Broadcast
Academic books get very little attention from outside their specialist area unless they’re about something we can all relate to.
Jacqui Bealing, Senior Press Officer
Professor Ben Highmore’s The Great Indoors, an engaging rummage through our domestic interiors, was an obvious candidate for a wider audience and garnered reviews across the media this month. A few news outlets - the Daily Mail (10 January), the Guardian (16 January) and BBC Sussex (13 January) - even remembered that he was an academic and gave Sussex a name-check.
Similarly, Professor Gordon Harold’s new co-authored book Parental conflict: Outcomes and interventions for children and families tapped into the nation’s guilt complexes and troubled memories and attracted wide media interest from, among others, Sky News, BBC Sussex and the Daily Mail (all 29 January).
We’ve also seen research stories getting another bite at the cherry. Dr Sophie Forster’s focus on mind wandering, which received some attention when published last summer, came back into the public’s consciousness when she was interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s ‘All in the Mind’ (8 January) and repeated for the BBC World Service’s ‘Health Check’ (23 January). A piece also ran in The Times (14 January).
Dr Ian Wakeman’s innovative software for connecting smartphones in sports stadia scored well last summer and then went up a league this month with the announcement that he has received development funding from the Royal Academy of Engineering. The Times, the Argus and the Daily Telegraph all ran the story (28 January).
Meanwhile, several academics have been making the most of opportunities to get their views and expertise out there on some of the big media blogs.
Among them are Dr Rumy Hassan writing on Al Jazeera (24 January) about the changing attitudes in the UK to race and immigration; Professor Dan Hough examining UKIP’s chances for The Conversation (17 January); Dr Adrian Smith writing about democratising technology on the Guardian’s political science blog (22 January); and Professor Dave Goulson writing for The Conversation on his neonicotinoid research.
For more on the past month’s media activity, see Sussex in the News