14. Prof Bianca Brijnath on engaging with CALD (culturally and linguistically diverse) communities
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Episode show notes
Today's episode is a deep dive with Professor Bianca Brijnath, the director of social gerontology at the National Aging Research Institute.
With over $24 million in research funding, much of it focused on cultural diversity, Professor Brijnath leads the Moving Pictures project, the largest website in the world for curating multilingual resources about dementia in various formats, from videos to comics.
Our conversation explores the critical importance of engaging with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) audiences in research dissemination. Bianca also shares insights on the benefits of using different mediums and the significance of co-designing with your audiences to achieve meaningful and impactful communication.
Our conversation covers:
The importance of engaging with CALD communities
Benefits of co-designing with communities
Responding to feedback from different cohorts
Managing iterations in project development
How institutions can engage more with multicultural communities
Choosing the right medium for your message
Starting with the community for impactful communication
The significance of inclusive science and messaging
Find Prof Bianca Brijnath online:
- Public engagement
- Career development
- Team alignment
- Storytelling
- Your pitch
- Listening
- Mentorship
- Collaborating with professional staff
- Communicating in different formats/mediums
- Comedy
- Failure
- Stakeholder/audience mapping
- Philanthropic funding
- Relationship management
- Community engagement
- Making your work relatable
- Feedback
- Playfulness
- Talks and presentations
- Representing your discipline
- DEI
- Commercialisation
Credits:
Hosted and produced by Chris Pahlow
Edited by Laura Carolina Corrigan
Consulting Producers Maia Tarrell and Michelle Joy
Quotes:
"Inclusive science is better science. It is more generalizable science, and it is more meaningful science, and it is more impactful at the end of the day." - Prof Bianca Brijnath
"Science is failure, right? It's not like we all just woke up one morning, decided to do an experiment, and voila, by the end of the day, we'd all cured cancer and dementia and got on with our lives... And so I think, if you're going to be a scientist and a researcher, you have to be resilient.” - Prof Bianca Brijnath
"We want our work to have carriage and currency across all populations. That's true impact that we're creating. And so I think it's really critical for that reason to engage with different audiences and populations on that." - Prof Bianca Brijnath
"Now, co-design is not easy. It is time-consuming and it takes a lot of effort, but you really do need to listen to people and what it is that they want. And in terms of the output that you are creating, you have to, again, think really what's going to be beneficial to the people on whose lives I'm trying to change." - Prof Bianca Brijnath
"In the real world, we have to create content sometimes that cannot be totally bespoke. I wish it could, but it can't always be totally bespoke. Sometimes we do have the luxury of time and budget where we can do that. But when we don't, we have to find common ground that's going to take enough people on that journey of helping facilitate change. So that's what we do." - Prof Bianca Brijnath
"What would you prefer? What do you actually want to see? How do you actually want the story to be told? And people will often give you that answer as well, which is really important. And sometimes they won't give you that answer, but when you reflect on it, you can kind of start to realize that there are other ways of doing things." - Prof Bianca Brijnath
"Some of the questions that we ask in research are so culturally bound, right? And they kind of privilege certain kinds of knowledge, products, systems, and ways of knowing things that are not universal. And that in fact, they can put many communities offside. So we really have to think about, you know, inclusive science alongside inclusive messaging and dissemination." - Prof Bianca Brijnath
"So it sounds like it's really important when you first get the group in to make the stakes clear and to, I guess, align them to the purpose of what you're doing. That don't worry about hurting their feelings. If we want this to make a real difference, we need to have your honest feedback. And that's such a great point. When they start to feel that ownership, they become champions of the project." - Chris Pahlow
"You want to get the messaging right, and then you can sort the medium out after that." - Prof Bianca Brijnath
"Science is failure, right? It's not like we all just woke up one morning, decided to do an experiment, and voila, by the end of the day, we'd all cured cancer and dementia and got on with our lives." - Prof Bianca Brijnath
