7. Prof Dan Woodman on promoting your entire field

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Today's episode is a deep dive with Prof Dan Woodman.

Dan is a TR Ashworth Professor of Sociology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He founded Social Sciences Week, and has been the president the Council for Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences in Australia.

Dan spoke about representing not only your own research but your entire field when conducting comms and engagement activities.

Our conversation covers —

• What it's like conducting comms and engagement with peak bodies

• Aligning multiple voices around a north star, and doing so in a way that allows for nuance and a diversity of perspectives

• The benefits of making engagement a core part of what you do

• As well as plenty of tips about conducting comms and engagement — including dealing with radio interviews, what to do when things go wrong, using your teaching as a practice ground for public engagement, and a whole lot more...

Enjoy, and stay tuned for next week's episode with science journalist Jacinta Bowler. We'll be releasing weekly for the first 12 episodes, and then switching to every other week to give us a bit more time to release some of the other exciting Amplifying Research projects we have in store for you.

Find Prof Dan Woodman online:

https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/profile/19920-dan-woodman

http://twitter.com/drdanwoodman

Find Chris online:

https://www.amplifyingresearch.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrispahlow

Chapters:

(00:00:00) Opening quote

(00:00:22) Intro

(00:02:16) Engagement at the core of what you do -- to help your own career, as well as to help your colleagues and the field as a whole

(00:12:26) Challenges with media engagement

(00:22:27) Public facing work outside of the University

(00:24:17) Building your network through public engagement

(00:24:41) Finding the fun in an interview

(00:27:06) Teaching as practice for engagement

(00:32:06) Promoting your discipline as a whole

(00:37:20) Responding quickly to opportunities

(00:40:49) Focusing multiple voices around a north star, and tailoring your key messages to different audiences

(00:51:07) Building capacity for engagement

(00:54:05) Getting people invested in the cause

(00:58:18) Should research orgs invest in comms and engagement?

(01:00:04) Summary

(01:03:45) Outro

Quotes:

"Engagement in some ways for me has been the core part of my, my job for the last few years."

"I've shifted towards focusing on how I can create opportunities for others in my own discipline, but also across the social sciences and even more broadly across the humanities, arts and social sciences. How we can build avenues to more opportunities for people to do engagement work, get their research out to different audiences. Because for me, that's the foundation for our success as a university sector. It's how we make sure that there's support for the research we do"

"And I think because I enjoyed it and it also went well, producers often come back to you if you've done a good job and there's this balance you have to find because producers are after a talent in someone that can tell a few jokes and some anecdotes, and they often will prioritise more that than you being the best person to talk about that topic. So you've got a balance between taking up the opportunities you're given and occasionally knowing when to say no or throw it to a colleague."

"And as time goes on, I think I got better at throwing more opportunities to my colleagues and thinking about, okay, I I've moved up through the ranks, doing this engagement has been great fun but it's also helped me, like, the other thing to add is it helped me with my research. When you write grants, you have this...  Really, really popping first paragraph that you need to write, whether that's for the ARC or for a non  ARC Australian Research Council funder.  Being able to say why your work matters in a really concrete, non jargonistic way is just a crucial research skill.  Talking to journalists, going on the radio, writing op-eds,  all help you build those skills."

"To say in a clear way, in a way that breaks it down and makes it less into a kind of academic adversarial language, but look, this is how me, my field, the way I work, my paradigm in sociology looks at the world is for these reasons, but, uh, if you get a psychologist in, they're going to pick out some different things that matter as well, being able to share that in an engaging way with other audiences is just wonderful for like making a contribution to the world and debates, but also again, for that work of pinning down in plain language, why what you do matters for your next promotion application or for that next grant application is really great, great skill to hone."

"So your university and your school and faculty should be giving you training, but also recognising those challenges and rewarding you for doing that work and protecting you where they can."

"[If there isn't already training and support available in your org] yes, do it yourself, but if you can ask your research director of your team or the head of school, if they're not offering it across the board, whether they might support you and get something started, show, show how it works and what the value can be."

