139. Interview with scicomm researcher and evolutionary linguist Dr Hannah Little

This week we were lucky enough to have an absolutely fascinating conversation with Dr Hannah Little. Hannah has been researching science communication for nearly 10 years, first as a Senior Lecturer in Science Communication at UWE Bristol and now in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. Previously, she did her PhD in the field of evolutionary linguistics at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, and went on to a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. Throughout her career, she has endeavoured to share her love for evolutionary linguistics as a science communicator herself with well-received appearances at, among others, the British Science Festival, TEDx and on BBC Radio 4. Her work as a science communicator influences her research, especially in terms of exploring how storytelling, comedy and science fiction can influence public perceptions and understanding of science. In her spare time does competitive speed puzzling, stand-up comedy, and is writing a popular science book about linguistics and aliens. She is a member of the UK SETI Research Network and the SETI Post Detection Hub hosted at the University of St Andrews. As you might be able to gather, Hannah is an amazing person to chat about scicomm (and communicating with aliens) with!You can follow Hannah and find out more about her work here:https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-little-3709371a2https://bsky.app/profile/hanachronism.bsky.socialhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoeXkCM2wSshttps://www.liverpool.ac.uk/humanities-and-social-sciences/research/blog/2024-posts/researcher-in-focus-hannah-little/We mentioned this paper on cognitive biases in our conversation: http://doi.org/10.1177/09636625251387445And here’s the storytelling toolkit for practitioners: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/3194747/1/Little_Storytelling%20Toolkit%202025_33MB.pdfTranscript: https://go.unimelb.edu.au/5s72