Opening academic conversations to all

So far, The Conversation Canada (TCC) has run two workshops with the University of Winnipeg (U of W) in 2022 and will run additional sessions on Feb. 4 about research communication and on Feb. 7 and 11 about science research communication. As a founding member of TCC, the publication’s partnership with the U of W provides journalistic opportunities to researchers at the university.

TCC is part of an international network of publications that provides a journalistic platform to academic authors. “It’s a different form of journalism, but, essentially, it operates like a newsroom,” Scott White, CEO and editor-in-chief of TCC, says. “We have freelance writers at universities across Canada, and we both assign stories to authors and (have) authors pitch to us as well.”

The first Conversation publication was founded in 2011 in Australia. TCC launched in English in June 2017 and in French in December 2018. Internationally, there are Conversation outlets focused on platforming academics from Australia, Africa, France, Indonesia, New Zealand, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.

“Our audience is a general audience, not an academic audience,” White says. “From the author’s point of view, it’s an opportunity for them to get their knowledge out to the wider public (what some people in academia call ‘knowledge mobilization’), but from a journalistic perspective, it’s just a great opportunity for us to have access to people who are writing on subject matters where they have proven expertise.”

“If they’re being publicly funded, then the public should benefit from their knowledge,” he says. “But our sole purpose is to produce good journalism.”

Lauren Bosc, program officer of research partnerships in the office of the vice-president of research and innovation at the U of W, says “the partnership that we have with The Conversation Canada has been an exceptional way for researchers to make their research more accessible.”

She notes that since the TCC’s founding, U of W faculty, postgraduate students and master’s students have published 66 articles, which have been read 1,039,262 times and commented on more than 300 times. Forty per cent of readers of articles by U of W researchers are from the United States, 20 per cent are from Canada, and the remaining 40 per cent read from other countries around the world.

Bosc says the platform “is such a great resource for researchers who want to take that first step of taking the writing format, the very traditional, publishing a book or article, and doing it in a way that can reach a greater audience.”

This fits in with the research office’s larger goal of supporting research at the U of W by providing faculty members and students with resources and helping them develop their ideas at all phases of their research projects and mobilize their work in a positive way.

Bosc says “research in Canada is for sure growing and changing all the time, and it means researchers are constantly needing to be critically thinking about how they do their publicly funded research into the hands of people who are affected by it.”

Specifically, he cites a move towards greater consideration for equity, diversity and inclusion and the relationships between academics who study Indigenous communities and those Indigenous communities themselves.

Published in Volume 76, Number 16 of The Uniter (February 3, 2022)