Author: Anthony Ocampo, PhD
Whether in the sciences or humanities, academics are so specialized in their niche that they often forget how to convey their knowledge to a general public. In fact, in academia, your success is predicated on your ability to be in conversation with other experts, not everyday people.
When we’re doing our PhDs, we are trained to be in conversation with “the literature,” but we’re not trained to contextualize our research within the broader marketplace of ideas, where we’re competing for the time and attention of people outside the ivory tower. One of my friends, a journalist at NPR, once told me, “Whenever I interview an academic, I always have to repeat the same question: ‘Okay, now how would you say that, but to a normal person?’”
Academics often ask me: How have you been able to share your research as a sociologist with public audiences on platforms like NPR, Los Angeles Times, or The Atlantic? If I had to hypothesize the biggest contributing factor, it’s that I’ve always followed one rule of thumb: Care as much about the sentences and storytelling as you do the sociology.
A few years ago, I took a mental health break from academia, I skipped academic conferences for a couple of years and instead took creative nonfiction writing classes.
I didn’t always see the value of formally studying creative writing. Part of it had to do with my socialization as a PhD student. We learned very quickly to read for function, not the experience. We mastered how to skim readings so that we could mine the main argument. In the final years of the PhD, as we prepared for the academic job market, we were told we had to publish peer-reviewed articles in academic journals in order to land a tenure-track job.
Still, a looming thought kept occupying my mind as I started to publish my research: Would my friends and family be able to understand my work? The answer was no.
My book editor gave me my first lesson in creative writing. “You gotta get the reader to want to turn the page,” she said. This advice was antithetical to the logic of article writing, where the key takeaways of a research study are laid out in the opening pages, like spoilers to a movie.
The job of the sociologist is to use research to accurately render the human condition. But because it’s a discipline built on studying social problems, “the literature” that centers people of color, queer and trans people, and other marginalized communities also tends to focus on trauma. The field too incentivizes trauma-driven narratives: Sociologists don’t get six-figure research grants, fellowships, and tenure-track jobs to study joy and laughter within marginalized communities.
But the reality remains: Alongside trauma, we experience joy; we laugh. Traditional sociology, in my experience, couldn’t capture the full humanity of the communities I was part of; by design, academia constrained that storytelling. Which is why, out of personal necessity, I turned to creative writing. I wanted to write another kind of literature.
Creative writing has freed me. Memoirs were my blueprints to help navigate systems of power. Fiction helped me reimagine my future when the present felt unbearable. Poems shepherded me to—and through—unknowable things. Ultimately, creative writing has made me a better sociologist; the tools it offers me—dialogue, sensory detail, rhythm, pace, the speculative—means I can render the beautifully messy contradictions of the human condition, especially for those who are systematically dehumanized.