Communicating the Social Impacts of AI. With Nat Kendall-Taylor

Our guest today is Dr Nat Kendall-Taylor. Nat received his PhD in Anthropology at UCLA and in 2008 he joined the FrameWorks Institute, a non-profit research organisation in Washington, D.C., where he is now the CEO.

FrameWorks uses rigorous social science methods to study how people understand complex social issues such as climate change, justice reform, and the impact of poverty on early childhood development. It develops evidence-based techniques that help researchers, advocates, and practitioners explain them more effectively.

Nat explains what drew him from pre-med to anthropology. He did his PhD at UCLA because of the Anthropology department's "unapologetic focus on applied anthropology". His fieldwork in Kenya on children with seizure disorders explored the question of why so few sought biomedical treatment. His experience there, working with public health officials and others, demonstrated the value of understanding culture, the importance of multi-modal transdisciplinary perspectives, and the often "counterintuitive and frequently frustrating nature of communications when you're trying to do this kind of cross-cultural work".

For the past 18 months, FrameWorks has worked on how to frame and communicate the social impacts of artificial intelligence.  The project came to FrameWorks through their long-term collaboration with the MacArthur Foundation when it became clear that some of their Grantees "had been having a lot of difficulty advancing their ideas" about algorithmic justice to the general public. The project has explored "the cultural models, the deep patterns of reasoning that either make it hard for people to appreciate the social implications" of AI as well as how to allow people to "engage with the issue in helpful and meaningful ways". The report will be publicly available on the FrameWorks website.

As Nat explains, if the public "doesn't understand what the thing is [artificial intelligence] that you are claiming has pernicious negative impacts on certain groups of people, then it becomes very hard to have a meaningful conversation about what those are, who is affected".  This is compounded when "people don't really have a sense what structural or systemic racism means outside of a few issues, how that might work and what the outcomes of that might be."

Nat says their work "suggests that it is a responsibility, it's an obligation, for those who understand how these things work to bring the public along, and to deepen people's understanding of how [for example] using algorithms to make resourcing decisions...can be seriously problematic".

Nat recommends three books (Metaphors We Live By, Finding Culture in Talk, and Cultural Models in Language and Thought) and ends with a call for more anthropologists to work outside the academy where they can also do impactful work.

Read an edited excerpt [PDF] of this interview.

You can follow Nat on Twitter at @natkendallt and connect with him on LinkedIn. FrameWorks are on Twitter @FrameWorksInst.

Update: FrameWorks published “Communicating About the Social Implications of AI: A FrameWorks Strategic B

Transcript

Dawn Walter: Welcome to the Response-ability.Tech, podcast, formerly known, as the Anthropology + Technology Conference. I'm Dawn Walter, the founder of the Summit.

Our guest today is Dr Nat Kendall-Taylor who is an anthropologist and CEO of the Frameworks Institute, which is a non-profit research organisation in the United States. Frameworks uses rigorous social science methods to study how people understand complex social issues such as climate change and justice reform, and it develops evidence-based techniques that help researchers, advocates, and practitioners explain those issues more effectively. We explore Nat's background and how he came to be at Frameworks, the work that Frameworks does, and we talk about the project that Frameworks has been working on for the past year, which is how to frame and communicate the social impacts of artificial intelligence. We hope you enjoy the show.

Read an edited excerpt of this interview: https://response-ability.tech/communicating-the-social-impacts-of-ai-more-effectively. The full interview (AI-transcribed) is below.

Dawn: So, welcome Nat. Thank you so much for joining us. How are you today? 

Nat Kendall-Taylor: I'm doing well. Nice to be here. 

Dawn Walter: So let's start with your background, you're a medical Anthropologist. And you joined Frameworks and 2008. Can you tell us a bit about your journey? Why you chose to study anthropology and what drew you to Frameworks? 

