8. Alanta Colley on storytelling, listening, and iterating your research comms
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Today's episode is a deep dive with comedian, science communicator, and storyteller, Alanta Colley.
Alanta has translated her background working in international public health into a series of incredible comedy shows, including "Trick or Treatment" debuting at the 2024 Melbourne International Comedy Festival (https://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2024/shows/trick-or-treatment).
She also hosts workshops on science communication and storytelling, and our conversation covers —
Putting the researcher back into the story
The power of failure as a communication tool
The importance of listening and asking questions
Iterating your message as you get feedback
And a whole lot more...
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.
Get tickets for Alanta's show "Trick or Treatment:
https://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2024/shows/trick-or-treatment
Find Alanta Colley online:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alanta-colley-2a018843
Find Chris Pahlow online:
https://www.amplifyingresearch.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrispahlow
Quotes:
"It was very clear to me that... If it wasn't a community led, community requested, community informed process, you would not achieve a great deal..."
"I can't stress enough the importance of failure as a communication tool. Personal failure... Research failure... Nothing communicates science better than when science goes horribly wrong."
"If you genuinely adopt a strengths based approach, you listen before you do science communication. You hear what people know already. You find out what people are interested in knowing and you tailor your science communication to, I guess you call it an aspirations model. Like, what science are you interested in? How is it going to be relevant to you? Where are the gaps? How can you build on the strengths and the knowledge that's already there.
"I think that's the beauty of storytelling in science communication, that you get to insert yourself in the story, and when I do science communication workshops, one of the first exercises I get people to do is called the origin story. Like, how did you end up here? Why are you in this room? When did this start to matter to you? And, I think the traditional methods of communicating research have, particularly in the science space, have been about extracting yourself out of it. We know the scientific process is all about mechanisms of almost removing the human individual and all their biases and their perceptions and their anticipations from the process. But when you communicate science, we all innately understand stories. We all relate to failure. We all relate to motivations and that origin story. That's how you get people in. That's how you turn the important information that you have to share with an audience into something palatable and engaging and meaningful to another human being."
"So context is everything when it comes to science, isn't it? Because a graph, if you don't have the background of all of the information relating to that data it means absolutely nothing to you... So it is your job as a science communicator to add in that context to explain why this matters to you... So that bit often gets missed... I think particularly in the university system, you start off in your very discreet, very specific cohort of people studying exactly the same science area that you're studying. And most of us will end up in a multidisciplinary team. So even speaking to our colleague will require a different set of tools and words and jargon than it will, you know, a person in a different team in your organisation to the funding body to a government organisation, hoping to fund you or use your research to write important legislation to the man on the street who is impacted by that research... So you need a lot of different tools in your toolkit as a science communicator... And to be very agile and responsive to the needs and the interests of the person that you're talking to."
"In comedy we talk about high status and low status... You've got the low status person who's the clown who falls over and makes mistakes and is constantly throwing whatever prescribed program there is off the rails. Everyone loves the low status character. Part of what everyone is revolting against is the high status character. There is class in science. There's a history of colonisation there. Our science is predicated on hierarchy. It's predicated on, educated versus non educated. It's come out of Royal societies. And a huge tool for science communication is actually to break down those barriers."
"I think the number one rule everyone always says in science communication is know your audience. But the conversation often stops there. Knowing your audience doesn't mean sitting down and just having a think about your audience and projecting an image onto your audience. Knowing your audience can be asking your audience what they want and what they need and what would be helpful and useful."
