In this episode of Publish Not Perish: The Podcast, we’re tackling one of the most challenging questions in academic writing: why does your research actually matter? Not just within your subfield or to a handful of experts, but to the world beyond it.
This episode is a continuation of the newsletter I sent out earlier this week:
Why Should Anyone Care About Your Research?
As academics, we’re trained to justify our research by demonstrating how it builds on and contributes to existing scholarly conversations—whether by diverging from, expanding on, or revising earlier work. We get good at explaining our work’s significance within our field. We can cite the right theorists, position ourselve…
In this episode today, I revisit four deceptively simple questions I shared in that newsletter—about who’s affected by your research, what might change if people saw it differently, what larger pattern it reveals, and who beyond academia might need this knowledge—and explore what makes them so challenging to answer.
This isn’t about adding another checklist to your writing process; it’s about uncovering the deeper meaning behind your work and reconnecting with why you started it in the first place.
Along the way, I share my own struggles with significance, the resistance that surfaces when we ask hard questions, and why sitting in that discomfort is often where the most powerful insights emerge.