Nat Kendall-Taylor: Sure. So I'll go back a little, a little ways. I guess. I was a undergraduate student at a school in Atlanta, Georgia called Emory University. Which has unbeknownst to me a very robust for field anthropology department, but also really strong and psychologically anthropology. I went into undergrad being interested like I feel like most undergrads are in, you know, going pre-med as they say and then kind of enrolled in those courses and was forced to take an elective in anthropology and loved that so much. Better than any of the other courses that I was taking, ditched all of my pre-med courses and really doubled down and focused on on anthropology and in particular studied with an anthropologist named Bradd Shore who's one of the founders of a theory that is at the heart of what we do at Frameworks called cultural models theory and took some absolutely fascinating courses with with Bradd and was within, you know, first semester sophomore year, totally totally in and not interested in anything else. 

Dawn: So what did you love so much about anthropology? Because that's a really big shift, isn't if you're going, you've got pre-med and then...

Nat: I think it's a super good question. I don't know if I have a super good answer for it, but I'll try I think some of it comes from the fact that my father's an academic. He's a psychologist and does international longitudinal early childhood psychology and had kind of a series of postdocs with whom he worked. He was at Case Western University in a city called Cleveland in Ohio in the United States in the Midwest and a number of these postdocs, who he would be studying with came from abroad. A number of them actually from East Africa, one in particular, who spent a lot of time at our house and I would just, I think it was, you know, at a formative time during adolescence being around these folks who worked on the same thing that my father did, but clearly saw the issues in such different and kind of dramatically  different ways. I think that was probably it. I also have just always been interested in kind of travel and being an outsider, I guess. And the kind of view and the perspective that that affords, which is what obviously what anthropology is is all about. So I majored in anthropology as an undergrad, knew quickly that I was interested in going to graduate school. Went to graduate school at University of California Los Angeles UCLA primarily again for their focus in psychological anthropology, medical anthropology, but also, unlike a lot of other universities unapologetic, relatively unapologetic, focus on applied anthropology at the idea that anthropology could and does have implications in value to the real world. Kind of outside of the outside of the walls of the Ivory Tower. In a particular worked with a guy named Tom Weisner, who was very prominent psychological anthropologist. But also which this next bit I think is rare in the academy, someone who saw applied anthropology kind of on equal footing on equal level as people who went into into the academy. He had done a lot of applied research on social issues, one project in particular, called Higher Ground, which was this really cool mixed methods project in Milwaukee, which looked at kind of Economic and employment supports and tried to understand how different families were using those supports in different ways and the anthropological perspective was a vital piece of that. So that was that was what got me did to graduate school took courses in all four fields of anthropology, but really the kind of cultural and within that psychological and medical stuff seemed just really interesting to me again in particular because that was the area that I could see kind of direct applied. I did my dissertation in Kenya on the Swahili Coast in between Mombasa, Melinda in a little town called Khalifa and studied the question of studied paediatric epilepsy. So children with dr. Of seizure disorders and explored the question of why so few of them sought biomedical treatment. So there's a large number of kids with epilepsy in East Africa. Primarily because it's one of the most malaria Lee endemic areas in the world and early onset. Malaria can lead to seizure disorders, ongoing seizure disorders and kids but a very very small percentage of those children. Despite biomedical biomedicine being in the east African context relatively available. Lots of clinics, prescribing a tip anti-epilepsy drugs, very robust, local hospital, but only a very small percentage of those children. And family saw biomedical treatment and instead spent inordinate amounts of money on traditional healing. And so that was kind of the the conundrum. I'm a lot of the factors that public health folks would typically look at distance to treatment opportunity cost of attending. Cost of Transportation of all of those factors were relatively well subsidized. Actually, there were programs allowed families to receive money vouchers for accommodation and transport and drugs were heavily subsidized yet so few kids went and the answer to, spoiler alert, is the culture really matters, right? What parents and families and communities believed was causing epilepsy, which was not lesions on your brain, kind of stuff in this in the spirit realm was not addressed by taking a tab was not addressed by taking a series of anti-epilepsy drugs. And so the models, the understanding of the causation of the condition was shaping and affecting people's perception of appropriate and effective treatment. Again to most anthropologists that would seem like a no-brainer. But to folks working with the best of intentions to try to improve the lives of these kids and their families the idea that, you know, there was something other than kind of instrumental economic rational actor kind of things going on in this situation was pretty remarkable. And so that research was used to design collaborative programs with traditional healers and biomedicine in a number of areas throughout sub-Saharan Africa, which has had improvements in terms of the way that that kids reductions in the frequency and the severity of seizures.

