Blog · Lunch Talk

Care-centred science communication

Lunch talk by Bethan Burnside · VIB & Curo Agency

What if the key to science communication that actually changes behaviour isn’t more facts, but more care? At our April 2026 Lunch Talk, neuroscientist, science communicator and curator Bethan Burnside made the case for ‘care-centred’ science communication — an approach rooted in the lived experience of disabled, chronically ill and neurodivergent communities. Here are the ideas we took away.

Starting from lived experience

Bethan speaks from two vantage points at once: as a researcher trained inside the biomedical framework, and as a member of the neurodivergent community. The friction between those two perspectives — how research describes neurodivergence versus how neurodivergent people actually experience it — is where her work begins.

Neurodiversity is the simple idea that there is no single ‘right’ or ‘normal’ kind of brain. Differences such as autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia and Tourette’s are natural variations, not pathologies — and they’re more common than many people assume, with estimates that roughly one in five people are neurodivergent.

How you frame that difference matters enormously. The medical model treats neurodivergence as a deficit located within the individual — a disorder to be diagnosed, treated or normalised. It can lead to stigma, pathologising language, pressure to mask, and a blind spot for people’s strengths and lived experience. The social model flips the lens: people aren’t disabled by their differences, but by inaccessible environments, rigid norms and discriminatory attitudes. The goal isn’t to ‘fix’ people; it’s to remove barriers, and to centre autonomy, dignity and lived experience.

Masking

The learned practice of suppressing or camouflaging one’s natural neurodivergent traits to meet neurotypical expectations — often at significant emotional and cognitive cost.

Nothing about us without us

‘Nothing about us without us’ — a slogan popularised by disability-rights activists in the 1990s — became a foundational principle of disability justice: self-representation, autonomy and participatory decision-making. It’s the principle behind NeuroArt, a platform Bethan created so neurodivergent people could share their lived experience and open a real dialogue between neuroscientists and the neurodivergent community.

Lived experience

The deep, embodied knowledge gained through firsthand encounters with specific challenges, identities or systems — such as disability, mental health, migration or poverty.

It’s worth distinguishing disability rights from disability justice. Disability rights focus on legal protections and accommodations. Disability justice asks deeper, structural questions: who gets left out of rights-based frameworks? How do racism, poverty and gendered violence shape disabled lives? What would a world look like where disabled people themselves define access, care and value? The framework grew precisely because disabled people of colour and queer and trans disabled people were so often excluded from mainstream disability spaces.

That leads to a redefinition of care itself. Drawing on Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Bethan reframed care not as charity, burden or a professionalised service, but as interdependence, collective access and community-based survival — the systems marginalised communities build for one another when traditional ones fail. (Fittingly, ‘curator’ comes from the Latin cũrãre, ‘to take care of’.)

A simple hypothesis

Hypothesis

Cultivating care leads to more effective science communication — communication that positively changes behaviour.

So what would care-centred science communication actually look like in practice? Bethan organised it around three pillars: accessibility, safety and connection.

1. Accessibility

Accessibility is the practice of designing environments, systems and experiences so that people with diverse bodies, minds and ways of navigating the world can participate fully and equitably. Universal design goes a step further, designing from the start so that everyone can take part without needing special adaptations — and those solutions almost always end up helping far more people than the disabled community alone. Automatic doors were designed for wheelchair users, but also help parents with prams, delivery workers and anyone carrying bags. Captions were made for Deaf and hard-of-hearing people, but also help language learners, people in noisy bars or quiet libraries, and anyone watching on mute.

Accessibility isn’t an add-on to science communication; it’s the mechanism that makes care-centred communication work at all. If people can’t access information — cognitively, emotionally, culturally, linguistically or physically — they can’t use it. And if they can’t use it, nothing changes. Accessible communication increases comprehension (a brain that spends less energy decoding has more energy to think and act, which means better recall and follow-through), expands who science is for (beyond those who already have high literacy and high trust in institutions), and builds agency — it tells people, ‘you have the right to understand this.’

At VIB, that plays out internally through a neurodiversity guide — redesigning systems to respect neurodivergent ways of sensing, processing and communicating, so people can take part without masking — and externally through community partnerships, such as bringing young people from vulnerable backgrounds into the lab with TADA/TAJO and building a low-barrier space where curiosity and belonging are actively produced rather than assumed.

2. Safety

Note the word: safer spaces, not ‘safe’ ones. It’s impossible to guarantee any space is entirely free of harm or risk, especially for people from marginalised communities. As Sabah Choudrey writes in Supporting Trans People of Colour, the work is instead to be accountable to harm-doing and transparent to risk-taking. When we label a space ‘safe’, we’re making a claim that we understand what safety means for a particular community — and taking on responsibility for honouring it. So it’s worth asking: whose vision of safety is being realised, and who is the space really for?

Safety is also more than a feeling — it can be built. The BARC (Building the Anti-Racist Classroom) Collective works with ‘principled’ spaces rather than ‘safe’ ones, and adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy popularised co-created group agreements: living, shared commitments that decentralise power, make abstract values actionable, and create genuine psychological safety.

Access intimacy

A term coined by disability-justice activist Mia Mingus for the deep connection that arises when someone genuinely understands and anticipates another person’s access needs — that sense of ease, safety and recognition where people feel seen and supported without having to explain or justify themselves. Access isn’t only ramps and captions; it’s relationships, trust and emotional resonance.

Why does this matter for science communication? Because people can’t take in or act on information when they feel judged, dismissed or excluded. Safer spaces create the conditions for listening, trust and vulnerability; they reduce shame, one of the most powerful inhibitors of learning; and they shift power away from the old ‘I know, you don’t — I speak, you listen’ model towards ‘your experience, your fears and your questions matter.’ That’s what turns communication into a relationship rather than a broadcast.

3. Connection

The final pillar moves from correction to connection. The old information deficit model assumes the problem is simply a lack of science literacy, and that the solution is more facts. Reality is messier. Trust is built through ‘science capital’ — education, knowing a scientist, values, context, lived experience, media exposure — all of which help people see connections between science and their own lives. Facts alone rarely shift anyone.

Connection also means bridging divides, and we’re worse at that than we think: people routinely misjudge those unlike them, and opposing political groups believe the other side dislikes them about twice as much as it actually does. Drawing on Monica Guzmán’s I Never Thought of It That Way, Bethan offered a checklist for whether the conditions are right for genuine connection rather than performance: time (room for the conversation to grow), attention (how much we can really commit), parity (can everyone meet on level ground?), containment (is this just between us, or are we performing for an audience?) and embodiment (how much of our full range — gesture, expression, tone, pace — can we bring to bear?).

To wrap up

Three things to take away:

We can learn a great deal about care — and plenty else — from people with lived experience of disability, chronic illness and neurodiversity.
Cultivating cultures of care has real potential to make science communication more effective.
We can build more caring infrastructures with tangible tools that foster accessibility, safety and connection.

And Bethan’s closing note was an invitation: she’s genuinely curious about your experiences and insights too.

About the speaker

Bethan Burnside is a science communicator based at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Neuroscience, Curo Agency, Big Bang Magazine and the Science Trust Project, and a curator whose recent projects include work at GUM Museum, Kunsthal Ghent, Kavka Oudaan, Art Telex and De Singel (currently Curatorial Fellow at the Contour Biennale). She is also a lived-experience advocate, sitting on a steering committee at the World Health Organization and the advisory board of the PLOS Mental Health journal. Her background spans mental-health research, neuroscience and education, with a postgraduate qualification in curation, an MSc in Neuroscience and a BSc in Psychology.