Acts of care: the winding road of public research communication and recognizing the invisible relational labor and resources – Part 1/2

By Daniela Lazoroska and Anna-Riikka Kojonsaari.

When we started this blog, three years ago, a couple of researchers contacted us with an interest to publish their research with us. There is nothing unusual about this, but they did say that they had also ran a similar project and found that they could not sustain the pace, as it was quite demanding. This latter point, on the demands that even seemingly side projects can make, has become increasingly clear to us as editors. In this this and next week’s posts, we are going to talk about some of the difficulties of such an endeavor, such as the extent of care and different types of labor it requires to run a ‘sideshow’; our struggle for visibility in overflooded and overstimulating social media; and the ambiguity of authorship, ownership and publishing possibilities for research-in-development. Even as authors of this text, we were uneasy about the meaning of the act of writing and publishing on ‘hurdles in the road’: “Is it good to be self-critical at this point or are we calling defeat” – we rightfully asked. In the end, we decided to play with our unease and further inquire ourselves: what, if anything, are we learning on how to deal with the challenges of public research communication? This essay is thus both our honest and personal disclosure of the difficulties of maintaining such an endeavor, but also our attempt to shed light on what might be structural difficulties that many might be experiencing, if not in the genre of blogging, then perhaps in initiating, caring for, and sharing your own passion projects. Two of the challenges that we have grappled with in the past years are as follows: 

1. Passion projects require a lot of care and emotional and relational labor. Particularly with those endeavors that are, to a level, altruistic, in the sense that there are no material resources to re-imburse those involved. It becomes discomfortingly obvious how dependent on each other we are in order for such small, non-profit endeavors to thrive. We have needed to, as editors, maintain a level of relational labor with potential authors of texts. Indeed, while some have volunteered to write, others have been asked to create texts for us. In both cases, one needs to maintain contact, create deadlines, motivate authors to work on editorial suggestions, share the published version in their networks, to name but a few ‘tasks’. These, we realize, are not necessarily concerns that ‘established’ fora for publication have, but a blog of our size does not have the privilege of being actively pursued by authors. Paradoxically, while public research dissemination is often a required section in many research funders application requirements, and an obvious prerequisite for the democratization of scientific knowledge, researchers often lack the training and/or the time to do precisely this. 

2. Gathering visibility in the sea of overstimulating media. While this has not been the main motivational factor for starting and running the blog, we have had an interest in our blog reaching as wide an audience as possible. This has not always been easy, and at times we have feared that our readership will dwindle. While we marinate in the anxiety of producing texts that might not be read, we also miss to see the opportunities and resources we might have ‘locally’ accessible in order to expand our readership circle. 

What to do about these challenges? Research on work conditions in academia has acknowledged the communication difficulties that researchers and research teams might experience, and called for an increase in institutional support and resources allocated in aiding researchers to share their work widely as an essential form of societal engagement. While we spoke of the privilege of journals, we might as well now acknowledge what we see as our own. We have at the IIIEE had the opportunity to take part in several lectures that address the importance of public research communication, which have provided us with demystifying tips on how it is actually done. We have also mobilized the help of staff working with communication tasks to share our posts with a network of followers who have already shown an interest in environmental topics, or tried to better see what resources we do have available. We do acknowledge that this solution excludes those that are not us ‘preaching to a choir’. But we hope that those then in their own end share with connections that have not previously been exposed to similar topics and stand points. Furthermore, we also acknowledge that this might not be established practice, or that there might not be allocated resources for receiving aid in other research spaces. If and when possible, we argue, this should be changed. 

In summary, the forenamed difficulties have taught us to acknowledge the amount of relational labor that, particularly, non-profit endeavors might require. We have also learned to better recognize and mobilize some resources and communication channels that we might have access to within the spaces and the conditions that we are embedded in. What are the relational, communicative, or other types of resources you might have access to, and how do you make best use of them to care for your passion projects? Comment below.

Join us next week to read about the power structures behind our choices to publish where we do, and what some have done about the issue. Subscribe below to get the notification of the Part 2/2.

Author bio: 

Daniela Lazoroska is a Lecturer at the International Environmental Institute (IIIEE, Lund University). Lazoroska’s current research addresses women’s networking and collectivization towards diversity in the Swedish energy sector, and is financed by the Swedish Energy Agency (grant number P2022-01070). The project team (DL, Jenny Palm, Anna-Riikka Kojonsaari) has ambitions of sharing their findings across stakeholders and forums. For more information on this project, visit https://mesam.se/projekt/natverkande-och-kollektivisering-for-mangfald-och-inkludering-inom-den-svenska-energisektorn/

Anna-Riikka Kojonsaari is a PhD student at the International Environmental Institute (IIIEE, Lund University). Her PhD project focuses on the social aspects, e.g. socio-technical systems and planning processes, of electric grids. The research project is financed by the the Kamprad Family Foundation project Resistance and Effect with grant number 20182014.

Picture from Pixabay.