Dawn: Was that the point at which your interest was kind of peaked in terms of the messaging, how you communicate or think those sort of things, particularly in the sort of Public Health realm. Had you heard about Frameworks at this point?

Nat: Yeah. This was before Frameworks. That was the point where there were a number of kind of interest that were peaked. As you said, one, was the fact that we can study culture and how it influences thinking, and use that in a way that can again to be kind of dramatic to that improved. People's lives, that that improves people's well-being, kids and families. And communities to the fact that these kinds of Applied issues require multiple perspectives. Not just anthropological one, but it requires public. In this case Public Health people psychologists who are doing assessments and designing Healthcare kind of delivery mechanisms to be working together. That's something that when I get to talking about Frameworks is really at the core of what we do and then Third, as you said, the kind of communications piece that you couldn't just tell people, they were wrong. That the Kaaba that epilepsy was not actually caused by an Yago. And that what they needed was to take this tab, you know, at this time every day three times a day, but that was not an effective mode of communication that that wasn't leading. So the kinds of outcomes that people wanted. So this kind of Applied value of understanding and studying culture, this kind of multimodal transdisciplinary perspective and then the importance of and kind of the counterintuitive and frequently frustrating nature of communications when you're trying to do this kind of cultural or cross-cultural work. Yeah. That was really a key, a key point. I would say and then I My dissertation and traveled with my wife to Central Asia, where I did some other work and Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan on some really different issues, child marriage practices and higher education. And then got to the point where we were coming back and I needed to find a job and then that same adviser Tom Weisner had studied and lived in DC for a year University of California has a campus in Washington DC. Actually, during that time had met the founder of Frameworks. And he alerted me that they were hiring kind of their first batch of social scientists. This was in 2008. And I think I did one of the interviews from Kazakhstan and one from London and I got a job and came back and started in summer of  2008.

Dawn: This is probably a good point at which you can tell us about about Frameworks, you know, what does it do? The work and the research that you do there, and I know that you anthropologists and other social scientists obviously work there. So I'd like you to tell us about what their role is and what sort of work they do.

Nat: So Frameworks, has about a has a staff of about 25, we're currently hiring. So it'll probably in the next six months grow grow slightly, but significantly, and it sounds totally weird to say, but it does the same thing that I did on the Swahili Coast of Kenya studying epilepsy and family well-being which is to say that it is centrally concerned with two research questions. One being how two people drawn culture to make sense of complex, social issues. The work that I do now is not on epilepsy, but it's on, you know, how do people make sense of justice reform, of Education, of climate change, of public health issues, poverty of early childhood development. Of a wide range of issues. So, how do people use culture drawing on that theory of cultural models? How do they use heuristics and mental models and patterns of reasoning frequently without knowing it to make sense of these issues. So that's kind of the first question that we take on on all of our projects. And the idea there is that if you can gain some understanding of what those structures of meaning, to be a little bit wonky, what those things are, how people reason about these issues then you can position communications and message in ways that kind of open up space for people to think productively about those issues. Rather than or you can avoid those cues or patterns of information patterns of presentation of information that so quickly close people down to those issues. And then we do empirical work on framing. So we look at the way that the choices that you make, and how you position information about use that, you use the metaphor metaphors, that you choose the messengers, that endorse ideas and speak out on issues, how all of those choices, big and small effect, what people do as a result, how they think, how they feel. And what they choose to do as a result of hearing, Information. So instead of the kinds of outcomes that I was interested in and Kenya, which were kind of, can you understand why taking a tab might be effective. Can you feel less frustrated and put off by bio medical doctors. Are you willing to, you know, go to clinic and pursue treatments and collaborations with, you know, biomedical Doctors and traditional healers. Now we're interested in, can we get people to kind of open up and consider new ways of improving education. Can we get people to be more supportive of preventive policies on substance use? And we measure those empirically through in this kind of gets to the different perspectives on our team, through both qualitative and quantitative experimental methods. And so the answer to the question of why we have so many disciplines represented on our staff from anthropologists, sociologists, political scientist, to linguist, to social psychologists is because those processes of meaning making, which is really what communication is about. How do people understand issues. How did the way that we talk about them effect that understanding are incredibly complicated? And I think frequently people don't really appreciate the complexity of that act of that process of communication and I think that's one reason why people are so frequently frustrated by message backfires or lack of effective communication. And so each of those disciplines that's on the team brings their own perspective, both kind of theoretical and methodological, to just studying a dimension of that really complicated process of meaning making and communication.

