This episode is for anyone interested in doing public scholarship and creating a viral TedX talk!
Leslie:
Today, I’m excited to speak to Dr. Jennifer Reich!
Jennifer is a professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado Denver. Her research examines how individuals and families weigh information and strategize their interactions with the state and service providers in the context of public policy, particularly as they relate to health care and welfare.
She’s the author of two award-winning books, Fixing Families: Parents Power and the Child Welfare System, and Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines.
She’s also the editor of the books Reproduction in Society and State of Families, as well as the NYU book series Health, Society and Inequality. Her work has been featured in news outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, and BBC. And on the Netflix show Bill Nye Saves the World –so cool!
So if you’ve been listening to my podcast for a while, then you know that I am a huge proponent of academics sharing their ideas with the general public.
Jennifer is the perfect person to have on because in November 2019, she did a TEDx talk called “What I Learned from Parents Who Don’t Vaccinate Their Kids.”
And incredibly, I just checked, it’s been viewed on YouTube more than 1 million times! So I really wanted to have her on to demystify the process of doing a TED talk and to chat more generally about how we can use our research to reach and impact diverse audiences.
So Jennifer, thank you so much for being here.
Jennifer:
Yeah, thanks so much for inviting me.
Leslie:
All right, the first question I always like to ask people is, can you talk a little bit about your journey through academia and also about your research?
Jennifer:
Sure! So my entry to academia wasn’t really, I think, as most of your guests have actually commented, it was not like self-apparent. I attended a community college out of high school. I was a transfer student. And somewhere in that process, between some of my courses at the community college and then as I was transferring, I started realizing I was pretty interested in social research.
And it came about because I remember taking a class on human sexuality. And the part that I was most entranced by, that most students didn’t care about, was how do you study something that people inherently lie about? How do we know what we know became the question I was really interested in.
And so when I started looking at where to transfer, I started thinking about where there are places that care about undergraduate research. Is undergraduate research a thing that people do? And so that’s really helped me identify where to attend to go to a university where I could do a senior thesis and to kind of think about how we understand the social world and know what we’re measuring. And so I thought that was something that would be really interesting. And I got a lot of support from faculty when I transferred from Santa Barbara City College to UC Santa Barbara.
And I was invited to take graduate seminars as an undergraduate and hear what other graduate students were thinking about. And so those were the kinds of questions that really motivated me. And Madebe St graduate school was for me.
And I’ll say I took a long time to get through my PhD program. Some of it’s doing ethnography, which takes forever. But some of it was also, I think, the process of maturing and really figuring out how you go from coursework to independent research. How do you identify a sizable question that’s not the definitive work on a topic that will take you 20 years, but that’s actually pretty interesting?
And what I’ve learned about myself over the last 20-something years as an academic is that I tend to identify social phenomena in places where systems aren’t working or we understand things differently and there aren’t logical, easy solutions, but everyone is operating with really good intentions.
And so my dissertation was a study of the child welfare system and how a system where everybody wants it to succeed is universally hated by everyone who touches it became really interesting to me and to think about where are the points of disconnect in that system. And so as I was finishing up that work, I had done a postdoctoral fellowship at a medical school campus at UC San Francisco. And I started thinking about where else are families making sense of the state in their daily life and how can I think about this?
And one of the things I’ll say is that I think sociologists in particular, when we want to understand the state, we tend to think about really big systems like prisons or immigration or welfare systems. And I started thinking about the state as it’s deployed every day in our daily lives and being interested in where that’s happening. And so that made me start thinking about vaccinations as another place where families and parents are trying to make decisions that they feel are, the right ones for them and their children.
And it sounds really different than the child welfare system, but in my mind it was really about, know, how do families navigate the state and the world of expertise. The world of people telling you how to parent. But that brought me to a really different parent population than the child welfare system.
And so those are the kinds of questions that I would say everywhere that healthcare, law and family come together is like the corner of the universe. I spent all of my time and, I think, academic imagination really trying to understand what’s happening, what could go better and why are systems failing even when we have investments and people willing to work low wage jobs with good intentions? Like with all those ingredients, how do we end up with systems that still don’t work? And that’s where I think I’ll live for a while more.
