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Collaborating to bring about change

• Video transcript

  [Name caption: Pollyanna Ruiz – Professor of Media and Cultural Studies]
  
  Pollyanna: My research addresses a number of problems. So the big overarching problem is how do groups that perceive themselves to be a minority, who perceive themselves to not have power, or to be excluded from public debate in different ways, what strategies and tactics do they use to make themselves heard in the public space, in the public arena?

  There isn't a single way in which protesters can best communicate, that will depend on the context they're in, who they are, who they're talking to, what resources they have available to them, but I hope that my research enables protesters and actually people who want to hear protesters or people who want to hear dissenting voices, think about how they can best bridge that communicative gap. I hope that it enables ideas to move from that kind of edge of society, the margins, the fringe and into the mainstream where they can be debated and decisions can be made.

  An example of a group that I've worked with recently would be the Long Live. 

  South Bank campaign in London. So they're a group of skaters who wanted to continue using a piece of land underneath the South Bank Centre and I worked very closely with them over a number of years and from that project we were always  going to produce an academic article, which is what I do, that's my job, but we also wanted to produce something which would be useful beyond the world of academia and so we made a 20-minute film really, really in close collaboration with the skaters and this film was incredibly useful  to them. So they would send the film to councils or to directors of institutions, to anybody they wanted to communicate with and the film made a quite a complex argument but it made it in a very accessible way. We've had feedback from people we worked with, who talked about how working with us lifted the ideas out of the dynamics that were on the ground that they were very embedded in and felt very passionately about and it enabled them to see things slightly more clearly, slightly at a distance and in a way that was helpful to them. 

  So I think that kind of lifting out of ideas is  really, really helpful and I think that having an academic group give them research which they can then go away and use in different contexts that has been produced by an academic group, according to particular kind of research standards, research methodologies, is a very valuable thing for them.

  [END CARD.UK Research and Innovation logo. ÅÝܽ¶ÌÊÓƵ logo].

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