Once you have identified the other stakeholders pertinent to your area of interest, you’ll need to start thinking about how you might build a relationship with some of them.

Some of this involves logistical questions— where are they located? How can you reach them? When is it appropriate to cold call/email? What events could you go to to build relationships.

In our hyper-specialized world, we also face jargon and epistemic barriers. You can’t simply approach a non-profit with phenomenological jargon, even if phenomenological insights may offer a great deal of support to a non-profit’s work.

Jargon-Translation Exercise: In this exercise, you will think about how you currently describe your interests, and how to unpack this to different stakeholders. You will also do more research on some of the stakeholders that you’ve identified. What terms do they use to describe the problem? What kinds of knowledge do you have vs. them? What kinds of knowledge do your specialized methodologies aim to uncover, and what role does each of them play in illuminating your praxis-question?

We will also talk in this exercise about the ethics of knowledge sharing/translation. How can we be sure we aren’t dominating with our own epistemic assumptions/norms, but be both genuinely open and responsibly critical of other ways of thinking/solving problems?