​​​The Conversation Africa is to present its popular science communication workshop on 21 November 2019 (09:00 – 12:00). The 3-hour workshop is open to established academic staff, post-doctoral fellows and PhD candidates.

A partnership between Stellenbosch University and The Conversation Africa (TC Africa) – whose mission it is to mainstream science engagement and to support science communication activities, the workshop is an exciting interactive session to help academics refine and improve how they communicate to non-academic audiences. 

The workshop empowers scientists to pitch their articles and establish the key message when writing for the general public. The skills taught at the workshop will help researchers increase their research visibility and impact.

Martin Viljoen, Manager: Media, says that communication with and through the media is not without its challenges, but it remains an excellent and exciting way of building your research profile and broadening teaching and research horizons."

A maximum of 25 people can attend the workshop with the venue to be confirmed.

Facilitating the workshop will be members of TC Africa editorial team – Candice Bailey and Nontobeko Mtshali who have extensive experience in the media world. 

To date 209 SU staff wrote 297 articles for The Conversation.

• Please liaise with Martin Viljoen at tel 021 808 4921, email media@sun.ac.za for more information.

MORE ABOUT THE CONVERSATION: 

The Conversation is a not-for-profit agency serving universities and the research sector in Africa. TC Africa's mission is to mainstream science engagement and support science communication activities. They do this by working with academics and scientists, who themselves write and provide evidence/research-based analytical articles on various societal issues AND articles about their research findings as well. Our editors then work with academics and researchers to publish these short and punchy articles, +/- 800 words. Articles are only published upon author sign-off. The objective is to make the knowledge produced in the academy accessible, easy to understand and freely available for the public and policy makers. Articles are published daily on our website - https://theconversation.com/africa . Publishing under a Creative Commons License, all articles are open access. All articles can be republished by other media. Since launching in May 2015 over 2 000 academics and researchers have contributed and cumulatively all their articles have now reached over 40-million reads globally - talk about escaping the ivory tower!

The workshop facilitators:

Candice Bailey worked as an investigative journalist at the Johannesburg-based civil society organisation Corruption Watch. She has also been a reporter in the newsrooms of several weekly and daily national newspapers, most recently the Sunday Independent and Johannesburg Star newspaper.

Nontobeko Mtshali has over 12 years' experience in the news media and communications industries in South Africa. She was a freelance writer before joining The Conversation Africa and prior to that she worked at a communications agency as a content producer. She has also worked as a researcher and as a journalist specialising in education with the national, daily newspaper, The Star.