Congress 2021 blog edition
As part of the Career Corner series, Charity Slobod, Community Connect Lead and Professional Development Coordinator of the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, and Jay Friesen, Faculty of Arts Community Service-Learning Partnership Coordinator, presented an Arts Impact Workshop entitled “So What? Who Cares?” This workshop aimed to explain how answering both the question of “So What?” and the question of “Who Cares?” is crucial to obtaining grants and scholarships for conducting your research, engaging the community with your research, or simply making it known to the world that your research matters and why it does. While normally conducted as an intensive three-hour workshop involving research pitch improvisation, this workshop was condensed into a short one-hour workshop that included audience engagement in the form of participants pitching Three Minute Thesis titles on their research and utilizing breakout rooms.
The question of “Who Cares?” relates to your audience. Who is your most immediate audience? And which aspect of your research does your audience care about in particular? Which aspect of your research do you want this audience to care about? In order to reach this audience, how should you present your research? Slobod claimed that it is important to summarize your research. Often, researchers are wont to either summarize by the discipline their research falls under – overly broad descriptions such as ‘History’ or “the Classics” – or to give their research long academic titles as sometimes seen in publications such as “breaking the contextual ice of…” so and so, as an example provided by Slobod. What Slobod said is that this practice often does not translate well to a lay audience, or even an audience unfamiliar with your field specifically, who may either have accidentally stumbled upon your narrowly focused research whilst looking up the broad discipline in general in the former case or who may struggle to understand what your research is about in the latter case. Slobod went on to comment on the fact that, scrolling through the list of events and conferences held at this year’s Congress, one can see the shift away from long academic titles and towards more audience-friendly ones in the titles of these events and conferences.
On the other hand, the question of “So What?” relates to the ‘why.’ After you’ve presented your research to your audience, why should they care? At times, researchers in the arts, humanities, and social sciences might feel discouraged from declaring that their research actually matters. After all, they may wonder how research in the arts, humanities, and social sciences could even begin to compete with research on, for example, cancer or climate change. However, Slobod argues that all research matters. According to Slobod, arts students’ research tends to aim to do at least one out of two things: ‘change the world’ by reforming it for the better, or ‘save the world’ by conserving and saving the culture of that time period. “No research should exist in a silo. You need arts, humanities, and social sciences to understand. It’s just seeing that you’re part of a larger research picture,” Slobod says.