I'm looking for reading suggestions on the following question:
If I have the goal of making a certain idea -- say, veganism, open borders, or whatever -- take hold in the population and if my means for achieving this goal consists in supporting academic work: how do I best go about? What's the theory of change where affecting academia is at the start of the causal chain and new beliefs/behaviour in the broader population are at the end of the causal chain?
This may be less meta than you are hoping for, but may contain some useful advice/references: The dos and don’ts of influencing policy: a systematic review of advice to academics. Influencing policy is at least one way that academic ideas can travel to the wider world.
I expect another is producing accessible content on the topic in question (e.g. writing popular blog posts, books, documentaries). It seems like these can sometimes be a catalyst for ideas becoming more widely known in the public. Examples of books that might have had or could have a broad impact are Animal liberation (Peter Singer), Silent Spring (Rachel Carson), Doing Good Better (Will Macaskill) or Human Compatible (Stuart Russel).
Thanks for this!