Leslie:
That’s awesome! And I’m just curious, so when you started studying vaccinations, how far into this dilemma were we?
Jennifer:
So I started thinking about vaccinations probably around 2003, 2004. I was finishing up my book that had been my dissertation and I had a book contract and was working on it. I was in a postdoctoral fellowship. So I was talking to this multidisciplinary crew of people who care about healthcare, but a lot of the more physician researchers, economists, very coming up from very different angles, public health researchers.
And then a few things were happening simultaneously. I had young children. And if you have young children and you’re living in the San Francisco Bay area, you are inevitably somewhere on the Berkeley mom’s website or listserv and listening to parents talk to each other about why vaccines don’t really matter anymore and how they’re not important in how you breastfeed your children, you’re probably going to be fine.
My husband was a resident in pediatrics, and so he was coming home frustrated with stories of children who had vaccine preventable diseases and whose parents were really shocked that the disease still mattered and were serious. And he was sort of exasperated. And then it was at the same time a post-9/11 moment where the country was talking about bioterrorism. And I was at a medical school campus where all these first responders were debating whether or not they should get re inoculated against smallpox, which is a disease that was eradicated in the late 1960s.
And so nobody had been vaccinated against it, but that was hypothesized as something that could be weaponized, that the last stores of viruses and laboratories could become significant. And so I was sitting here listening to these three really different versions of the same technology and thinking that was interesting. And then I took a job in Colorado, which at the time led the nation and the most number of parents who reject vaccines by choice. So it seemed like an exciting place to try to do the study.
What I will say is that when I wrote a small grant, I think it was a feminist organization for new faculty, junior faculty. It was like a small pool of money. And I got a rejection that basically said, “who cares what white women do with their children and who cares about vaccines?” Like, this is a stupid topic. And I think about that rejection all the time because I hope that reviewer also thinks about that rejection all the time!
Because it turns out, right, there were some legs to it. And I could see where the tide was going. Like, I could see the movement. I could see the kind of groundswell of questioning that was coming from affluent mothers in particular, that I thought was going to become increasingly significant. But at the time, nobody thought it was a particularly interesting or compelling question. And then I will say too, that I think, you know, just as an aside, when we do studies, we assume, I think people are excited to be studied or have their stories told or that we can give voice. And it turns out studying affluent white women was not easy and that they really didn’t want or didn’t have a need for me to tell their stories because they tell their own stories just fine.
And so it took a long time to really recruit parents to talk to me, to really understand the story. And at the time, I would say everything that was written about vaccine refusal was written by men. There was a journalist and there’s been some physicians, and they all kind of start with the premise of, like, “you thought these women were stupid, but you didn’t know how stupid until we told you.” And I just thought, the world does not need another version of that.
And what I do know about parents and mothers in particular is they work really hard to make the best decisions for their children. And everybody wants healthy children. So that story doesn’t make any sense. And nobody needs that story in the world. That kind of condescending experts. So I didn’t wanna tell that story. So it took me a long time to also figure out in my book, how do I represent parents in a way that they would represent themselves if they have the same audience? And that we could agree to disagree on what it means, but that I’m representing them fairly on their own terms?
And so learning how to kind of write that story and write their stories in a way that was respectful disagreement essentially took some time and some space. But it was really important for me to get that right, because nobody needs another snarky, self congratulatory, patronizing tale of what’s wrong with people who were, recall at the time, “Whole Foods moms” in the media, right, who were this kind of dismissive, slightly misogynistic version of their decision-making.
So it took me a long time to write the book. And I remember at the time thinking I couldn’t publish anything while I was writing it because they were savvy consumers of information and they would find anything I wrote. So I really didn’t publish for a few years, which was lucky because it was post- tenure and I could absorb low productivity for a couple years that I think more junior people really couldn’t. I kept calling it my sophomore album. And I was like, “well, maybe no one will ever read this book and I can just move on to the next thing.”
