Who Gets To Partake in The Conversation?

This article was written by Nicholas Blomley, who recently received the Community-Engaged Research Achievement Award at the 2023 SFU CERi Awards. He is a former CERi Researcher-in-Residence and a Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University. This article explores how academia presents a power-dynamic regarding which voices matter most. Specifically, this article dives into Blomley's experience with The Conversation, an independent news publication, and their policies regarding who can author articles and what determines 'expertise'. 

Who counts as the ‘expert’ in community engaged research? Whose voices matter most? The organizing principle of CER is to challenge the view that expertise comes simply from accreditation and privilege.  The expertise of community members is to be valued in the same way as that of academics. In practice, however, this goes against the grain. 

The Conversation was created in Australia in 2011,  with The Conversation Canada launching in 2017.  It describes itself as ‘an independent source of news and views, from the academic and research community, delivered direct to the public.  Rather than the conventional media format, in which journalists craft articles, referencing or quoting experts, The Conversation partners directly with researchers who write their own pieces.

It has become an invaluable and important resource for evidence-based news and analysis. It is also attractive to many academics, allowing us to speak to large public audiences.  Conversation articles are often republished by national print media. 

In a world in which evidence based analysis is easily challenged, while under-resourced journalists struggle to find the time to develop rigorous analyses, The Conversation has become a vital resource. Its imprimatur is its reliance on academic authors and sources. Its Charter opens with the commitment to ‘inform public debate with knowledge-based journalism that is responsible, ethical and supported by evidence’. 

Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, its global editorial guidelines specify that it ‘will only publish articles written by academics employed by or otherwise formally connected to accredited institutions…. Generally speaking, academic authors will have attained the level of PhD candidature and/or have a teaching position and/or an active research profile’. To be clear, ‘non-academic staff without a track record of teaching or research will generally not be eligible to write’.  This is despite a commitment to ‘seeking out diversity and inclusion in its choice of authors’. 

I fell afoul of this policy when I was finalizing an article drawing from research regarding the seizure and destruction of homeless people’s belongings. The article argued that to fully understand this traumatic and violent process, it was essential to centre the wisdom of the experts – homeless people themselves. I co-wrote the article with Connie Long, an Indigenous woman with lived experience of homelessness and property theft. The editors at The Conversation were very supportive of the article, except when it came to my request that both Connie and myself be identified as authors. Based on the editorial guidelines, Connie was not ‘eligible to write’. I challenged this, at length, with the local and national editors, but without success. They were only willing to acknowledge Connie’s co-authorship in an endnote, not on the opening banner. 

This enraged me, to the extent that I nearly pulled the article. When I spoke to Connie, she was also upset at the disrespectful way in which she was treated. However, she suggested that the story was too important not to tell. As a result, she said, she was willing to relegate herself to becoming ‘a footnote’, as she put it. And that is how the article was published (although, pleasingly, it was subsequently republished by the Globe and Mail, adding both our names as authors, and misspelling my name!)

The Conversation’s authorship policy seems, to me, to be misguided. It fails to recognize the important democratization of expertise that is central to community engaged research. Co-authorship between accredited academics and community based experts should be acknowledged. This is not simply on ethical grounds, but also reflective of the important scholarship that can only be realized through CER. We would have failed to fully understand the regulation of homeless people’s belongings had we not had close relationships with the experts – those people experiencing the process of dispossession. 

Given the increased scope and scholarly recognition of CER, The Conversation also risks alienating emergent CER scholars, many of them Indigenous and racialized. They are unlikely to seek out The Conversation as a space to publish their work, to the detriment of all.