Abstract
In their book Going Public: A Guide for Social Scientists, Arlene Stein and Jessie Daniels convincingly offer practical approaches on how to build an audience and how to make public scholarship count. The book is meticulously structured in two parts, consisting of seven chapters that unfold progressively to yield in-depth discussions on the requirements of ‘going public.’ The first part focuses on the elements of good writing while the second part centers on using digital media tools.
Each chapter outlines a few basic principles on writing beyond academia with the public in mind (‘public writing’). It showcases ways in which to exercise one’s public voice, not only through published research in peer-reviewed journals but also through opinion editorials (‘op-eds’), blogs, and newspaper and magazine articles. It further maps out how to engage the audience and traverse academic and general audiences through the use of digital tools when sharing one’s work with a larger audience.
The book emphasizes the need for a transformation in the dissemination of research findings in a modern society of digital technologies. It argues that social scientists can achieve this not just by making their research more accessible, but also by reflecting on the process if they are to communicate with those outside their areas of specialization or those who are not public academics. It therefore advocates that the value of public engagement lies in ‘public scholars’ or ‘public intellectuals’ being vocal about the dilemmas and public discourse society is faced with in order to make a monumental change in a time of the rise of social and print media.
Stein and Daniels show that going public must be established at a right time and place prior to sharing ideas with the ‘lay’ public. They highlight that it is a researcher’s social and moral responsibility to communicate their research effectively without compromising or manipulating the research findings. The authors point out that to remain relevant, social scientists can take lessons from journalists in order to grab the attention of their readers. Meaning making must therefore be constructed through stories, vignettes, and personal narratives that connect events that unfold through time. In so doing, social science can adequately capture the everyday lived social realities, forces of institutional structures, and professional elements that often challenge being a social researcher. This will further allow academic work to break out of the academy, communicate scholarly work in a more accessible way to lay audiences and enter public spaces to reach a broader audience.
One of the main characteristics of Stein and Daniels’ book is the continuation of the conversation started by Howard Becker in his book Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article (1986). Going Public extends Becker’s work by going further into the digital era in a way designed to help social researchers to broaden their research for the nonacademic milieu to improve scholarly communication. The authors present useful tips for good writing, explain how to approach publishers, and how to build a ‘public’ career while contributing to social science and improving public discussions and policies. Going Public is an insightful and practical guide for those wanting to know how to do ‘public scholarship’ while translating their ideas into clear writing, and to graduate students, faculty members, and researchers. The book ultimately supports better use of digital tools in disseminating research, academic interests, and themes via an online platform to become a public intellectual. As a researcher and user of social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, and ResearchGate), I found the second part of the book most interesting because it encourages work to be made more publicly reachable on digital platforms and via social media outlets. This part also shows how academic publishing is shifting, and how scholars can measure the impact of their research articles and books through alternative metrics (‘altmetrics’), which could not be done previously.
Going Public is an easy read, the language is kept simple to convey complex messages. It is a hands-on guide that is clearly written, compelling, engaging, and timely in the age of digital media – and one that cuts across academic disciplines and social and geographical settings. It reinforces the notion that social milieus are important when going public because it (re)shapes meaning making in the sphere of digital, social, and print media. The overall thesis of the book builds on the value of doing public scholarship in ways that those with expertise can contribute through public debates and discussions so as to avoid influencing public opinion in uninformed ways. The book places strong emphasis on why going public often leads to debates when political and social contexts are not considered. It aptly points out that going public is laden with pros and cons that are shaped by daily events occurring in society. It suggests that ideas that are disseminated often do get public responses but sharing ideas in public also widens the gap for mistakes to permeate through to the public. The book, however, advocates the value of becoming a public scholar to improve the scope of one’s work, test scholarly ideas with the public, and strengthen it through networking and collaborating across disciplines.
It also presents juxtapositions to consider for clear interpretation of data to prevent its meaning and policy relevance being overseen or misinterpreted. For example, one must consider the lay audience versus the experts/professionals, journalism (show) versus social science (tell), academic versus nonacademic contexts, and public versus private spaces. Moreover, one needs to take into account the classic narrative arc (linear) versus academic narrative arc (less linear) in magazine writing (show) versus academic writing (tell) in order to write for one’s audience in a way that is both entertaining and enlightening. The authors achieve their aim by drawing on many years of experience in academia and public scholarship and by sharing real-life experiences and detailed examples of how to tell convincing stories that make the ‘story’ easier to grasp. This is done through an exploration of real-life cases and practical strategies that can help grow one’s audience and make public scholarship matter beyond academia. The application of these cases and strategies are drawn from different disciplines such as sociology, journalism, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, linguistics, history, and economics.
In conclusion, Going Public is relevant for deepening some of the conversations that are currently taking place in the social sciences about expanding the reach of one’s scholarship while offering practical advice on how to do so. It advocates that social science should embrace social media and other digital technologies to make research an essential part of greater, bolder debates about the times in which we live – a major contribution to the social sciences. This book appeals to early career and established researchers alike by making clear that good science and good writing tells a story while remaining relevant. The book has the potential to facilitate the research dissemination process as it serves as a guide for researchers interested in writing for audiences outside of academia. I strongly recommend this book to social scientists, journalists, policy analysts, and anyone else interested in making their personal experience and research more accessible to the wider society through storytelling and the use of digital technologies.