"I encourage individuals, but also schools or research centers or faculties to think about how engagement work they do might build into something bigger, you know, articulate with international days of significance for that topic or, or join in with a national events like social sciences week or or, um, national science week and these kinds of things... Because,  not only does it really help you in the end, because you're part of a different program. You can put the logo for this big national event on, you, you, you can have an avenue to some different audiences. It's also your way as a, as a part of this sector, this knowledge sector, to also through doing it with others, contribute collectively as well to showing the strength, diversity and importance of, of the work we do."

"I know some of my international and national connections and actual academic collaborations have come through people who first were exposed to my work, not through stumbling across the journal article, but through the newspaper article in their national newspaper or hearing me on, on the radio."

"As it went on and I became a regular, I'd sketch out a few notes, but have some key points I wanted to make, but leave plenty of space to just riff and you'll be working with a professional who will pick up on things that they think are interesting, are going to work for their listeners and push you further."

"If you're an academic, you've almost certainly done a lot of engagement of breaking down ideas and bringing people along with you, if you've done any teaching from tutoring to lecturing, you know, particularly at first year or second year, you're not saying it as you would in your journal article or your academic book. And you'll have certain anecdotes, ways to connect to people."

"That [radio] program had me on semi regularly for the next five years. And it was, I think bringing in those things I'd known had worked through my teaching to break it down in terms of stories or anecdotes."

"When the presenter starts smiling back at you or even laughs on the line and you know that, okay, I can relax a bit, this is going well and it makes it more fun for you as well and when you've done it a few times, then, you know, you'll probably still get some of those healthy nerves come in, but you know that you've done it before and you'll be able to do it again."

"It was thinking about what do we really need to do in the social sciences? And that was, get better in engagement. What are we already doing? How do we build on what we're doing? So it's not more work for people, but by doing it collectively, we actually make it easier and get a bit more out of it."

"You want to build up your skills to be ready for it and ask some questions of the producer and also, you know, say no when you really do have that feeling in your gut, like, I don't like the way this is likely going to be framed."

"If you're going on live radio, you can't do this, but if you talk to a journalist, you can ask them to send through what they're going to use and say, look, I'll talk to you as long as you send through the quotes and I get a look. Some journalists won't ask you back if you do that because they don't want to deal with the time. But if you're worried or you would like to see, most journalists will say, yeah, no problem. "

"Our catchphrase, our line, is "what makes us human" and, we could kind of riff around that... Including people who want to absolutely use the humanities to put humans back in their place in the grand scheme of the environments and other animals. But that was something we could hold on to and say that what we bring is actually a diversity of ways of rigorously knowing about what makes us human and different lenses of looking at that. And, you know, when you're in these roles, you don't need to write the dictionary of the humanities, arts and social sciences over 200,000 entries or, or, or a tome of a thousand pages about what holds it all together. Few people do that work, good for them, but you need something that can be a bit of a rally, rallying cry, or at least people are happy to sign off when you make a collective, um, submission to government about what you do."

"So what I try to do is tell people about the pragmatic aims we have at this time and frame it in that way. It's like, this is not that other important work we might do about really teasing out the epistemologies of the humanities, it's about our social sciences and arts, it's about what message do we want to sign off on collectively today to make that point as strongly as we can in this practical case I've got to deal with of a current government who wants to cut funding here or whatever it is."

"Whenever you're doing work with different communities, you want to have key messages that the people have rallied behind, but, but tweak them for the different people you're talking to. That's one of the skills of doing this kind of work that gets better through practice."

"We can't do everything and there's always gonna be decisions to be made about where we invest our time and resources. But comms and engagement becomes this foundation for everything you do. If your team, your staff builds up their skills in talking to varied audiences, different communities... It's going to make them better teachers... It's going to make them better at writing research grants... It's going to make them better at doing your annual planning day as a team... Because they'll learn new skills about  understanding where different people are coming from and how to shape their message for different groups. So those key skills of engagement and comms really help with everything we do in the university."

"However the university changes in the next decade, things like being great teachers, doing good research, and then contributing to the community are going to be key pillars of whatever we do. And this engagement work, learning to improve how we communicate to different audiences and different communities is going to help us do all those things. So whatever the details of your mission for your group are, these are key skills that will help you achieve that mission."