Short Course 4

Overview

Geological issues are increasingly intruding on the everyday lives of ordinary people. Whether it is the onshore extraction of oil and gas, the subsurface injection of waters for geothermal power or the deep storage of waste products, communities across the world are being confronted with controversial geological interventions beneath their backyards. Communicating these complex scientific and technical issues is made more challenging by the general public’s unfamiliarity with the geological realm. To address these challenges, geoscientists need to design and develop new strategies to engage dissonant publics.

Those strategies will require geoscientists to engage more effectively with journalists and the wider media, to target their messaging at those audiences most able to effect change, and to establish trusted relationships with the end-user communities they are working with. But at the heart of the communication challenge is how geoscientists can be better communicators.

With that in mind, the course will provide practical experience in creating more compelling, impactful messages and to get those messages out more effectively. Building on a better understanding of the media landscape and working with journalists and media professionals, the session will help develop practical learning on how to use story-telling, visual imagery and social media channels to create more engaging geoscience media content. Practical insights from story-telling, film-making, and visualisation offer ways to improve the impact of our technical and scientific communications (research papers, conference presentations), facilitate the interchange of ideas with different disciplines (e.g. with engineers, management), ease our interaction with journalists and other external stakeholder groups, and showcase what we do more widely to the public.