This article is part of the University Press Week blog tour. Today, Jess Miles, Digital Marketing Manager, talks about who Bristol University Press helps to speak up through the Transforming Society blog and podcast.
We see our role as a University Press as amplifying both author and non-author voices and ideas within and beyond academia so they can make a difference. Research can make the most change if we are able to use it to influence policy and practice.
This has been the aim of Policy Press and Bristol University Press for nearly 30 years.
University presses and other nonprofit scholarly publishers are uniquely placed to do this. The service we provide to academics, librarians, practitioners and all those we engage with is ultimately designed to allow the work to speak up: for the benefit of both readers and society. ‘Speaking up’ informs how we disseminate our books and journals, and digital marketing – including this very blog and accompanying podcasts – plays a special role in this.
The fact that this blog tour is such a big part of University Press Week is a testament to the work we all do behind the scenes. Launched in 2017, Transforming Society has brought the stories behind our authors’ research to a broad audience of academic and non-academic readers interested in the social sciences. We’ve published over 800 articles, briefings for policy makers, impact case studies and nearly 100 podcast episodes.
These formats help our authors to ‘speak up’ in a different way to a new audience. Crossing format boundaries in this way is crucially aligned with our mission to address global social challenges and make research accessible.
Now on Acast, the Transforming Society podcast brings our authors’ voices (literally!), via Spotify, Apple, Audible, Amazon and all the podcast platforms, to new places and new groups. Our most popular episodes this year include ‘Why we need to apply psychology to politics’ and ‘Why high earners should care about inequality’.
We support authors to speak up in the policy arena by working with them to produce engaging policy briefings, also published on Transforming Society. By highlighting the key findings of the research and its policy implications, and placing these directly in the hands of policy makers, we can grab their attention… and hope they listen.
And listen they sometimes do! As we all know, change is hard to achieve, but it happens – our impact case studies show where and how. When Clare McGlynn and Kelly Johnson co-authored Cyberflashing: Recognising Harms, Reforming Laws, they wanted the law changed to make cyberflashing a criminal offence. Merely a year after publication, and following the production of a policy briefing, upskirting and cyberflashing became specific criminal offences in Northern Ireland, following evidence given by McGlynn to the Stormont Assembly Justice Committee. Achieving change like this is one of the goals of speaking up, and one that we want to turn into a reality for more of the work we publish.
We also hear the voices of those who are impacted by the issues and research, which are all too often lost or ignored in the discussion. In an episode earlier this year, “I refuse to live with the stigma now”: Life on a low income, we interviewed participants in the Changing Realities project about their experiences of life on a low income.
Running alongside Transforming Society, our webinar programme provides a platform for people impacted by policy to speak up. Our social policy and participation webinar series has brought together academics, activists and service users to discuss policy and participation on subjects including mental health policy and social care reform. It’s the range and diversity of voices speaking up here that matters.
As university presses, the platform we have, our social mission and our scope for creativity allows us to support both our authors and others to speak up. We shouldn’t take this for granted. At Bristol University Press, the Transforming Society blog and podcast and our webinar programme are some of the ways in which we bring voices to the fore, with the aim of making a difference.
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The views and opinions expressed on this blog site are solely those of the original blog post authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the Bristol University Press and/or any/all contributors to this site.
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