Last weekend, I had the opportunity to work at a conference in my field. Even though I wasn’t presenting my research, I still networked with researchers, teachers, and publishers and got the chance to talk about the history research I’m doing through the Brackenridge Fellowship. Throughout this experience, I realized that the way I explained my research was significantly different based on the people I was talking with. With a publisher who was familiar with the popular primary sources about Atlantic piracy during the early modern period, I emphasized how my work reconsiders the connections between piracy and climate change in those sources. With a professor whose research centers the intersections between politics and ecology in Jamaica’s banana industry, I discussed the impacts of climate change on shifts in policy about piracy in early modern New England.
With audiences outside of my field, it’s more difficult to convey the purpose and significance of history research, especially when it centers figures like pirates whose agency has been obscured by centuries of mischaracterization in popular media. With the researchers and publishers in early modern Atlantic history that I spoke with last weekend, I found it relatively easy to describe the importance of studying early modern Atlantic piracy from an environmental perspective, but with people who are outside of my field and/or aren’t in academia at all, it’s difficult to communicate the significance of both pirate studies and climate history in a short conversation or abstract.
To communicate my work to broad audiences, I usually attempt to draw connections between early modern climate change and modern climate change and describe how understanding the impacts of climate change on how societies viewed and labeled pirates 400 years ago can help us understand the impacts of climate change on ideas of morality, community, and international relationships today. However, when I have more time to get an idea of the background knowledge and interest level my audience brings to a conversation, I also try to connect my work with what they may already know about climate history or Atlantic piracy. For example, older family members of mine remember being taught about the “torrid, temperate, and frigid zones” (an outdated idea connecting climate to work ethic that white Europeans used to support their imagined racial hierarchy), so when I explain my work on climatic influences on British perceptions of pirates, I build off the knowledge my family members already have about historical connections between climate and morality.
Because I want to go into higher education as a professor and researcher, I will have to interact with a variety of people outside of my immediate field. Just within a college campus, I will have to communicate my work to audiences with varying levels of interest and knowledge about my topic, from administrators to academics in different disciplines to undergraduate students. For these audiences, I think it is more important to emphasize how understanding historical reactionary politics in an environmental context can help us demystify how current climate change impacts relationships on every level, from interpersonal to international. Even as an undergraduate, these sorts of interdisciplinary conversations with multiple perspectives has been really helpful to make my work more impactful. Instead of messages getting lost in translation, communicating my research to diverse audiences has helped me find a lot of meaning!
