Event Details

Join us for a candid talk on engaging with media and policy as an academic. We'll discuss strategies, share personal experiences, and offer advice on whether pursuing a public-facing academic career is right for you. Ideal for MA students, PhDs, and early-career researchers.

We are pleased to invite you to a talk about the positives and perils of engaging with media and policy, or in different words, how you can go about being heard outside of the academic bubble. We last gave this talk a solid five years ago in 2019, and it was very successfully received, so we figured it was probably time we ran it again. In it, we offer advice and some quite candid insights for postgraduates and junior academics on how to (and indeed, whether you should) seek to put your research out there for non-academic audiences such as policy makers and the media. No surprise, half a decade later, we have some new stories to share from our perspectives of PhD student to Professor.

In the first half, I’ll discuss my frankly quite haphazard learning curve that started with the media and then diversified from there in all kinds of unexpected ways, including the strategies that I unwittingly adopted that made it all happen. I’ll also discuss why traditional academic metrics (e.g., publications, presentations) are just part of the story. Most importantly, perhaps, I’ll talk about figuring out for yourself whether this journey is the right one for you.

In the second half, William will talk about his more deliberate journey, including his media appearances, his experience working on a civil service secondment with the DCMS, his consultancy work with government bodies like the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), and his advice on how to navigate the university’s internal systems around the media and policymakers.

Overall, this talk is not intended to convince you that you should or should not engage with the media or policy or other stakeholders. It’s designed to give you an honest insight into our experiences so that you can then decide for yourself whether this approach to your career and your research is right for you and the work you’re doing.

As noted above, we’re especially aiming this at MA students, PhDs, ECRs, and any academics who are interested to know more.