Why science communication isn’t enough
In a world with seemingly endless problems and an unquenchable thirst for answers, what we can do to make sure our research actually has a positive impact on the world? This question has come up several times in our group’s weekly lab meetings, and landed us at an old discussion about the merits and pitfalls of basic vs. applied research. While the debate didn’t last long (you’ll find a quick recap below), it prompted some deeper reflections about who research benefits, and how research and academia could play a more prominent role in addressing urgent societal challenges in an equitable way.
As academic researchers, a more fundamental question that we should be asking is: who does research benefit?
Applied vs. Basic: Missing the point
First, to sum up the debate on applied vs. basic (or “blue sky”) research. It is easy, but naive, to assert that all research should be applied towards solving the most urgent societal challenges (e.g. climate change and food insecurity). All it takes is a few quintessential examples of important discoveries made by accident via curiosity-driven science (e.g. Penicillin and CRISPR, the gene editing technology) to illustrate the merits of basic research. Problem-driven science is limited by what is known or can be identified. The problems of the future, particularly in a technological, globalized world, are difficult to predict.
Applied research also comes with its challenges. Some of us have experienced granting mechanisms for applied research that favour collaborations with industry groups that have cash to contribute to the research. Indeed, this allows for research objectives to be swayed by powerful interests wanting to prioritize their own goals, which are sometimes at odds with the “public good”.
The thing is, like many dichotomous debates, the argument over whether applied or basic research is “better” misses the point. It seems that we can say with a fair bit of certainty that both approaches to defining and conducting research inquiry have their benefits. But as academic researchers, a more fundamental question that we should be asking is who does research benefit?
Why science communication isn’t enough
In 2010 Nancy Baron published Escape from the Ivory Tower: A Guide to Making Your Science Matter, part of a growing call for science communication which is going strong 8 years later. The book serves as a guide to empower and equip scientists to communicate out about their research (basic or applied), descending from the isolating confines of academic science in order to engage with politicians, media and the like.
This call for scientists to go beyond their labs and not only translate their results but make recommendations based on them is absolutely needed — and many scientists have heeded. Few would make the argument that academic research should collect dust on the shelves, though there is some debate about who should be doing the communicating/translating.
Yet, communicating out, regardless of who does it, only solves a small part of the problem. Once research questions have been formulated, data collected and analyzed, there is only so much that can be done to package the research in a way that is accessible to a given audience. Indeed, some audiences may not like the contents at all, no matter how it is packaged. Perhaps the audience you are trying to reach doesn’t like the questions you asked in the first place. Or maybe the audience you ought to be reaching isn’t in your realm of consideration at all because you didn’t think they’d be interested. Or worse, because you didn’t think of them, period.
Science communication is insufficient to address inequities and patterns of exclusion — past and present — perpetuated within academia. In Canada’s not so distant past, prominent nutrition researchers used the inhumane and abusive conditions in residential schools to conduct experiments about malnutrition, not only benefiting from but purposely exacerbating malnutrition, and contributing to the abuse and death experienced by Indigenous populations at these government-funded institutions (see the incredible work of Ian Mosby on food and colonialism). The very birth of medical ethics was in response to medical atrocities committed by Nazi doctors during WWII.
Of course, we now have institutional mechanisms that thwart these inequities when research involves human participants, but the colonial legacy of science and academia lives on in many ways.
In research (and in policy-making processes) — we need to ask ourselves who was at the table in the first place, and who was absent. There is little that can be done at the stage of communicating results to redress issues of representation and equity that may be embedded within it. On the flip side, we should be contemplating how our research processes might contribute to capacity-building in communities previously excluded from, or even harmed by, the scientific community. Knowledge may be power, but handing someone a research brief is hardly an act of empowerment.
Until we achieve procedural justice — the notion that fair procedures facilitate fair outcomes — in academic processes, and we address these issues of representation and exclusion in our research paradigms and institutions, we’re not dismantling the ivory tower. We’re just building a set of stairs so that we can send messages down to a select few.
Baby Steps
Moving past the debate about applied vs basic and the concept of the ‘Ivory Tower’, our group decided to think instead about who we are trying to reach with our research. As a group, we all study some aspect of the intersection of food security and sustainability, and so it is a given that we are all seeking to have a positive impact on the word. Though most of our group’s work is fairly ‘applied’ in that it is driven by societal challenges, many of us use data-heavy methodologies that do not necessarily require us to engage with stakeholders during the research process. In other words, our work may be ‘applied’, but it doesn’t exactly ‘engage’.
We work in different places (British Columbia, India, Mexico), and at different scales (regional to global), so we have no one audience as a group. So, we sought to map out our respective research audiences, and strategize about where there were opportunities to engage these stakeholders in our research processes. We’ve also started some conversations about how our lab’s unique skill set could be harnessed to help solve some pressing local problems (perhaps someone will write another blog post on these efforts). These are baby steps on a longer journey towards engaging a broader audience through our research.
The Opportunity
Conducting research where communities and stakeholders participate in the research process is not new. Community-based participatory research (sometimes shortened to CBPR, with many related tenets) has a strong history in social science, education and public health. There are lessons to be learned from these approaches that can be brought into not only the interdisciplinary space, but into the natural sciences. Public engagement and rigour are far from mutually exclusive. Quite the contrary, in some circles in the aforementioned fields, participatory and community-based methods are a sign of truly grounded research that captures participants’ realities, and challenges the too oft inequitable status quo.
Increasingly, we have the tools. The interactions between media, science and society have evolved considerably since Nancy Baron’s important contribution to the science communication literature. A growing number of scientists use twitter to reach out to their colleagues and non-academic communities, many research labs have started blogs (follow ours!) to share insights about processes, outcomes and implications of their research. We also have increasing support from research institutions (e.g. the Public Scholars Initiative at UBC) and granting agencies for engagement (SSHRC Insight grants now require a Knowledge Mobilization plan, which can include the co-production of knowledge by researchers and knowledge-users).
There has been a notable rise in participatory methods in the social and natural sciences alike: methods like photovoice empower participants to capture concepts and issues that are important to them, involving participants in the data collection process. Citizen science is also gaining ground as researchers harness citizen involvement to collect large amounts of data about the world around them. Like any method, there are challenges (representation can still be uneven, and the data aren’t always accurate), but this is one of many ways that the scientific community is forging a path towards more democratic research processes.
Conclusion
If we want our research to make a difference, we do need to think about audiences, and package our work in a way that gets to them. But we need to do more to ensure that communities (and their interests) who have previously been excluded from the research process and its positive outcomes, as well as from academic institutions more broadly, are reflected in our research processes so that they too can benefit.
As a young researcher straddling disciplines, I am just learning what this means. But here are a few simple pathways for researchers and academic institutions that I think will set us (as in broadly, inclusively) off in a better direction:
- Give up some control. Over research questions, timelines, and/or output formats (content, process, packaging).
- Push disciplinary boundaries and cross-fertilize, notably from the social to the natural sciences, to incorporate true engagement and participation to make the research process more democratic while maintaining rigour and the scientific method.
- Use different (or at least additional) metrics for judging success (e.g. this method used by IDRC), if not by our institutions, then at least at first with our colleagues . Supervisors can play a huge role in supporting this shift (I am extremely grateful for the leadership of my supervisors in this regard).
What is exciting is that many of us are well-positioned to this. If we want to create equitable solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges, it’s time to take down the fence. It may have been keeping the messiness of the rest of the world out, but now we have the opportunity — and the imperative — to let people in.
