Research Comms

Research Comms is a conversation podcast about how research gets from the people who produce it to everyone else, presented by Peter Barker. Barker owns Orinoco Communications, a digital communications company that works only on research and innovation, mostly through videos and animations. The show cares about method. Its guests are communicators, engagement specialists and people working inside research institutes, and the questions stay on what they actually do. Barker's standard introduction names science, engineering, the social sciences and the humanities as fair ground, and the guest list covers economics, climate change, dementia research and public engagement. Lucy Wilson of the UK Dementia Research Institute describes an organisation spread across several universities that calls itself defined by its science, not its postcode. She talks about pushing further into engagement with policymakers, governments and other charities, including a partnership with the BHF. Eric Fine of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication argues that people who assume nobody shares their worry are less likely to get involved. The same misreading, he says, can lead mayors, community leaders and elected officials to give climate a lower priority than they otherwise would. That conversation also touches on the program's twice-yearly national survey, Climate Change in the American Mind. In the Liminal episode, Liz Neeley and Ambika Kamath lay out sensemaking as a framework. Their example is a neonatal intensive care nurse: what she notices on her own only matters once it becomes a shared response with other nurses and doctors. As the episode puts it, nobody has to know everything or work it out alone. Matthew Kulvicki of the Institute for New Economic Thinking talks about video, which Barker says seems embedded in the institute's work. Kulvicki would rather not call his conversations interviews, because he wants people to be comfortable being themselves. Jamie Gallagher, a freelance public engagement professional who specialises in impact and evaluation, recalls losing seven thousand pounds of in-person work within a week in early 2020. From there the talk turns to taking engagement events online and helping others do the same during lockdown. Storytelling gets an episode of its own. 'Beyond the buzzword: how storytelling can transform research communications' draws on more than one guest. It holds up Serial as a model for pulling an audience back and forth between two possibilities, and it points to a psychologist's information gap theory about curiosity. Jessica Fox and Kat Arney are heard on the role of emotion. Barker's manner is relaxed, with sign-offs that wish listeners a wonderful summer or hope for a less croaky voice next time, and he points people to links in the episode notes. Production stopped in October 2024, and the feed points to a successor, Research Unravelled. A few places to start: the storytelling episode for technique, Eric Fine for public opinion and policy, and Jamie Gallagher for events.