And then I post my first article out of these data in October 2014 in the Journal Gender and Society. They issued a press release about the article because at the time that journal was really working to increase their public profile about research. And the measles outbreak at Disneyland was six weeks later. And so at that point people started contacting me because they were so surprised anybody had been studying this. ‘Cause they thought it was brand new. And I remember graduate students asking me, how did you know this was going to become a big issue? And all I could say was, it’s been a big issue for over a hundred years. And so, you know, it just ebbs and flows in our awareness. And so I could see that it was right under the surface.
So that really launched me in a way into thinking about what was my role in the public conversation about vaccines, but also about parents and their decision making about their children’s health. Like what did I want to contribute to the conversation since I was not willing to be like another expert telling them that they were anti-science and that they were ignorant and selfish, which is both untrue and also unhelpful.
Leslie:
I think that’s so great. And it’s really got me thinking. Before we turn to talking about your TED Talk, you mentioned something around writing from an empathetic perspective. And trying to like be fair and it sounds like embrace humanity and understand that we all make decisions with the information that we have at that time.
I’m curious, it took you a while to figure out how to do that. Did you do that in conjunction with the people you interviewed? Or how did you figure out that voice that still represented people fairly?
Jennifer:
Yeah, so I was really struggling with the kind of narrative form. And I’ll say too that when I was writing about parents whose children were in foster care because the state had labeled them unfit parents, it felt really good to tell their stories because they’re so deeply misunderstood and they’re so structurally disadvantaged in terms of their ability to navigate the state, which really embraces middle class parenting standards as a source of evaluation, talking about affluent parents.
And that at the time, the pattern was really clear that, like, when I started studying it, I’ll just say I kept finding white women. And I thought, “everything I know says that low income families and families of color trust the state less than do wealthy families. So what’s happening?”
And I talked to Medicaid providers and I interviewed healthcare providers to try to say, like, what’s happening that this is the pattern? And it was showing up in quantitative data also that the parents most likely to opt out of vaccines by choice were white with some college education and higher family incomes. And so I really had to grapple with like, “did I sample wrong?” And I came around to like, “no, you have to be able to absorb a 21-day quarantine if there’s an outbreak at your child’s school. You have to be willing to stay home with a sick child for weeks at a time if need be. And that if you have issues of housing or food security, minute risk of an adverse reaction to a vaccine is not your biggest issue because you have more pressing issues.”
So there’s a certain privilege that at the time, I could say was really built into the question. But writing about how these mothers really deploy their privilege in some ways to make the decisions that they want to, that have community outcomes, like, have effects for everyone in the community is also uncomfortable. Like, I wasn’t accustomed to criticizing my participants. And that was the other place.
Like, it felt untrue and unkind in that these women invited, you know, and men too, invited me into their homes, let me play with their children, talk to me about the hard decisions they’ve made, shared with me their experiences in the healthcare system that were often traumatic. And so it didn’t feel authentic to sort of then turn around and attack them in a way that there would have been celebration from medical providers, but it just wasn’t helpful to the conversation and it didn’t feel honest.
What I would say is that while I was struggling to figure out how to write this, I was talking to another sociologist, Jessica Fields, who had written this great book about sex education controversies. And she studied lots of conservative women who are anti-comprehensive sex education. And I said, “they must hate you.” And she looked at me like I was deluded. And she looked at me and said, “they don’t hate me. They disagree with me, but they don’t hate me.”
And I remember thinking, maybe that’s the best version for me, is that we can like each other and they can disagree, but they can feel like I was true. And that became kind of my guiding principle as I was trying to write their stories was would they see themselves in the stories? Would I tell the stories fairly? Would I tell the stories the way they’d want them told? And then, as I interpret those stories, they don’t have to agree with me. And that became really the process that guided my writing as I was trying to make sense of where their stories were coming from in their lives.
Leslie:
Right. So maintaining that basic level of respect all the way through and also saying that they were your audience too. A lot of folks write books knowing that their participants are never going to have access for language or other reasons. So just knowing that they would probably pick it up, see how they were represented.
Jennifer:
I mean, I tend to believe you can never control exactly who picks up your book, and you have to know that you can’t. Like, you have to be open to anybody picking it up.
