"Popularizing Research" is finally published!

Peter Lang Publishing announces the publication of Popularizing Research: Engaging New Genres, Media, and Audiences, edited by Phillip Vannini of Canada’s Royal Roads University.

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This long-awaited resource is published with an opening Chapter by Bournemouth University’s Kip Jones.

 

The Chapter, “Short Film as Performative Social Science: The Story Behind "’Princess Margaret’"  is written by Jones, Reader in Qualitative Research and Performative Social Science at Bournemouth, who shares a joint appointment in HSC and the Media School. The Chapter outlines his fascinating and innovative approach to research and its dissemination via a fusion of the arts and social sciences.

Jones utilizes his chapter to recount an unconventional journey to academic publishing that certainly did not follow the usual route of journal or book publication. The Chapter revisits “The one about Princess Margaret”, one of Jones’ earliest attempts at audio/visual script writing, by recalling his initial motivation and enthusiasm for finding innovative ways to express scholarship and how his thinking about the use of tools from the arts in social science has evolved since those early days. These personal experiences are then offered up as advice in a summation for both social scientists and arts practitioners who may be interested in this new paradigm of Performative Social Science through a discussion about collaboration and pathways to impact.

Popularizing Research offers academics, professional researchers, and students a new methodological book/website hybrid by way of a broad survey of ways to popularize research. As an edited interdisciplinary book accompanied by a website featuring samples of popularized research, it will have the potential of not only telling its readers about new genres, new media, new strategies, and new imperatives for popularizing research, but most importantly it will also be useful in showing how these new processes work in the end, what they sound like, and what they look like.

For more information and to view the video representing Jones’ contribution to the book, see his page on the book’s website under ‘Film’.

Excerpt from Chapter 1. Short Film as Performative Social Science: The Story Behind "Princess Margaret" by Kip Jones

Publish or perish drives much of academic life.  It has its origins in hard science where the first to get an experiment, finding, or theory into publication won the prize. Other academic disciplines followed suit by imitating this system. This structure led to the development of an academic writing style and a vetting process that are both now antiquated and suspect. However, we’re all frequently caught up in this bind, me included.

Qikipedia recently cautioned us on Twitter that “about 200,000 academic journals are published in English. The average number of readers per article is five” (Qikipedia, 2010). Funders are now looking for outcomes from their investments that demonstrate how we will affect change in the wider world; in other words, the world beyond the very few other academics who happen to read a journal article. Fortunately, publishing is evolving and, more and more, supplementary multimedia are requested as part of the publication process. This climate of change presents opportunities to get the products of our alternative methods of dissemination of social-science data to wider audiences—to popularize research.

Further information and on line resources 

Listen to Kip Jones presenting part of an early draft of the Chapter here.