The Lange Nacht der Forschung – long night of research – is a biennial event here in Austria where various academic institutions come together to open up to the general public. This year’s LNF was held on 24 May.  Throughout the evening, an array of stalls and a programme of talks– over 500 items and 50 locations in Vienna alone - give attendees a showcase of what Austrian institutions’ researchers are working on and help them discover more about some of the wide array of academic disciplines on display.

Events like this are a very good way to give a window onto Iranian studies to parts of the public, but they present some real challenges too. For a field like ours, it is an opportunity to give people insight onto the diverse areas of research represented at the institute in a way that presupposes little prior knowledge and is as engaging as possible, both for children and for adults. The stalls should be eye-catching and convey information concisely. In this blogpost we describe how we presented our work at the LNF 2024.

Finding a basis for communication with the public was one of the most important tasks of the event. Researchers spend most of our time thinking about highly specific topics, and we can struggle to communicate our ideas even with other researchers in adjacent fields. To communicate with the public, who have no reason to know about Iranian kingship under the Mongols or deadjectival verb formation, or any of the many other things we do at the IFI, an event like this is both a challenge and an opportunity to find new ways to articulate what we do.

It can be tempting for academics to focus on the information content of a display: we are, after all, used to trying to communicate with subject experts or students who are primarily interested in the information. Having activities that people can physically engage with, however, often stands out to people far more than trying to remember a block of text, especially in a situation where people might have seen tens of stalls if they were going around Vienna through the evening and the diversity of information can become overwhelming.

Using activities helps provide a more direct window onto that information. Fine motor skills were required for trying out the different kinds of scripts used in the Iranian world throughout history: we provided transliterated alphabets for Old Persian (written in Persian cuneiform, a type of syllabary), Farsi (written with a version of the Arabic alphabet or “abjad”), Sanskrit (Devanagari, an “abugida”) and Bactrian (written in the Greek alphabet), among others. Trying to write their names in different scripts allowed our visitors to gain an understanding of the principles that underly different writing systems, but also of the cultural connections underpinning the spread of these systems across the Iranosphere.

Sitting down and playing a medieval game of chess, meanwhile, put people more directly in the seat of people in premodern western Asia who would have played the game with much the same rules – though it comes with risks of misconceptions, this shared practice across cultures and times can be a very powerful tool for building empathetic curiosity.   It can also provide a better route for people to remember and re-learn information - we gave out fliers with basic medieval Persian chess rules so people could try the classic game with their own sets at home, for example.

Some final thoughts to remember about public engagement in these sorts of events: first, we should remember its limits. The people who visit the LNF are a self-selecting part of the public, so what we have discussed here are the challenges of communicating with people who already actively want to hear about research and find out new things, and who have the time and space to engage with what we do. As such, it’s only one part of a successful programme for engaging beyond academia, though it is an important and useful one.