Mobilizing Knowledge: Re-visioning Research Dissemination, or Don’t Yell at the TV – Be on TV

Do you ever find yourself yelling at the TV? Do you open the newspaper and start shouting at your kid or your cat? Do you sometimes just get up on your imaginary soapbox and start to rant? I thought only old men yelled at the TV. Then one day, I started going on a tirade during the evening news. My family thought I had an anger management problem. Maybe I do.

Then I realized that I was suffering from Knowledge Stagnation Syndrome, a well-documented condition, whereby academics with decades of high-level training and specialized knowledge in several fields are deprived of opportunities to impart their opinions on current events and public discourse.

Have you ever worked for months to develop research for a conference paper only to have five people show up to your panel, two of whom are your friends? Have you ever worked five or even ten years on a book to have it sell only a few hundred copies, all of which went to university libraries? Have you ever developed courses and researched vast amounts of material only to find that you can teach that course only once and then perhaps to only a handful of students? These are the sources of frustration that lead to Knowledge Stagnation Syndrome.

All joking aside, in what follows I will outline my own journey from yelling at the TV to being on TV and how it has transformed my thinking about what research is, why we do it, and whom it benefits. I will discuss some important institutional challenges to the “mobilization-turn” that is upon us and make the case that humanities disciplines have an important role to play in research dissemination.

(Vocabulary note: For the purposes of this paper, TV is a stand-in for any news outlet, from mainstream media such as radio, newspaper, television to the multiple platforms in the blogosphere, Twitter, Tumbler, Facebook, etc.)

In the Beginning

Early in my academic career – having just finished grad school – I rode the elevator with a senior colleague who expressed regret that I was now trapped in the “publish or perish” grind. He wished me luck and got off at his floor. Undeterred, I went to all the professionalization workshops I could, hoping to learn the tricks of the trade: how to place an article in a top-rated journal and how to write a book prospectus so I could add those all-important lines to my CV. I channelled my research efforts into these time-tested categories.

Some years later, I applied for a SSHRC grant and encountered a new category: Knowledge Mobilization. This sounded more applicable to the deployment of troops for a military intervention than to my research. My only question, is this a peacekeeping mission or do I have to take a combat role? The advice I got from colleagues was to fake it. But I had that same queasy dishonest feeling as when I had once waffled on an exam question as an undergrad.

Knowledge Mobilization (KMb)

The term KMb was introduced by SSHRC in 2002, but a decade later it is still greeted by some academics with a mixture of confusion and cynicism. In all likelihood, KMb is not going to go away, so here are a few interpretations:

• • making ideas matter

• • telling my story again

• • sharing knowledge in novel ways

• • connecting research to people

• • expanding the audience

• • shaping public opinion

• • turning ideas into action

• • participating in the creative economy

After composing the above list, I wanted to test out my ideas, and so I sent this out into the “tweetosphere,” which elicited the following additions:

• • the educated imagination (Jonathan Allen @j_a_allan)

• • making ready for whatever goal you have; strategy and tactics to fight poverty, pollution, disease, illiteracy, ignorance, racism, pick your battle (Peter Levesque @peterlevesque)

• • it is not the goal but the preparation; social process that leads to greater probability of creating new value and benefits; “inspiring the social imagination” (Jo Van Every @JoVanEvery)

• • Massive Open Online Course [MOOC] (Sidney Eve Matrix @SidneyEveMatrix) (Matrix)

But there are also...