Navigating Research Misappropriation and Mischaracterization: Facilitating a Workshop on Strategies

From medicine to medieval studies, there is a growing trend of ideologically motivated individuals and groups misappropriating and mischaracterizing academic research and even intimidating researchers to further political agendas. It is essential that researchers be well prepared in the event that their research gets unwanted attention. To that end, I created and facilitated a workshop for faculty and graduate students on how to prepare for and respond to instances when their research gets misappropriated or mischaracterized to push an unsupported ideological narrative. Strategies covered in the workshop included utilizing undergraduate classrooms to gauge how one’s research might be understood by and explained to a relatively uninitiated audience; employing citation-tracking and social-media tools for keeping current on the research in one’s field; and identifying and explaining the grains of truth in misperceptions of research and the larger social and political context in which misperceptions, mischaracterizations, and misappropriations occur.