But when I think about the language I use in my writing, the way I tell stories in my writing, I always picture that kind of advanced undergraduate or that curious reader who wants to know more, and that’s kind of who I write for and then anyone who finds it.
The strangest part of this, though, is that a researcher in Australia emailed me to tell me that the organization that opposes vaccines in Australia sells my book on their online store.
Leslie:
Oh, wow!
Jennifer:
And that surprised me. And I have had, I will say, I’ve given a couple community talks where people who were in my study have come to talk to me afterwards. And some do disagree with me. They accept my analysis, but they disagree with what it means. I make this argument that we have this very individualized culture that makes it really hard to have public health solutions and that parents see themselves as experts on their own children, which they’ve been encouraged to do.
And so I’ve had parents say to me, “well, if we’re not the expert, who is? You know, who should we trust more than ourselves?” And, you know, having those conversations, I had one mother who said after our interview, she rethought some of the things she had said, which was interesting to hear too. So I’ve gotten some feedback.
But I don’t write with participants because I feel like the analysis is my responsibility. And so I try to be as true to them as I can be from how I understand their stories. But I haven’t really written with them because my goal is not to move people towards a certain outcome. It’s to increase understanding of the points of disconnect.
Leslie:
So well said. And that makes a really good segue to talking about your TED Talk, because that is basically the one idea we’re sharing. Right?
So why did you want to do a TED Talk? And what was the process that you went through to do one?
Jennifer:
So this is the embarrassing part, I guess, is that I didn’t really wanna do a TED Talk! I never aspired to a TED Talk. But I’d been doing a lot of media work after that measles outbreak at Disneyland. And I was sort of in the backdrop. Every time there was a vaccine controversy or an outbreak, I would get called.
And I’m sure you’ll talk about this in other places as you’re doing so much on public engagement. But media attention begets more media attention, right? So you write something or you’re quoted somewhere, and then other journalists, who are mostly freelancers, who are mostly young people, are looking to what’s already out there to see what sources they can find. So it sort of leads, you know, it builds on itself. And I like feeling like I have something to contribute to the conversation.
What I’ll say just before I jump to the TED Talk story is that a lot of my life, especially since COVID, has been me and a bunch of physicians on a talk show or on something. And my role has informally become the person who always says “it’s more complicated than that,” or stop telling parents, you know? Because physicians are bad at staying in their lane of expertise. And so they wanna explain things in terms of medical literacy, like, “let’s just educate people and then they’ll make the right decision.”
And so I really push back on that in part because it just doesn’t make any sense to how any of us live our lives. And so that’s become kind of this informal role I’ve been willing to fill in the conversation, where I’m not one of the parents who rejects vaccines, but I’m able to speak to where they’re coming from with some credibility. And so I had been doing that for a while.
And I would say about a year before I was approached to do a TED Talk, one of my colleagues, Esther Sullivan, who wrote this fantastic book about manufactured housing, essentially trailer parks, and what happens to people when the land is sold underneath their homes, was approached by TEDx Mile High TEDx. And I’ll say Mile High TEDx, which is based in Denver, where I live, is the largest paid TED event in North America. And anybody can start a TEDx process within the national organization and there’s a good framework for doing it. But this one is a pretty organized, lucrative, large event for scale. My TED Talk was at the convention center with 5,500 people in the audience.
Leslie:
Oh, wow.
Jennifer:
And that’s a much bigger event than a lot of people at universities in other ways. And so Esther came to me and said, “I got invited to do this thing. Do you think I should do it?” And I said, good senior colleague that I am, I said like, “how exciting that to have this opportunity to have some support and coaching for a new way to communicate about research. It’s really hard mid-career to kind of find opportunities to grow and develop new skills. And they’re offering this to you. You should totally do it.” And she did, and her TED Talk is great and you should all look at it online.
And I was really excited for her. And so then when they called me a year later, I thought, “I don’t really want to do a TED Talk. I never want to do a TED Talk.” I don’t want to, you know, do all the things. And my kids made fun of me because I’ve sort of like, over the years there’s been some really funny riffs on like the TED way of speaking, you know, the whole demeanor of it. And so they thought it was really funny that I was thinking about doing it.