Dawn: So, the reason we're here today is because you're currently working on a project on how to frame and communicate the social impacts of artificial intelligence. So perhaps you can tell us about that and how you came to work on this project and also, perhaps use it as an example of the sort of research that you do. So I know that you don't just do ethnographic, is lots of survey, there's kind of sound bites. All that sort of things. I'd love you to share that with us. 

Nat: Sure. I mean, it's good to have a concrete example, as a way to make some kind of more All Points about how we do our work so that project came to us through a ongoing long-term collaboration with a foundation in the United States. Called the MacArthur Foundation, the John and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, which is a one of the larger Foundation, the United States. Based in Chicago. They do chicago-based work but a lot of domestic. Work on a cross of number of different social issues and they have a program called the kind of a area of Interest called technology and society. And so, artificial intelligence and particularly the social implications of that in, even more, particularly the ways in which artificial intelligence, kind of propagates and advances, existing, inequities across social groups in the United States, is a commitment that they Kind of in a larger commitment to Social and racial Justice. And so we've done work with them on Justice Reform on immigration on education and as they were and this is how most projects come to us. They have a set of grantees kind of really credibly smart Innovative folks who are working on algorithmic justice, or facial recognition, whatever it may be, and those grantees I think understandably to you and me and probably folks who are listening to this, had been having a lot of difficulty in advancing their ideas into the public square, had been kind of running up against some walls, in terms of their ability to really get their messages through. And so that tends to be the point at which folks come to us and are interested in projects when they've been kind of hitting their head against a wall on communications for some time. They know they've got important things to say. They know they've got great data and research and findings, but they just can't get people to, to get it to think about it, to consider it in supporting different solutions. And so MacArthur Foundation. And their person who runs this area of work in Eric's ears, came to us and asked, if we'd be interested in kind of taking this on, from a framing perspective. How do people understand artificial intelligence and the social implications Thereof. And then prescriptively from a reframing perspective, how can those who are working on these issues make informed choices about how they position their information, to allow people, to kind of more openly and readily appreciate these social kind of equity components of the issue. So we started a project about a year ago, which kind of has gone through is going through the typical parts of the process that we use to do the research. So we started off with interviewing members of the sector members of the, both, grantees and folks outside of their Grantee Circle. People who are working on the social implications of artificial intelligence to figure out. What were the core ideas? The  information that they wanted to more effectively kind of put out there and get to and kind of cut through and be understood by people who are not in the field of artificial intelligence. And so that was the first step and the second step was then to figure out kind of what they're up against how normal people, people who don't live and eat and sleep, and breathe, artificial intelligence, and the social implications thereof, think about these issues. Again, from that kind of cultural models perspective, what are the deep patterns of reasoning that either make it hard to appreciate this perspective on the issue or in some cases allow people to engage with it in and helpful and meaningful ways. That's the kind of point that we're at right now. There is a report that I I believe has been or is shortly to be published that documents those kind of first two steps in the process. And then we're currently working with members of the field in the US and this is one of the most fun parts of the process to brainstorm, a bunch of different framing hypotheses. We think the value of justice is going to be really effective. We think the metaphor of who knows what is going to be important in helping people understand kind of some of the problems with algorithms and the  source of information upon which they draw to make predictions and decisions and then we'll empirically test those using a series of qualitative and quantitative methods. Both kind of classically designed framing experiments where you get large representative samples of Americans and you randomly assign them to different treatment groups where they hear different frames and then you can compare the effect that those frames have to discern what kind of frame effects as they are called in our field. These different decisions are having and then we get to the the hardest. But the most important part of the work, which is where you take all of that work that we will have done for, you know, a year and a half and try to put it in forms and products. That members of the sector given the fact that they are so unbelievably busy can kind of take up and use in their work to inform the decisions that they are making when it comes to Framing and I would say that that's the part of our work where we are. Innovating the most these days. There's last, however, long I've been doing this 14 years have been kind of jam-packed with research kind of methods Innovation. How do we run experiments in different ways. How do we think about, you know, different kinds of analysis to do? But the point that we're at now is not to say that we figured that all out, but the real place for Innovation now is in thinking how you, which And to be not skills that social scientists have, how you take the results of that research and use it to partner in meaningful ways, with members of a variety of sectors, not just artificial intelligence. But, you know, people working on racial disparities in the education system or people working on abolishing, the death penalty. Kind of, how do you take social science and bring it into the world? Of these folks whose work it can add value to. But who don't necessarily think about those issues from social science perspectives. 

