The 2025 SWCC Conference takes place in Fredericton, NB, June 12-13.

Location: University of New Brunswick, Fredericton campus

Theme: Re/Connections

The Call for Abstracts will be open until Friday, January 17, 2025 at 5pm ET.

All successful applications will be notified by Monday, February 10, 2025.

Submit an Abstract

Please submit your abstract through the linked Google form. If you have questions regarding the conference or the call for abstracts, please contact conference chair Jeremy Elder-Jubelin at conference@sciencewriters.ca.

Theme: Re/Connections

As the SWCC continues to grow and evolve, a return to roots can provide opportunities for new and renewed collisions, ideas, and inspiration.

In 2025, the SWCC conference returns to a university campus. The conference will build on the theme of Re/Connections by exploring the multitude of connections that inform our work and make it possible. It will seek inspiration in its host site, invoking an academic practice that relies on both the creation of knowledge and its dissemination, and where new discoveries are born in the communication of previous ones. It will also draw on the tradition of reflexivity and challenging assumptions, and contemporary conversations that seek to broaden the range of people, voices, and knowledge that are valued and given space.

This return to a university as conference site will also provide opportunities to connect directly with the creators of the knowledge we strive to share with the world.

Three Conference Streams

Stream 1: Connected Practices

With the growing importance and valuing of knowledge transfer and knowledge mobilization, researchers’ and science journalists and communicators’ goals and activities have an opportunity to grow together in a mutually supportive and beneficial way.

What can we learn from each other? How can we work together to increase the knowledge and understanding of science outside of the academy? How do we negotiate the respective needs, goals and obligations of our respective fields of practice?

Possible topics might include:

• Shared and conflicting goals, practices and ethics;
• The role of plain language and clarity;
• Building relationships of trust;
• Engaging students or others in our work;
• Reconnecting with the academic community.

Stream 2: Connecting People

How do we best connect with researchers and scientists? How do we best reach our audiences? How do we bring people together to facilitate the exchange of knowledge?

Possible topics might include:

• Engaging in communications toward different goals (advocacy, policy, education, etc.)
• Reaching diverse and multiple audiences (readers, policymakers, etc.);
• Engaging with scientists / researchers / knowledge creators;
• Engaging with Indigenous knowledge keepers;
• Sharing Indigenous knowledge in a good way.

Stream 3: New Ways of Connecting

Emerging and established digital technologies create new possibilities for science communications. How can we best use these tools to connect – with each other as a professional community, with audiences, with other stories?

Possible topics might include:

• Generative AI and other AI-based technologies;
• Choosing, using, and leveraging different platforms and channels;
• Online/virtual/hybrid activities;
• Rich media and new media storytelling;
• Communities of practice (locally, regionally, nationally, globally).

If you’re interested in being part of our conference planning team, please contact us at conference@sciencewriters.ca.