This week’s PARTICIPATE visibility workshop turned into an honest conversation about what it really means to be visible in academia—and why many of us struggle with it.
Danish researcher and academic coach Sanne Frandsen recently ran a workshop about researcher visibility. Frandsen asked a number of questions and for this PARTICIPATE event Anne Schiffer took us through a similar series of questions and thoughts about visibility.
First Anne asked the room why visibility even matters. Very quickly, themes emerged: wanting our expertise to be known, connecting with others in our field, making our research useful, and ensuring that our work actually has impact beyond conferences and journals.
But the bigger question was: why can visibility be so difficult?
People talked about time pressures, discomfort with “showing off”, imposter syndrome, fear of online trolling (especially for women), and an overwhelming dislike of social media. Others said they weren’t sure where their work “fit” internally or felt pigeonholed by colleagues who only saw one slice of their expertise.
We then explored “hiding strategies”. Sanne talks about 6 hiding strategies that may or may not apply to you.
- This before that (e.g. I can’t talk about my work on social media before I have done the conference presentation)
- Designing at the whiteboard (e.g. I have made brilliant plans to become more visible but never act on those plans)
- Overcomplicating and endless polishing (e.g. if what I share with colleagues and it’s not perfect I might get ridiculed)
- Curating others’ ideas(e.g. sharing what other people do instead of what you do)
- Omitting your own story (e.g. Sanne who is now pretty widely known for her coaching of women academics was at an event at her institution where an external visitor talked about how she’d benefitted from Sanne’s sessions and her close colleague who sat next to her had no idea what she was talking about but Sanne had not shared this part of her story)
- Evermore education or reading (e.g. I can’t possible write something about this top before I have made sure I have read absolutely everything about it).
Many of us felt a sense of familiarity with at least some of these strategies – like endless polishing, planning but never posting, prioritising everything else first. As a consequence, people can feel overlooked, stuck, misunderstood, or simply… invisible.
Although, as someone pointed out in the workshop, invisibility can be great for work-life balance as it means less requests to do things on top of one’s regular workload, like paper reviews or funding application assessments!
The discussion shifted when Anne asked everyone to share one thing they had done recently to be more visible. There were many small but meaningful wins: updating staff profiles, giving talks, sending good reviewer comments to managers, following up on collaborations, organising exhibitions, even improving email signatures. Small steps – and they mattered.
We ended with a useful exercise: drafting a personal academic mission statement following the template:
“I use [methodology/framework]
to study [population/phenomenon or context]
in order to [add the change you want to see in the world].”
Anne’s resulting new academic mission statement was:
I use people-centred design
to study place and lived experience of resource scarcity
in order to improve equitable and just access to energy and water.
Even half‑formed, these statements helped people articulate the essence of their work and the change they want to make.
If the workshop revealed anything, it’s that visibility isn’t about shouting louder – it’s more about being intentional, and a little braver. And often it’s simply about telling the person sitting next to you what you’re already doing.
(Photo credit: by Tim Reckmann on ccnull)