The challenges of communicating in a sensitive environment about a sensitive topic

In this chapter, we present a case study of a project that deals with a politically sensitive and often publicly debated subject: extremism. In developing dissemination practices, we had to take into consideration that the ability or political inclination to receive, understand, and digest academic knowledge from different stakeholders can change due to a polarizing public atmosphere and fluctuating political environment. Hence, we acknowledged that the success of the Analysis of and Responses to Extremist Narratives (ARENAS) project would depend on how we communicate our research results to various audiences (the public and key stakeholders) with their own diverse political affinities, of which we were not neces-sarily aware. Therefore, we developed a strategy for sharing politically loaded content based on several layers of practices for translating academic knowledge to different contexts simultaneously. In this study, we discuss what kind of flexibility and reactivity proved to be inevitable in the process of recalibrating and continuously recontextualizing academic knowledge in order to meet the shifting expectations of multiple audiences.