Moving Beyond The Academy: Presenting Data To Advocates
Animal exploitation industries spend large amounts of money on research and development so that they can better “sell” their message that animals are objects for consumption, rather than individuals who deserve to live free from harm. Unfortunately, the animal protection movement does not have the resources to conduct the same type of research. Faunalytics tries to fill the gap, not only by conducting research, but also by consolidating the research of others that relates to the animal advocacy cause.
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There is good research out there to support animal advocacy issues. The problem is that most advocates cannot access it or do not know how to access it. I have previously written about the gap between advocacy and research and I identified the problem as being both on the part of advocates and researchers.
“Academics are not widely producing work that is of use to advocates. Furthermore, advocates are not accessing the research that is crucial to improving their effectiveness. This issue is two-fold. Researchers and academics need to make their work useful, available, and understandable to advocates. This is arguably the bigger issue, and where the most work must be done.”
The onus is on the researcher to do more to get their research to advocates. I say this because they have been privileged with training and access to resources that most people cannot have. I also say this as a researcher myself, so I share the responsibility (as does Faunalytics) to make research accessible to animal advocates.
In fact, most of Faunalytic’s work is focused on bringing research to advocates. However, we also work to help academics and researchers make their work relevant to advocates. We do this in many ways—by allowing researchers to have full access to the data sets we create and publishing new research datasets expressly for use by advocates. We also strive to give talks at conferences to help researchers and academics learn useful ways of communicating with advocates.
We recently produced a webinar based on a talk at the 2012 Institute for Critical Animal Studies Conference that discusses ways to present data to advocates. If you are a researcher of human-animal studies or critical animal studies, I hope you will take a look. One of the main focuses of the talk addresses how to effectively present data visually. If nothing else, please check out this blog post that summarizes many of the free online tools for creating easy-to-understand visuals to represent data.