The Royal Society of Canada (RSC) hosted a town hall to discuss the recent RSC Task Force on Covid-19 policy briefing: “Protecting Expert Advice for the Public: Promoting Safety and Improved Communications.” The co-authors of the report: Dr. Julia M. Wright, Dr. Howard Ramos and Dr. Amanda Clarke provided an overview of their findings and recommendations to address the growing concerns around intimidation and harassment of researchers, and co-author Dr. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun moderated the discussion. The report has three key goals: to make researchers safer, to develop stronger research communication with media and publics, and to collect further information to advance the other two goals.
Dr. Julia M. Wright opened the discussion by providing the context of the high-pressure research environment that opens scholars up to risk. Scholars are increasingly required to engage in knowledge mobilization to maximize their research impact. This involves turning research into an attention-grabbing and personal story to get the most possible readers and listeners, and sharing it on the internet. As the television and radio shock jocks aligned with the political right of the Ronald Reagan era worked to hold the attention of listeners through outlandish misogyny and racism, the design of the internet today employs similar tactics to get us to site and keep us there. “Concerningly, the marketing model that incentivizes getting more clicks supports misinformation. We must think more deeply about how we think about sharing research with publics,” Dr. Wright added.
Dr. Wright explained that the knowledge mobilization storytelling format reinforces the hero-myth, which is only one kind of story. “‘Tell a story’ is a deceptively simple phrase. They don’t want tragic, absurd, satirical, or sci-fi stories. They want a story of the solitary genius who fights against adversity and succeeds,” Dr. Wright said. In fact, every step of the research process is collaborative, and by the end of a project there will have been dozens, or hundreds of researchers involved, through discussions, citations, and peer-review, for example. Recalling Newton’s famous expression, “if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”, the “if” is usually left out. But this is an equally important part, as our work must be tested and reviewed by our peers before it can be accepted as expert knowledge.
Dr. Howard Ramos further contextualized the research environment that informed this study. First, different sectors that have a stake in expert research have different interests. For example, the private sector is profit-motivated, governments are state-motivated, the NGO sector is value-motivated, and it is the job of academics to work with all of these sectors, balancing them and offering advice based on their expertise. Scholars must also talk with publics, though currently there are some serious concerns about how this is being done. “We are encouraged to engage outside the ivory tower, which is a key component of a healthy democracy. Though in the context of the current tools and methods that engage the public, we have to fit our agenda within the attention cycle that has an insatiable appetite for information,” Dr. Ramos added.
This shift towards more engagement means that sometimes experts say things people may not want to hear. It also means that the public is increasingly seeing contested information. “Academics are being asked more frequently by journalists to comment before peer-reviewed work comes out, often that work is in its infancy. This was clearly shown by Covid-19 as researchers pivoted to address the pandemic. The public saw scientific debate unfold in an unprecedented way”, Dr. Ramos explained. In this context, technologies are making it easier to access a wider audience which is leading to backlash, often in the form of harassment of women, Indigenous and racialized scholars. Currently, medical doctors and journalists are developing statements in defence against this, and the RSC report explains that we need to do the same for academics. Dr. Ramos finished by stating, “we need to support researchers in safe public engagement. Only then can we have a vibrant and open society.”
Dr. Amanda Clarke then turned to some proposed solutions in the report. She began with the caveat that they are not proposing solutions to larger chronic challenges like the distorting influence of private platforms, systemic racism and misogyny, or capitalism. However, “we were attentive to the challenges that can be resolved in near term by pressuring for action to create the conditions for scholarship to flourish,”, she explained. Their focus was on three targets: 1) Research funding agencies, such as the Tri-Council 2) The federal government and 3) Post-secondary institutions.
Within each, there are three themes within which action should be taken. The first is information gathering and measurement. “There is a need to understand the scope and scale of this problem. There is no systematic way to identify threats and harassment of researchers. Many cannot call this out and publicise it themselves,” she explained. They are calling on Statistics Canada to develop a nationwide coordinated approach to understand harassment across sectors. Second, beyond measurement of the problem, they are considering the existential question of public research communication framing. They suggest that the Tri-Agency strike a multi-disciplinary task force for more robust and concrete frameworks for Knowledge Mobilization that re-examine what good public engagement looks like. “The current frameworks are marketing focused, which produce simplistic narratives. We can turn to other traditions in academia for ideas, such as the open science movement, or community engaged research.” Dr. Clarke said. Lastly, the most immediate need is low hanging fruit. Dr. Clarke explained that we need clear mechanisms to support researchers who are threatened, as there is no such action plan in place. “This would take little effort, and we suggest that post-secondary institutions produce clear action plans in collaboration with other sectors about who should be called and how researchers can be supported,” she explained.
The webinar also had time for questions from the audience. In this period, several themes were discussed, like how the Covid-19 pandemic changed how experts engage, how emerging scholars can navigate these pressures, and how to engage responsibly with the media as scholars. Throughout, the co-authors expressed that these issues have been bubbling for some time, and that the pandemic and the media frenzy around it has exposed them. For example, there were always issues with algorithmic influence, with working conditions of emerging scholars as well as women and racialized academics, and pressures to keep our research relevant to the impossibly quick news cycle. Despite these challenges, we can work to change this context. Now that this report has produced a clear picture of current issues with researcher safety and communications and the suggested ways forward, it is the hope that post-secondary institutions, the Tri-Council, and the federal government can begin working in collaboration to solve these immediate problems.