Dawn: I'd love to know if you can share it with us. So first thing you do is interviews a new. We're trying to understand what the core ideas were that you had to kind of cut through and be understood and then also the Second Step was to understand what you're up against kids. Are you able to share any of that with us? Because I've been really interesting, the results of that research.

Nat: I mean you you will know this given given work on and everyone will know this. I'm guessing given work on artificial intelligence, but that term has come to encapsulate, a tremendous range and breadth of technologies some of which are not even by definition artificial intelligence. So one of the that first stage is a really interesting one both in terms of less in terms of kind of research methods and analytic techniques. I mean what we're doing is basically stakeholder interviews and a grounded theory, consensus analysis. So it's nothing revolutionary stuff that anthropologists and sociologists and other social scientists are very well versed. And but the really interesting part is kind of a more strategic dimension of that, which is how do you, how do you move from that potential set of ideas that you could communicate to asset that we think is most important to advance first, or that we think is kind of a bite that we think we can take and move in a meaningful direction. So in this project, the decision was made to really focus on algorithms and their effect on three issues in particular health, and health care, child protection and policing, kind of predictive policing. And so and those were decisions that we as researchers didn't make but we made in collaboration with members of the sector who thought that wow, if we could really move some of our ideas on on that relatively narrow slice of the field that would be, that would be really valuable and powerful. So that became the focus out of that first stage of the research and then in the in the second stage, I mean, unfortunately when it comes to artificial intelligence, a lot of those findings, in terms of how people think about these issues kind of reveal and kind of draw into relief obstacles, that the field faces and how they communicate. So, I mean and some of them are fairly like, no, duh ideas. Like the public does not have a very good grasp of actually, what artificial intelligence is and what it isn't, right? And some of that is a product of the sector and technology companies and how they communicate and the kind of allure that they draw from the tag of artificial intelligence and the kind of relatively loose application thereof on a whole bunch of things that are kind of innovative or cutting-edge, but probably not definitionally artificial intelligence. Right? But so if you've got an audience, the general public, in this case, who doesn't understand what the thing is that you are claiming has, you know, pernicious negative impacts on certain groups of people, then it becomes very hard to have a meaningful conversation about what those are, who is affected how and and so forth. So, I mean, that's a, that's a major obstacle. And then more specifically, when you get into this, kind of our focus on predictive algorithms, even less of an understanding about what predictive, what predictive algorithms are. And so kind of a sense that kind of artificial intelligence has things that you put into it and things that come out of it. But not a lot of sense in terms of the kind of dirty data issue that if you feed algorithms and they learn on data that is biased. Then you create algorithms and predictions that are similarly biased, which is obviously a major issue in the United States when it comes to predictive policing practices that they are fed data. That is not, it's not unbiased data about crime, right? Its data that's deeply biased by structural racism and then it produces an algorithm that is structurally racist and then it produces predictions which are equally racist. So kind of this lack of understanding about how that particular part of it works, assumptions about kind of the, in the kind of fact that these algorithms are kind of always correct. The inability to see that they are biased in the same way, that that they do have components in which human error enter into the algorithms. And so, if you understand algorithms as just being neutral, then it becomes also very difficult to see how they could be advancing inequities and how they would need to be changed and altered and used in different ways to avoid some of those those exposures. 