And at one point Esther said, “you want me to give you your talk back to you? Like, do you want me to remind you what you told me?” And that was really the thing was that there was– They give you a coach. It’s a three-month process of working in a cohort so you’re admitted into a class. They do events. At the time they were doing events twice a year and they did a fall event in a spring event. They brought a bunch of us in. We were not all local, so people flew in for these events, for these trainings. We had regular meetings. We worked with coaches to help develop the talk.
It was a huge amount of time. It was a bigger commitment than I think I appreciated. I remember one of my classmates in the TED Group was giving her second TED Talk. Her first one had many millions of views. And we were joking that we could like feign an injury to try to get out of it. We move it to the spring, but it just seemed like the learning with other people getting feedback, being vulnerable was really important. And having coaches or having people whose skill sets were so different than mine, whose expertise was really different.
So like, as a small example, like one of the first things we were asked to do in thinking about our talks was to think about how would you talk about your topic from your heart, how would you do it from your head, like this kind of intellectual version. But then how do you do it from your core, from your sense of values? And then that good talks should do all three because audiences engage in three different ways, right?
Some people need statistics, some people need heart, and some people need values and ethics in that. And if you can weave all three together, you can capture a really wide audience. That’s like a small example of like one of the tips I’ve taken with me that’s been really useful that came out of that process. So those are the things that convinced me to say yes. I’ll say the way they found me, which is not true in most places, is that because it’s a large event, they have paid staff and coaches, they are looking often for quirky, interesting stories that they can help develop into this.
And I think it was really a press release or a little news story even from the university about my research that they heard and reached out and said like “the way you’re talking about it, it’s really different. We want to talk more about it.” And so that was kind of the thing that invited me into it. I know different people have had different ways of connecting to the network and then they do take most TEDx events, take submissions and they take proposals also and kind of sort through and they’re trying to find a balance of different kinds of topics as well.
Leslie:
Yeah. I mean this is the first time I had ever heard of coaches specifically for TED talks. I mean it makes sense, right, that there’s public speaking coaches, but that it’s a specific kind of art form.
So your TED Talk had a mixture of different kinds of stories, but a lot of personal. You divulged various things about your own personal life too. How did you decide what stories to put into your talk?
Jennifer:
I would say for people who know me professionally, I do a lot of service. I’m really involved in the discipline. I love editing a book series so I can help develop people’s work. I feel like I’m pretty outgoing, but I’m also– I don’t tend to talk a lot about my personal life or my own experiences very often. And so it was really uncomfortable. And that part of them encouraging, “you need to give people ways to connect to this story and like you are a Mom.” Right? That’s part of the story. You are not just a sociologist.
And it’s so much easier for me to be the sociologist than to be the person in the community who’s engaged in this. And so that took some practice. It took some encouraging to sort of say, “okay, I’m gonna put myself out here in this story more than I’m comfortable.” I remember asking for slides for my talk, and they’re like, “does the audience need slides to understand your point?” And I remember thinking, “well, I need the slides.” And they’re like, “no, no, you don’t get slides. But if the audience needs slides, you can have them. But I don’t think the audience needs slide. They need stories.”
And that was another source of discomfort. I mean, the thing that I think nobody had told, I guess it’s really obvious if you watch TED Talks, but to memorize 13 minutes of a script with no notes was maybe the hardest thing I’ve done in a long time. And just to really feel like I could not be distracted by this room of people with these lights around me and be able to really be authentic.
How do I sort of connect to an audience? I tend to talk too fast. How do I not talk too fast? Like thinking about all these pieces. The performance piece was layers of it. And then the stories of what resonates for people. And getting feedback from some of my TEDx classmates and some of the coaches about what are the stories that really help people connect to our daily lives to show some empathy towards people who are making different decisions than they are?
Leslie:
Do you feel like if you hadn’t included any information about yourself that people would have connected less with the talk?
