The panel discussed various ways research can have impact and focused on communicating impact through the media. Facilitated by Dr. Ruth Currie, the session provided insights into effectively placing academic voices and making impactful contributions.
What are you aiming to achieve through your research?
Want kinds of external communications channels could support you in this?
What does ‘good’ media engagement look like to you and why?
What does good influencing look like within your discipline?
Who can support you to communicate the impact of your work?
How might you engage effectively with the research communications teams?
There are lots of ways that research can have impact in and beyond the contexts where it takes place. Knowing how to communicate research, who to communicate it to, and how this can contribute to broader impact is an important aspect of our practice in research. Understanding how impact is communicated through research can be challenging and the possibilities of how and where to place our voices can be daunting. In this panel session, we explored one piece of this puzzle: communication with media. The panel - Professor Fiona Henriquez-Mui from the School of Health and Life Sciences and Dr Theo Tzanidis and Dr Stephen Langston from the School of Business and Cultural Industries, shared reflections on their research and how it informed their contributions to broader public discourse. Together, they explore some of the questions academics can ask of their work, to enable them to make impactful contributions.
Engaging with media and public discourse as a researcher opens opportunities for your work to be explored by different audiences, who sometimes wouldn’t access your work when shared through academic channels, such as journals and conferences. As a contributor to media content, you sometimes have less control of how your work is communicated but this can also inform how you frame the dissemination of your work, to ensure its relevance in different contexts. In this way, engaging with media can be an important aspect of research impact and its important to consider what your aims are for media engagement and who you need to support you to navigate this effectively.
Engaging effectively with media does not happen in isolation. From the public engagement work you do, to the invitations to speak at industry events, there are always opportunities to communicate what you do in ways that have relevance for work happening outside of your research. Learning from experienced colleagues and developing relationships with partners is an important step in refining your research communications approaches. Its important to work collaboratively with media content creators and research communications teams, to support your agency in how and why your work is communicated.
Watch the recording of the session on this page and keep an eye out on the e-bulletin for future sessions. If you are a PGR, your PGR Coordinator will let you know when more sessions are upcoming. In the meantime, good luck with your media work and remember to contact the Research Communications team to support your media engagement.