Dawn: So I guess at the hardest part of it really is and that's what I really sort of what drives the conference for me is social justice. So it's how how do we get across to the general public? That this is a social justice issue and why why should the general public care? So I guess you've done some social justice type projects before. So, what's your gut feel for this in terms of the communications that we need to? In the world, I guess he's working on this specific issue needs to focus on. 

Nat: I mean, I know that there are things that go beyond this issue, but are certainly in place, and I a lot of what I'm about to say comes from work in the US. And so, I don't know how kind of internationally applicable it is. But over the last year and a half in the United States, since the murder of George Floyd, this these, these words is structural racism, systemic racism, have become ubiquitous, right? So people have people are now and we've got another really interesting project, which I'm talking about later today, called the culture change project, which is looking at how cultural models have or have not changed over the last year and a half in this country at a really deep level. So there's like a there's a there's a correlation that people are drawing that they are that they were not drawing to the same degree at the same strength where by kind of between like those words and terms and the idea of racism, but what our research shows, really clearly as it doesn't extend deeper than those words. And terms is that people don't really have a sense what structural or systemic racism means that people really don't understand outside of kind of a few issues, how that might work and what the outcomes of that might be. And I think the couple of exceptions that we're seeing and so you're seeing some cracks in So policing is one whereby think they're just has been so much Focus over the last year and a half in kind of driving home. The, the idea that when we see people being killed by police that it's not just that individual police officer and their racial animus. That is the problem. It is the systems of training of recruitment of incentives of accountability that are at play and so people, you see, on a couple of issues, this kind of surface level linguistic kind of relationship. Actually, deepening into some understanding of how it works. But I think this is and this is one of our main kind of recommendations from this culture change process, which I think project, which I think pertains to the artificial intelligence one is that there is a tremendous amount of work ahead of us in explanation. Not just repeating those words structural racism or artificial intelligence practices, advance, whatever verb you want to use, you know, existing systems of structural racism, but actually unpacking what that means, how that works examples of issues where you can see that come into play. And so, I mean this is this is the work that we have ahead of us in that project and why we selected those three systems in particular Health, child. Action and policing because it become it is it's eminently more possible to explain artificial intelligence and its impacts on those particular issues than it is just to try to explain the social implications of artificial intelligence. So a lot of this is about examples and explanation. I think which I think is good news because people who work in these sectors, like that's what they know. They No, the explanation and I think they've been under maybe to be a little provocative. Maybe been under the illusion that they can't go deeper on the explanation because, you know, people don't and won't understand. And I think our work throws that into question and actually suggests that it is a responsibility. It's an obligation of those who understand the process of how these things work to to bring the public along. And deepen, people's understanding of how, you know, using algorithms to to make resourcing decisions that police departments is a, is a problem can be seriously problematic.

Dawn: It's a good provocation, and good for us to think about, I think, and for the people who are listening to this podcast and the people who attend and believe in the summit and what we're trying to do, will your work be publicly available? Be lovely. 

Nat: That report, I believe it's being released to the partners currently. So we normally release things to Partners slightly head of public release, but all of this work will be publicly available will be on our website and and will be will be out there. 

Dawn: You touched on at the end, the sort of and the different sort of methodologies that you were using. Did you want? Just touch on that briefly. 

Nat: Yeah, I mean, it just goes back to the point about kind of why different disciplines are necessary in the work that we do is that, I mean, I know a lot about cultural models Theory. I know a lot about kind of the methods that that we use to do person-centered interviewing to try to figure out what I mean. That's the catch. That's the trick about cultural models analysis is that you have to figure out based on what people are saying, how their reasoning and what they're not saying, right? And so there's there's really kind of universities in the United States where folks still work on that, that area of anthropology and where, you know, the I I think those folks in particular are incredibly valuable outside of the academy. And then, you know, some of the, the more quantitative methods, the experimental, Kids are things that come out of fields like political science, political psychology, social psychology. So having folks, with those kinds of perspectives, who kind of think in terms of experiments and experimentation which is not not a perspective that we are necessarily trained in as anthropologists. But you know, if you hang around folks, who are, it's a really, it's a really different perspective and a very useful tool for thinking about how to do this 

Dawn: work. You said you'd be you innovating the most these days around I guess when you taking all the work that you do and then putting in two forms and products.