Jennifer:
You know, I think different people connect to different pieces. So I’ll say, like, the other thing that’s kind of funny in retrospect is that the talk was in November 2019. At the time, I described it as the worst idea I ever had. I had to find a makeup artist. Like, I don’t know how to do makeup. Like, all these things that I were like, so out of my comfort zone. But it was really festive and it was really fun and there were things about it and I felt really accomplished when it happened and then it was over. And it actually takes three or more months in my case for the video to post. So like the production process, the editing, kind of putting it all together to get it online. So it didn’t post online until February 2020.
Leslie:
Wow!
Jennifer:
And I got a note from my Coach who said, “I just want to let you know, your video posted today. It has 30,000 views in the first two hours. Whatever you do, don’t ever look at the comments.” And I thought, “surely the comments are about the content and I want to know what people think.” And of course, they were not about the content. They were about my voice. A couple of people thought I needed more moisturizer. There were comments on all sorts of things, and I was sort of shocked. There were people who said, “I didn’t watch this TED Talk, but…” and then spent time writing comments. And that surprised me.
At the time, my daughter was in high school, and I remember telling her how upset I was about this. And she looked at me and just said, “which part of Internet troll were you not clear on? There are people whose whole purpose in life is to be that person. That’s the whole phenomenon, and you entered it.” And so that was something I guess I hadn’t really considered either.
Like I’ve already said, I don’t think you can control who picks up your book or who engages your work, but engaging your video, engaging your talk is really different. And that, I guess I should have thought harder about what that would or have been more ready for it. And it’s also really clear that women get very different kinds of comments than men do. Everyone at TED told me, women just get criticized for every little thing on their talks in ways men don’t. So the video posted in February 2020, I remember thinking, maybe I’m all done talking about vaccines. Maybe I really don’t have a lot more to say. And then Covid was about three weeks later.
And so that put me then in this space where I did nothing for two-and-a-half years but talk about vaccines and write op-eds and kind of weigh in to try to fill that space that was being not just occupied by people who don’t understand how people make decisions for their children and their own lives, but it was also watching a federal response and watching systems that were essentially what I saw is like, how to undermine vaccine confidence.
Like, I could watch everything they were doing was exactly what I would have told you never to do after everything I had learned. And so I felt like that was a space I could fill. And so one of the things going back to your question about stories is that in fall of 2020, I got an email from a woman saying “I was really upset. My school just announced they’re not going to reopen for my children, and my children desperately need to be back at school. And then I saw your TEDx Talk, and it made me think maybe I could do this to make sure other people are safe and to get that kind of response.” This is now eight months after I gave the talk and six months after I posted, and five months, four months into a pandemic.
To know that I had said something that gave someone a framework for making a hard decision is a different kind of feedback. And that felt really validating. And I don’t know that it was me as a parent telling personal stories, if it was me telling stories that were relatable about how other people made decisions. But I felt it’s been one of the highlights to think that I could write something that resonated in a way that made somebody be able to face a really challenging moment and feel supported in it somehow.
Leslie:
Yeah, absolutely. And I also think that the medium makes a huge amount of difference. So I think a lot of folks who would have watched a video may not have run across an op-ed piece or other kinds of public engagement that you’re doing.
So what are your thoughts about reaching different audiences and using your ideas to impact from policy to various kinds of decision making out there?
Jennifer:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I think a lot of people who want to get more involved with public sociology or public scholarship or public dissemination of research, imagine they’re gonna reach everybody. And I know, like, you and I both work with authors who are like, “my audience is everybody.” And you’re like, “your audience can’t be everybody. You have to write for somebody.” And so who are we trying to reach, I think, is really important.
So I would say that at times, my audience that has been really gratifying has been that I’ve been invited to a lot of medical schools, a lot of Grand Rond lectures, to really talk to physician groups, to talk to practitioners about how you could think about parents differently. That’s a different audience than I ever pictured reaching. But they find ways of making it useful.
I think I wrote like, about a dozen op-eds during COVID and I’d written a few before here and there, as things kind of emerge. But for me, it was like a way of channeling a lot of anxiety into trying to just add another dimension to the conversation. To try to pull the conversation a little bit away from, like, “this is just ignorant people being ignorant,” you know, and to try to kind of add something to that conversation.
