Research Comms Podcast: Suzanne Fisher-Murray talks about the differences between development and academia.
‘Truly participatory communications is communications where communities themselves have identified a need.’ Suzanne Fisher-Murray, on the importance of community agency in international development.
Suzanne Fisher-Murray has worked as a research communications specialist in both the development sector and academia. She currently works as research communications advisor at Christian Aid, where she specialises in communications planning for research uptake and impact.
In this episode of Research Comms, Suzanne talks about the differences between development and academia, the power of radio for sharing stories and influencing behaviour, what truly participatory communications look like and the value of creating personas for strategic communication with communities that care.
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The below is a short excerpt. For the full interview download the podcast.
You’ve worked in both the development sector and higher education as a research communicator. Is there much of a difference in how communications are done between those two sectors?
I think there are big differences between higher education and the development sector. I’ll start by explaining a bit what I do now. So, within my role there is a team of us at Christian Aid, within the Research, Evidence and Learning team. And we are really focused on trying to learn what is working and what isn't within Christian Aid and beyond. Christian Aid works on a partnership model, so we're working with a lot with partners from the Global South. Talking to those partners, trying to understand what's working around different methods, different approaches. We look at lots of evidence across many programs to get a sense of those programmatic approaches and what's working. So it's really learning along the way and learning from practice. Part of my role is to communicate that research but then also a large part of my role is just to support teams across Christian Aid and partners to develop research communication strategies.
If we're developing a piece of research, who are the key stakeholders that need to see that research? I might do a lot of work around stakeholder analysis. Helping them think through who are the key stakeholders that have influence and are interested in this research, so they can do something with it that will actually lead to policy change or to other changes within society. A lot of it is around supporting teams to do that strategic planning, so we can we can think that through.
I think one of the big differences perhaps between working with an international NGO like Christian Aid and the higher education sector is that there's probably a lot more work with local organisations and civil society organisations. And a really big focus of the role is to try and encourage more sharing of that research back with partners, with communities, so that they are empowered to use that research, and so that the research benefits them. We want to make sure it’s not just an extractive research process where we're taking the research out and sharing it somewhere else with decision makers and high level stakeholders, but that we're bringing the findings of that research, which those communities have created themselves, back to them. That means that there is a sense of sharing and learning and an exchange of information.
Have you listened to these other episodes of the Research Comms podcast?
Can you talk a little bit about participatory research and how it can benefit research communication?
Like all of these things you could spend a long time debating how you're going to define participatory communications. And I I personally feel that truly participatory communications is communications where communities themselves have identified a need.
They've identified a problem or a need that needs resolving and feel that communication is a tool within communications could help resolve that. I would say that actually a lot of communications that goes on within the international development sector isn't really truly participatory communications, if I'm honest.
A lot of the communications is done because the NGO has decided that there is some research that needs to be shared or there is a problem that needs resolving and communications is embedded into that process. And probably that communications has at its heart some research that is underpinning it. But the communications is driven by the the NGO or is driven by the academic.
For communications to be truly participatory you really do need very strong relationships with those communities. You need to have fairly constant communication going back and forth to be hearing what particular issues or challenges they're facing and what they'd like to be looked into, rather than the only point of communication being when you go in to do the bit of research that you've already had in mind. So that does require a close relationship, and it requires a lot of time.
For instance, I was trained by someone who is a real specialist in participatory video and doing participatory video with a community. There's training involved in terms of just using the technology and working out how to do that and also around who’s telling the story and how is the story being told and from whose perspective? And there's all sorts of things to think through there with the local communities. So it takes time to do well, but can really result in some very powerful stories.
I'd love to hear a bit more about how how you got into this field.
I think my my career trajectory has been not a straightforward one, as is probably the case for a lot of us who work in this area. I started working as a journalist, I had done a masters in development and was always really interested in international development. And then I had begun working as a radio journalist overseas. I started working freelance in a whole range of West African countries, so I started in Sierra Leone. I also did some reporting from Burundi and Liberia and doing short documentaries segments for the World Service. So short radio news pieces and things mostly focused on gender based violence and the use of rape as a weapon of war. It was a very sobering and challenging experience. When I was in Sierra Leone, for instance, the country was still experiencing a civil war at the time, and so I was traveling around in U.N. helicopters going from place to place. So I started that way, and then I kind of moved sideways into managing a radio drama series in Burkina Faso and then later on in Rwanda. So that is a whole field, which is often referred to as ‘behavior change communication’, about using radio drama series and embedding research and different research and evidence into educational drama series. Because obviously in Africa, still a lot of people are listening to radio. It is a key source of information for them.
I worked with two American psychologists to understand their research around trauma and healing trauma and the roots of genocide to understand key concepts there and key messages that they wanted to get across. One of those key messages, for instance, was that genocides don't just happen. People think that they just happen. And many of the people we interviewed as part of that research, because the the project involved a lot of ethnographic research, a lot of people we interviewed would say ‘the genocide in Rwanda fell upon us like rain’. But actually, the academic theory is that genocides happen in a series of steps. And there are many warning signs. So the idea was to develop key messages around that. What are some of those signs? What are those warning signals that we can be aware of and then embedding that into this series of radio dramas working with local scriptwriters who were writing in the language, Kinyawanda, so that we could then share those on national radio. It was a move from developing documentary series and short clips for the World Service as a freelancer into something very different, much more focused on storytelling, but storytelling that had research embedded and behind it.
When you talk about ‘behviour change communication’ what do you mean? What kind of behaviours are you looking to change and how does that fit in with the research communication?
Each of the experiences that I mentioned, I would call them different things. When I was working in Burkina Faso, I think that was behaviour change communications in the strictest sense of how it would be defined, which is that you are using communications to affect behaviour or to get people thinking about behaviours.
As an example, there I secured funding for a radio drama series that focused on HIV and AIDS prevention through encouraging the use of condom wearing. We did a lot of research in advance with a radio drama listener group that was part of the radio that I was working with. I talked to them about what the obstacles are to wearing condoms. The feedback across the board was, ‘well, you know, our husbands don't want to be wearing condoms’. The issue there was one of power. A lot of these women, because it was a polygamous culture, may not have even had the power to say to the husband, ‘actually, I'd like you to wear a condom’. So that became the fundamental issue. But the behaviour that we were trying to change was to encourage the use of condoms so that we could prevent the transmission of HIV and AIDS, which was a huge concern. So behaviour change communication there is very clear.
Research Comms is presented by Peter Barker, director of Orinoco Communications, a digital communications and content creation agency that specialises in helping to communicate research. Find out how we’ve helped research organisations like yours by taking a look at past projects…
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