If knowledge is produced but nobody cares, is it even knowledge?
Breaking down barriers with Aspro Dallas Rogers.
Let’s start in his own words.
This is an edit from an interview I conducted with Associate Professor Dallas Rogers1. Since Dallas is a renowned academic podcaster2, I thought a piece of produced audio was fitting in telling a story about his work.
Knowledge should be available to everyone. This is a recurring theme, but knowledge generated through academic research is inaccessible by design. Often behind unconscionable paywalls, and, even if you can access it3, it’s impenetrable thanks to academic writing styles.
Instead, Rogers believes that “Research, for me, should be available for everyone”. But for this to happen, academics need to “enter the marketplace of ideas”. Or else, academic research will remain only for the very few. Can research even matter, for anything, if nobody knows about it?4
“The reason we do research is to tell people about it, in some way” Rogers continues, “Communication is the reason we do research”. He ask, if research is not adequately communicated can it even be considered research? For Rogers, communication is critical in the production of knowledge. And he understands that academia has a lot to learn from popular culture creators when it comes to communicating ideas.
Deeply entrenched barriers remain, however, between academics and popular modes of communication and engagement. But engaging in these spaces is becoming critical.
“We will now need to enter the communication landscape as it is, the TikToks and the YouTubing and the podcasting and we’ll need to demonstrate in that environment that we are knowledge experts.”
In a world that distrusts academia, this is increasingly important because Rogers believes that “Ultimately, the benefit is just that academics will be more relevant in the world”. While institutions push back, against emergent forms of edutainment, content creators have become today’s thought leaders and public intellectuals.
Leaving academics in the dust, as their ivory towers crumble around them5.
As an urbanist6, “I want to change people’s minds about the city. I want to change their minds so that they can advocate for the better world”. It isn’t hard to understand why Rogers is so interested in creative research translation to connect his work with its intended audience. People who live in the city.
“Speaking at an academic conference, taking on the persona of the expert, and writing journal articles, actually, is quite hard. I actually find podcasting and doing these other creative forms of communication a little bit easier, and I think they engage a wider public.”
To achieve his aim, to change people’s minds, Rogers has no choice but to experiment and innovate the way in which he shares his work. People who live in the city don’t typically attend academic conferences. Or read journal articles. But they might listen to a podcast or watch a video. Especially if it resonates with their interests and values.
To connect with these audiences, “I do that by changing the communication medium to suit those audiences. So, I’m kind of very audience-focussed in that way7. Who do I want to engage? How do I communicate it to them?” This becomes a clear distinction between Rogers’ style and more traditional approaches to research dissemination. Where Rogers ensures his research is packaged for the audience, typically, research is packaged for the academic publishing industrial complex.
“That's how we ended up with Jack Toohey.”
Know Your Landlord8 is the creative expression of Rogers’ and his colleagues’ research, an Australian Research Council Linkage project with the Tenants Union of NSW, Tenants Queensland, and Tenants Victoria9.
Considering an objective of the project, “This project should provide significant benefits for Australian renters and our tenant advocacy partners who represent them, and to show how digital technologies can be used to create a better housing system”. If Rogers and his team simply produced a paper from their findings, it is unlikely to provide much, if any, direct benefit to Australian renters and our tenant advocacy partners.
Of course, a paper will also be published. A peer-reviewed journal article is the documentation of knowledge generated through a research project. However, it is the creative digital artefacts which will help to achieve the project’s social aim.
As well as the Know Your Landlord website, the team collaborated with content creator Jack Toohey. Toohey had already established himself as an influential creative, commenting on Australia’s housing crisis.
Rogers’ team provided Toohey with rich source material for his content. In exchange, he connected the academic research with his core audience. Renters. And not only in Australia, but renters in the UK and USA as seen in the comments. This was a fruitful, and mutually beneficial collaboration. In part, because the researchers did not exert control over Toohey. As a content creator, he was a good fit for the subject matter. As a group of researchers, they were able to provide Toohey with expertise and evidence-based insights upon which he could develop and publish content. And Toohey’s audience, even if they don’t know it, are engaging with academic research10.
This is a series of videos that came from the collaboration.
This might seem unconventional for academic work, according to Rogers “no one in my school really understands”. Questions arise, “How is this research output? Or even research communication?”, in Rogers’ experience “they can’t get their head around it. And, so, I think there is actually a lot of resistance to things like this.” But for Rogers, in terms of his own satisfaction
“I think I'm having an impact in a space beyond the academic journal article.”
Continuing with his experience, “The institutions don’t get this, right? They don’t get these creative forms of engagement.” Rogers continues, “They don’t understand how they work. They don’t understand their utility. And I’ve struggled a lot to get institutional support for a lot of the stuff I’ve done.” It is this lack of understanding, and the resulting lack of acknowledgement, which propels most academics to continue and publish their research findings by traditional means.
“It’s the model of the old university.”