What’s interesting, though, is that each step we do or each interview we put out, or the TED Talk or whatever people find opens up new audiences. And so I found myself getting invited into a range of spaces that I never expected to be invited into. I was invited into a committee of the United Nations. I was invited to the Democratic Attorneys General to talk about when there is a vaccine and how it should be equitably distributed. There were, like, invitations that were public and policy oriented that didn’t come because I wrote a book, per se, but because I had a book that gave me credibility, that gave me access to other kinds of spaces. And that’s the way it sort of layers on itself.
And those are the places where the messaging shifts for different audiences, depending on what people need. I’ll say just upstream. Because sometimes it doesn’t get said enough. But that I think one of the challenges when scholars think about how do I do public engagement is we like nuance because we like really detailed, complicated stories, and those just don’t translate well.
And the first time I ever did a national interview was on the Today show in 2006, I think. And I got a lot of support from another public scholar, Stephanie Coontz, who had written a lot about families. And she told me I could do this and coached me. And her coaching was like, “what are the three points you’re going to make no matter what the question is? Like, what do you want to add at the end of the day of the conversation, no matter how many minutes you have?”
And that’s been a really helpful way to also think about, like, what do I want them to get. If I can get them to leave the room with one message, one thing, what’s the one thing I want people to leave with? You don’t need to know all of it. And to really hone in on the message for which audience you’re trying to reach with that message, and then stand behind it.
Leslie:
Yeah, that’s fantastic advice. And what other advice do you have for academics who want to share their research with a wider audience, but they really just don’t know where to start?
Jennifer:
Yeah, that’s such a great question. And, there’s a couple things that I think we have to just kind of lay out first. One is that knowing your institutional situation where you work is really important. So not just, like, will they give you credit towards tenure? And I will say, I work closely with the American Sociological Association, and we have new guidance on advising academic departments how they should count public engagement, how they should think about this.
I know that’s really near and dear to your heart, Leslie, and there’s a lot of people trying to come up with guidance documents to support departments who want to. But having said that, scholars need to think about their own safety as well. And so to think about, will the institution back you if there’s a controversy? Can it set up duplicate email accounts so you use one publicly and one internally, which some scholars have done?
Leslie:
Interesting.
Jennifer:
My work with the American Sociological Association as vice president, it’s worth noting we do a lot of advocacy for individual scholars who sometimes get doxxed for their work. And who are being attacked for the scholarship that they do in states or at religious-affiliated institutions where the work is not just not valued, but it actually could be dangerous. And so to think about who you are and where you’re located in these conversations can help make strategic decisions about what you want to contribute.
Because I think it’s really easy to romanticize publicity scholarship, which is different than public scholarship, but to also think about what that puts you into. I don’t get very much hate mail compared to many of my friends who study vaccines, in part because I think I try to lead with empathy and so I just don’t make people angry in the same way. But I do occasionally get some kind of funny slash mean messages. I think my all-time favorite is still the email. And all it said was, “I curse you and your children.” That was the whole message.
Leslie:
Oh my gosh.
Jennifer:
And I remember showing it to my youngest child. He was like, I think in middle school at the time. And he looked at me and said, “oh, so Dad just gets a free pass?” And I remember thinking, at least we have a sense of humor about this. And that was the whole message. And I have no idea what this person was responding to. I don’t know what they saw that made them motivated enough to go find my email address and send it. But I think it’s worth thinking about. Like it’s not all a big welcome party when you show up at the conversation.
I also think people also have to think about being deferential to the folks on the ground who are already doing the work. So I think it’s really easy for scholars to come in and say, “aren’t you so happy I finally came?” But there are local experts, there are people on the ground, there’s community organizations who have been working on these questions for years. And you can help bring resources, you can help bring credibility. You sometimes have access to different audiences. But to do it in partnership with the groups can be really important.
Like, in addition to everything I did during COVID, I volunteered at a lot of vaccine clinics and just doing grunt work for the people who needed bodies and help. Because I could, and I could be trained to do anything. And just being open to that as well I think is really important in terms of getting started. Those are a few things I would say that might be really helpful.