Nat: Yes, I think I mean the other thing that you realize in doing applied social science research is that there's a lot of expertise and value outside of the social sciences and that if all you ever do is get together an awesome, you know cabal of social scientist, you're limited in your perspective to do, good applied work and that sounds so obvious doesn't it sounds just blatantly obvious and it took us. I don't know. Eight years of doing this work to realize that that that although we were being, you know, you know, very multidisciplinary in ways that academic departments are not is that we were still kind of in this bubble of social science. And then what we need to do and we are still working on this, we've got three hires currently that we're making to try to continue to move. In. This direction, is we need people who are experienced communicators. When it comes to social issues. We need people who are who are directors of Action in various nonprofits. We need people who are organizers and kind of work with information to make change happen. We need people who not only study but who do social movements who kind of know about campaigning in the non traditional sense and kind of what it takes in essence to move, ideas out into the world and figure out how to engage as many people as possible with them. Those are not skills that I have as an anthropologist. Those are not. I mean, I have not done that but there are people who do that and who have those skills. And so, and this is hard for social scientists, but part of the work of applying social science to social issues is in realizing that there's this whole area of expertise, which we don't have, which is mission critical, which is absolutely essential to doing this work and how you create an institution. You create processes, how you create collaborations that allow that area of valuable expertise to come to the table in a kind of a productive and collaborative way. 

Dawn: And I think that's really important. If we want to have impact, doesn't if we want our work to have impact, which, I think for most anthropologists is really important. We don't want to just go and do research, you'll find out new things and then just nothing to happen right from its. Oh, yeah, before we go. Is there anything you want to leave us with that? We haven't covered today, perhaps. Awesome, if people are interested in this particular space perhaps some books. They can read or some podcast they can listen to or anything like that would be great.

Nat: Yeah, I mean there's books. I have a there's like three books that we use a lot here at Frameworks that none of them are new, but I think that they are great. And so there's two kind of seminal works on cultural models theory, which we use a lot. One is a more kind of theoretical volume called Cultural Models and Language and Thought and the other one is a very applied methodological piece called Finding Culture and Talk and I use those. I mean that those are books that I have like, in my home office. I have them in my downtown office, even though I don't go downtown anymore and we use those books a lot. And then another one that I always recommend if people are interested in kind of the ability for frames and the choices that we make to have profound influence on how people think and decisions that they make is a a book by Lakoff and  Johnson, it's quite old, I think it's 1988 or 1982, called Metaphors We live By which is a really interesting look at the the power of metaphor and how we think the the influence of kind of conceptual metaphors in shaping public discourse in decisions and decision making. So those are three that I that I really like. And then when I've recommended them to other people, they they report back that they found they were useful, they could be lying to me because they know that I like them. But  those are three  that I would really recommend.

Dawn: Great. Thank you so much. And is there anything you'd say to at the anthropologists who are sort of thinking about going into this space and thinking about working in the area of communications? What would you say to them?

Nat: I teach A couple of courses at universities, where folks are interested in applied, social science, and I still think that there's this perception. I think maybe quite pronounced amongst Anthropologist that Like there isn't good work for us outside of the academy. And I think that that's just total baloney or whatever. Whatever word you want to use their, whatever, b word you want to use there. And I think that there's a you said it before, but kind of, I do think of the there's this inherent commitment that Anthropologist have towards impact and social good. And there's tremendous opportunity to be a real part of that. And I'm not saying that publishing academically is, you know, clearly publishing academically as part of having impact, and in creating social. But I think that there are positions outside of the academy that are a lot closer to potential and opportunity for impact for anthropologists to have good.

Dawn : That's a lovely note to end on. Thanks so much.

Nat: No problem.