Final month, one thing uncommon occurred to an educational philosophy article.
The information media reported on it.
[Arthur Dove, “The Critic” (detail)]
Shortly after the article was printed in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, tales about it confirmed up in number of venues, together with:
amongst others.
How did this occur?
It’s no thriller: Cambridge College’s Office of External Affairs and Communication wrote and distributed a press launch for it.
Granted, the article, “Gendered Affordance Perception and Unequal Domestic Labour” by Tom McClelland (Cambridge) and Paulina Sliwa (Vienna) appears extra more likely to hook a broader viewers than the everyday PPR output. Right here’s the summary:
The inequitable distribution of home and caring labour in different-sex {couples} has been a longstanding feminist concern. Some have hoped that having each companions at residence throughout the COVID-19 pandemic would usher in a brand new period of equitable work and caring distributions. Opposite to those hopes, previous patterns appear to have continued. Furthermore, research recommend this inequitable distribution typically goes unnoticed by the male associate. This raises two questions. Why do girls proceed to shoulder a disproportionate quantity of house responsibilities and childcare regardless of financial and cultural features? And why is there a widespread one-sided misrepresentation inside different-sex {couples} about how home and caring work is distributed between the 2 companions? We reply these questions by interesting to affordance notion—the notion of potentialities for motion in a single’s surroundings. We suggest an essential gender disparity within the notion of affordances for home duties such because the dishwasher affording emptying, the ground affording sweeping and a multitude affording tidying. We argue that this contributes not solely to the inequitable distribution of home labour however to the frequent invisibility of that labour. We discover the results of this speculation for resistance and social change.
But, regardless of how broad an viewers would possibly doubtlessly be taken with an educational philosophy article, only a few folks will discover it until it’s marketed in the precise strategy to those that present data to that broad viewers, and the best way that’s usually finished is by way of press releases. (Here’s the press release for the article by McClelland and Sliwa).
There’s an workplace at your college or school (typically with “communications” in its title) staffed with specialists with the duty, know-how, and contacts to create and disseminate press releases about your analysis. Are you making the most of yours? Departments and researchers often must be proactive right here. Some departments, notably within the sciences, are excellent about conserving their establishment’s communications workplace knowledgeable about new analysis developments. Others, together with philosophy departments (at the least within the U.S.), usually will not be.
Within the case of this specific article, Professor Sliwa thought to strategy the communications workplace simply after the piece was printed at PPR. In keeping with Professor McClelland:
They then agreed to put in writing a launch. We discovered that the norm is to have press launch prepared earlier than the article is launched or it’d appear to be previous information. The press officer wrote a draft launch primarily based on studying our article. We then had a back-and-forth to refine it earlier than it was launched. The press officer warned us that media retailers work on a decent timescale. This was actually my expertise—folks needed replies to issues fairly quick.
How are you going to inform whether or not your forthcoming article is newsworthy? Should you’re undecided, one of the best wager is to strategy the communications workplace and speak to them about it. You could want to elucidate it to them, or recommend why folks moreover different researchers in your space of specialization would possibly care about it, however you may additionally study from speaking with them about doubtlessly audiences you hadn’t beforehand thought of, or methods of framing your analysis that join it to different issues persons are involved with.
Dialogue welcome, notably from those that have labored with their establishment’s communications workplace to publicize their work.