So I think that the part that’s uncomfortable with TEDx, which is really valuable, is that you started with the single idea and the single message and what’s your one big idea? You can have one. That’s a good exercise for all of us to say, “if you leave with one thing I’ve told you, what would you like that one thing to be?” If I could get one thing to people on the ground facing this, or to policymakers deciding about this, or what would be the one thing I want them to take with them and to know that for yourself. Because then you sort of know what it is you want to get out and disseminate.
Leslie:
Right.
Jennifer:
So mine has really been two things I spend all my time on is we’ve set up the cultural framework for individualism which has discouraged public health and collective solutions. And that’s not the parents’ fault, that’s on all of us. I’ve been able to message that and stop calling parents stupid. It’s not helping and it’s not true. To get those two things, I think, has created a space for a different conversation. So knowing what your two things are is really important. Knowing if you’re in an institution and a place in your career where you can spend time on this, because careers are long, hopefully, and you don’t have to do it all at once. And sometimes you put things off until they’re a better time or a better place. That’s okay.
You don’t have to do everything all at once. And I think as junior people, we’re almost always impatient and motivated and excited. So that’s a place to kind of assess your interpersonal, your personal, and your institutional resources to think through, like who’s around you and how will this land.
And then in terms of the mechanics how to get started, there are often cultural opportunities to link your point or your goal to something happening in the world. Whether it’s a celebrity controversy, whether it’s the World Cup soccer. I just saw something this week about the US shouldn’t be allowed to host the World Cup soccer because we can’t handle immigration and green card holders right now. That’s an opportunity for immigration scholars to bring expertise to the table, even if it’s not about, say, professional sports.
We can think about global events, and then there, they create these windows of interest where we get to stretch the conversation. So there are ways of thinking strategically about places to do that. And then, who do you want to reach? You have to know who you want to reach. Op-ed writing is really valuable, but it’s a very narrow audience since most of our news is now paywalled. But I know when I’ve written for Vox, it’s a really different audience than the Washington Post.
So, thinking about who’s the audience and how do you get to that audience, I think the TED Talks are a really different audience than academic journals, but they’re also different audiences than newspaper readers. And so of the things I’ve done that are interesting to young people, Bill Nye’s TV show on Netflix resonates in a totally different way for young people. I did Snapchat News. I didn’t even know that was a thing. The number of my students who saw that became I didn’t even know it existed. No one my age knows it existed. But it mattered to young people. So who are you trying to reach? And then where are they? And know that there are multiple ways of getting there.
Leslie:
Oh, I think that’s super brilliant. And I think always pulling it back to the audience thing, because, like I talk about all the time, scholars are always talking to their reviewers, and they don’t really question that. It’s just a default mode because you’re so used to being critiqued and someone trying to sort of poke apart every part of your analysis.
But when you are doing public engagement, that may or may not be true. A lot of folks are just there because they’re curious. They’re just interested. They just want to know something else. And so I think knowing your audience and knowing your message is so, so, so important.
So, Jennifer, thank you so much for demystifying the world of TEDx Talks for us. How can listeners connect with you?
Jennifer:
Oh, thanks so much for asking. And I love to hear what people are thinking about, so I’m easy to find by email. I’m at the University of Colorado Denver, and people are welcome to reach out that way. Many of my publications and public scholarship are linked on my website, and so I’m happy to share that information too, if that’s useful, to get some examples of what folks are working on. And then I think there probably needs to be more spaces where people who are trying to engage and do some of this work can talk to each other about strategies. And so I’m always happy to do that for folks.
Leslie:
Awesome! And so, listeners, please go watch her TEDx Talk. It is a masterclass in translating your work to the general public. You can also find her on LinkedIn or Blue Sky, or at her website, jenniferreichphd.com.
If you’ve enjoyed this episode on Tedx talks, make sure to also check out:
Ep. 70 – Becoming a Public Scholar: Making an Impact Beyond Academia (with Dr. Kevin R. McClure)
Ep. 64 – Publishing with a Trade Press: Is It Right for You? (with Dr. OiYan Poon)
Ep. 54 – Mastering the Art of Writing a Crossover Book (with Dr. CJ Pascoe)