When trying to work with his own institution, developing creative research content, “They just couldn’t get their head around that it wasn’t like Get research. Put out press release.” In response, considering the shifting mould of the public intellectual, Rogers believes that “You can intersect with society in different ways.”
In Rogers’ experience, what university leadership and marketing teams want is “very sterile communication. They want you to be the expert. They want you to stand there in a suit and tie, and they want you to dispense the knowledge you learned in your latest piece of research.” An academic writes a paper, and “they want you in the news cycle with your 30 second grab about it. And that’s what they think successful research communication is.” Institutions don’t understand why researchers like Rogers want to play, to experiment and communicate their work in different ways. Academia is too conservative.
Reflecting on his own experience with the mainstream media, “I hate it”. “They want me to be dressed a certain way. They want me to sit in front of my computer and type something. Then they want me to sit into a chair with some books at my back that they can blur a little bit.”
“There’s an aesthetic and a performance there that I think, actually, doesn’t represent what an academic is these days.”
When Rogers asks to deviate from this, to take the production into a relevant urban setting, “oh, no, no, no, you, you, won't look like an expert.” But when an academic is driven by purpose, like Rogers, it isn’t about looking like an expert. “We want to have an impact by actually changing people’s minds.”11
“Other knowledge experts are stepping into the void. So the university doesn't have a monopoly on knowledge production.”
This is a catastrophic failure of academic leadership and scholars committed to the traditions of the academy. Traditions which are exclusionary.
Academics, Rogers believes, should actually learn from content creators. Rather than thinking they are better than, or above them.
“Academics think they’re better than the Jack Tooheys of the world. I’m smarter than Jack Toohey. I’ve been researching housing for twenty years. I know more about the problem than he does. Maybe. But he’s got a bigger audience and he’s having more impact than you are.”
This must be reckoned with. And Rogers wants something productive to come out of it. Regarding his own collaboration with Jack Toohey, “We know a little bit more about this issue. He’s got more followers. Let’s come together and do something creative here.”
He believes that
“Universities need to get better at recognising that this is a productive form of knowledge.”
And in doing so, transforming how academia engages with society, universities might start to claim back “The loss of cultural capital”. But he states, “We won’t claim it back in the way that we had it before.” But in new and more meaningful ways.
Check this out if you’re interested in making better research videos.
I actually first heard about Rogers’ work when he was interviewed on 4zzz’s Radio Reversal about his book club. It was instantly apparent that he was a scholar passionate about getting out of the ivory tower and into the community.
With his own seminal City Road Podcast, Rogers has been referred to as the urban studies podcast maestro. An aside, but something that comes up a lot is the lack of support and resources for academics to undertake creative research translation. Media training is often available, but it isn’t fulfilling academics’ desires to develop their proficiency with things like podcasting and video creation. Another theme that arises is labour. Rogers states that he’s the podcast guy: “If someone else wants to do a podcast they, like, come and see the podcast guy.” Institutions are not providing the kinds of support that academics want, so they have to support each other.
Of course, open access can solve the ability for somebody to obtain an academic publication but it does nothing to actually assist in readers’ comprehension. But, I’m also somewhat against the current approach to open access as it just results in universities giving millions of dollars (on top of the labour or producing papers for publication in the first place) when they aren’t even accessed that openly anyway by anybody outside of academia. I do like the proposed Diamond Open Access. You can check out Free Journals Network.
Nobody outside of a researcher’s own discipline.
In Australia, higher education remains under very real threat. From Covid to immigration, the sector continues to grapple with funding challenges to the tune of billions of dollars.
“Urbanism is the study of how inhabitants of urban areas, such as towns and cities, interact with the built environment.” - Wikipedia.
An observation of Rogers’ is that when an academic wants to start a podcast, “a lot of people just start with, I know this stuff and I need to get a microphone and I need to say that stuff into the microphone.” Instead, they should ask themselves “who do I want to communicate with? How do I communicate what I know to them?… What’s the pitch? What’s the tone?” A final thought from Rogers on podcasts, when he first started City Road Podcast “Everyone was like, well, like what's a podcast? And, like, why are you making a podcast? [Rogers’ emphasis] And they just couldn't get it. And then like five years or seven years later, they're coming to me and go, how do we make a podcast? We need to start making podcasts.” So, change is coming. But the academy moves incredibly slowly.
“The Know Your Landlord Universe was created by housing researchers at the University of Sydney. This website reports on research funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC). The research was undertaken with ARC Linkage partners, the Tenants Union of NSW, Tenants Queensland and Tenants Victoria.” Link.
I wonder if this would deter some academics, this lack of personal prestige. Rogers’ aim is to connect his research with the largest possible audience. He doesn’t care if that audience knows who he is or not. But, for a lot of scholars, they want the accolades.
Rogers acknowledges that, for many of the academics he knows, the current approach to media engagement and public dissemination works just fine. They’re happy to work with journalists, and leave the creative direction up to them. But, for scholars like Rogers, they want to be in control of their own story and see the huge potential in telling it well.
🙌