Straight from the researcher's mouth

The general public can be an audience who are not experts in the field of discourse but not entirely ignorant of it either. And they can be discerning also. “I try to avoid jargon and too long and complicated explanations, and to link the information to everyday experiences,” says dr. Agata Konczal, who engages in public outreach a few times a year.

The rise in social media and new channels of communication has made it easier to reach out to audiences all over the world. In October, Agata gave an online lecture from Dusseldorf for the National Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw about forest anthropology and forest-human relationship. In Polish, to a mainly Polish audience. “In this case, my aim was to introduce new information – something the audience may not look for by themselves, or are not so familiar with – and show them new ways of engaging with the topic. I think that worked well as there was an hour-long discussion after my 45-minute presentation, with many questions and reflections from the public. They also asked for recommendations for further reading.” Agata is Polish and has been with the FNP group since 2021.

Her colleague dr. George Iordachescu, from Romania, is known as the ‘Bear Man’ to the public. George is no stranger to podcasts, having appeared in and hosted several since his days as a postdoc in Sheffield University. “Whenever I plan a new research project, it has a public outreach and engagement component.” He covers issues – relating to bears, among others - of Romania’s beautiful countryside, the Carpathian, and shares his knowledge about illegal logging and deforestation, community conservation, uses of technology in conservation, wildlife trafficking in Europe. Together with two gymnasium teachers in Romania, he is currently planning some activities for school children.

Enjoy

Both Agata and George enjoy themselves tremendously while reaching out to the public.

George: “It is one of the reasons I love being an academic. It also motivates me to keep going as I see a practical dimension to it. Public engagement also makes you humble as a researcher, puts your feet on the ground and reminds you that problems will not be solved by publishing academic work alone.” George organised the Pelicam International Film Festival in Tulcea from 2017 to 2021, which featured new green documentaries and film productions about people and environment. “It was for a public from school children to senior citizens. I was in charge of moderating the Q&A sessions after each movie. There were also two to three big debates per festival, usually with one academic guest, one or two NGO representatives and one or two film directors/producers – and the point was to discuss a pressing topic interesting for the public. I loved organising these; they gave me a chance not only to ask questions informed by my academic practice, but also to bring together experts from different worlds and have them respond to an environmentally-sensitive public.”

George aims to put across how simplistic treatment of an environmental issue could lead to ineffective responses or even further injustice. “One example is my podcast about illegal logging in which I tried to show that usually those considered as poachers are the most marginalised and vulnerable people from a community and that they are part of patronage or unequal power relationships.” Year after year, with each debate, interaction with the public has shaped his academic interests and make him see issues in a more nuanced and complex way.

Although public outreach has so far not changed the way in which Agata defines or understands her research goals, it does inspire her to do more and to keep going. “It is an energy booster for me, and fills me with new ideas and reflections.”

Charu Jain considers her engagement with rural communities in her home country India – where she is based – as a form of ‘thinking aloud’. Such public engagement has prompted her to question many of the outcomes of her work. It has sparked her interest for research, prompting her to do a PhD at FNP.

For example, she observes that water structures led mainly by women have had better environmental impact. “The women have taken the lead in resource conservation and my research aims to explore the reasons for this shift from traditional practices to more community-led approaches.” Her PhD research will address the relevance of gender-led differential environmental and social outcome in shaping water and forest resource management efforts in Rajasthan, India.

For more than 20 years, she has been helping rural women to develop skills in handcrafts that will enable them to generate additional income. The aim is to reduce the burden on natural resources – especially forests – as communities move away from resource extractive livelihoods, such as selling firewood for cooking/energy sources, charcoal making, briquette making from forest wood. For the same reason – to reduce reliance on natural resources - she was also involved in organising beauty courses for village women, to equip them with skills for other occupations.

Charu is also involved in guiding water management projects for senior school children, and in skill training programmes such as solar electrician training, the use of food processing and drying technologies.

Since starting her PhD, she has learned to enjoy interacting with academia for more insight and self-improvement. Nowadays, she also spends time to share the results of her fieldwork observations with project funders to explore new initiatives for rural communities, such as community forests and setting up low carbon cooling solutions.

Dr. Koen Arts – known for his book ‘Wild Jaar’ in which he tells how he and his wife Gina Maffey spent a year sleeping outdoors – likes public engagement events very much. “I do see outreach as a part of my work at the university. Such events tend to pull you out of your bubble, for example, through surprising questions that are thrown at you. Societal interest in the work I do makes me feel that I’m potentially making a difference in non-academic ways too, igniting that little spark that might lead to greener thinking or Earth-positive behavioural change. But I also find it important that colleagues pursue it when they are intrinsically happy to do so. If you can share authentic enthusiasm, that can make a big difference, I believe.”

Koen generally enjoys discussions, presentations and giving workshops. “I struggle more with events with a very strict format, such as with a TEDx talk when I had to rehearse lines and behave more like an actor – which doesn’t suit me very well! Still, the experience was interesting, and I got to know myself and my limitations in a new way as well. This is a nice side-effect of engaging in outreach activities.”

Often, public engagement activities take place outside working hours. Agata’s museum talk took place in the evening. So too when Prof. dr. Bas Arts gave a presentation on ‘Forests, citizens and policy’ under the big parasol in the tea garden in Hortus Nijmegen in May this year. The evening event comprised a mix of storytelling, interviews, tours and music performances.

A balance therefore has to be sought between working hours, private time and public engagement activities – the latter can be, for some people, very much an extrapolation of their working life – but for others, an encroachment on private time. Such as having to give up coaching his son’s football team on a Saturday morning when dr. Arjen Buijs was asked to give a talk to members of Natuurmonumenten. He therefore sees such activities not as a strict duty of an academic but more as “a personal conviction to contribute to society in return for the empirical research we do in communities”. - _{^{by Keen-mun Poon}}