coaster ride my career has taken. At the same time, I think I made choices that were great for me, and I landed in a really great spot because I took risks. I think it is important to take calculated, thoughtful risks. New fields develop, and they develop because people push the boundaries. Do you want to play it safe? Maybe for tenure you do, so consider the power dynamics of your institution. I say this as a dean who is fully aware of what it takes to make tenure. Still, push the boundaries when you can in thoughtful ways. That is what knowledge production is about.

Mostly, be curious. I think some of us in higher education institutions feel very protective of our turf, and that means we stop listening. We should be lifelong learners, which means we have to listen. I have a student advisory council. When we get in the room, I say, “You can call me Laura. Bring it on. What do I need to know? Tell me what’s working. Tell me what’s not working.” They know they can come to me. That makes my life richer and, I hope, makes me a better boss and a better leader. It is really about the work. It is not about you. It is about the work.

Thank you, Dr. Lindenfeld, for the insightful discussion of science communication, your work as Dean and Executive Director of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, and your cultural studies research on food films!

About the Author: Ben Clancy (they/them) is a critical scholar and creative living in Chicago with their partner, child, and other wildlife. They are a PhD candidate at UNC Chapel Hill in the Department of Communication, where their research focuses on the politics of communicative and artistic technologies. Ben has an M.A. from Texas State University, has worked as a research fellow for the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at UNC, and is an alum of the Vermont Studio Center residency in poetry writing.