Communication and science mediation services in French universities and research centers: When institutional reconfigurations become a way of asserting professional identity

This article examines how communication and science mediation services in French universities and research centers organize the public communication of science and how institutional reconfigurations affect professional identities. Based on 31 semi-structured interviews and a complementary questionnaire (n = 57) conducted in 2025, it analyzes how professionals define their roles, negotiate relationships with researchers and governance bodies, and interpret changes linked to funding, reporting, participation-oriented policies, and institutional visibility. The findings show that communication and science mediation are not merely different tasks but distinct professional identity orientations, grounded in different trajectories, values, methods, relationships to publics, and forms of legitimacy. Reconfigurations are often perceived less as a participatory turn than as processes of renaming, reporting, and adjustment. Finally, instability is incorporated differently into professional identities: communicators present adaptation as a core expertise, whereas science mediation professionals more often experience reconfigurations as threatening the specificity and public-service orientation of their work.