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By Patriann Smith

At the start of 2024, Scientia Global, an international platform that opens dialogue between science and society, published a lay article about my work on X (formerly Twitter), amassing a viewership of over half a million.

Attention to one of my academic articles that it referenced was itself almost immediately transformed: the piece shifted into the 99th percentile and was ranked in the top five percent of over 25 million research outputs across all sources, according to Altmetric. In fact, it held the top spot out of 198 research outputs that Altmetric has since tracked from Cambridge University Press’ Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (ARAL) where it was published, scoring higher than 99 percent of its peers.

Devoted as I am to understanding the dynamic connection of academics to the lay public, these altmetrics greatly intrigued me. In academia, much time and energy are devoted to our highly regarded top-tier, high-impact scholarly journals, sometimes requiring scholars to spend years working towards preparing an article for dissemination, only to recognise that the readership largely failed to match up to the expectation.

While relevance and timeliness influence which scholarly articles make it to the big leagues, I was becoming increasingly aware that a broad corpus of research in such journals — widely read or not — were often only accessible to the very scholars that were already part of the echo chambers within which I was conversing. “If I am a public scholar working infinitely for the public good,” I thought, “why is it that most of my research is either inaccessible or will never be read by a lay audience?”

Instead of publishing for impact based on academia, what if I could connect with broad and diverse audiences — the very people whose realities continued to inform my research life? What if I could write for the human in each and all of us?

As a deeply abstract thinker, this research goal presented me with the greatest challenge. I struggled to naturally construct sentences that were not complex, and found it difficult to wrap up a sentence unless it was six lines long. I know that my writing can still come across heavily to readers.

It quickly became clear that the journey would require a lot more than merely identifying avenues for writing and connecting with the public. It would demand a new way of thinking, living, being, doing, and working in translation and in conjunction with the beating heart of multiple and diverse audiences. Was I up to the task?

I submitted a piece to the International Literacy Association’s Literacy Today magazine. The editors were gracious, helping me translate my thoughts so that more people could understand my research. Via my Research Gate profile, the article began to gain traction with a broader, though still fairly limited audience — certainly not half a million, but a great start for a budding “translation” academic enthusiast. And so, I tried again.

The Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (FABBS) asked me to write a blog post about a 2016 piece I had published in the journal Policy Insights for the Behavioral and Brain Sciences. I renamed it and, third time being the charm, was invited by the London Society of Economics (LSE) United States American Politics and Policy (USAPP) blog to write about research I had recently published. These international outlets aligned with my focus as an immigrant and transnational scholar with Caribbean origins. I was thrilled!

Having published the links to these and subsequent posts on social media channels, I was determined to see how the public engaged with the content. What caught their attention? Did they respond to the ideas? What did they choose to share? What questions did they ask?

From this informal, anecdotal research process, I could see there was significant room for improvement. How could I get individuals across various spheres, whose emphasis was not transnationalism, immigration or racialisation, to read and engage with the material?

I would come to see that in writing for scholars, I had to leave myself behind. Like being confined to the ivory tower, this required a relinquishing and an intentional embracing of vulnerability. I needed to make myself seen. Even as I shared intellectual findings, I could be human. Someone once told me she felt more connected to me when I spoke rather than wrote. How could I bring the relatability of my speaking into the writing process and thereby transform it?

This was how I came to embark on a freeing of the mind and self via a newfound partnership with Global Voices (GV), which constantly strives to maximise its readership not only in terms of content, but also by way of translation into various languages — not to mention its capacity to connect using knowledge that caters to individuals perceived as originating from the “Global South” as much as those with roots in the “Global North.” My first two pieces for GV were thoroughly edited based on these and other aspects such as tag lines, titles, and keywords, resulting in pieces that laypeople across geographies found it easy to access and pleasant to read.

In fact, it was because of my learning from Global Voices that I came to unapologetically write a piece on Black immigrants in the United States and another “not so lay” article in the  Journal of Language and Literacy Education.

For me, the journey of translating academic research for wider audiences does not always result in a massive viewership, but it does not need to. In the various communities with which academics connect daily, I find it increasingly important that the research I share with colleagues becomes a part of how I engage with the world.