From Do-It-Yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry by Caroline Lee pg 6. I thought this was a really interesting account of how the contemporary valorisation of debate goes hand-in-hand with a widespread sense of civic decline, with often negative results: Pure civic settings are in high demand in an increasingly apolitical and consumption-oriented […]
Tag: public engagement
From Do-It-Yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry by Caroline Lee pg 36-37. Her book illustrates how public engagement professionals have a vested interest in this narrative, offering to facilitate participation in order to address this civic withdrawal: The late 1980s and early 1990s were a time of concern for the decline of […]
My notes on Allen, P. (2019). Political science, punditry, and the Corbyn problem. British Politics. There has been a widespread failure by political scientists to predict, explain or account for Jeremy Corbyn’s rise and the emergence of Corbynism as a political movement. What explains political science’s Corbyn problem? In this paper, Peter Allen addresses this […]
My notes on Kerry Shephard, Kim Brown, Tess Guiney, Lynley Deaker & Gala Hesson (2018): Exploring the use of social media by community-engaged university people, Innovations in Education and Teaching International. This paper considers social media in terms of the third mission of the university, contextualising it in terms of the difficulties which universities have tended to have […]
I’m (re)reading this important paper by Tressie McMillan Cottom in advance of a talk which Karen Lumsden and I are doing tomorrow on the dark side of (digital) public engagement. We were asked to suggest a reading for the session and this immediately occurred as the most suitable. It’s a insightful, careful and honest appraisal of the […]
The ESRC offer a list of nine factors which help generate impact: establishing networks and relationships with research users acknowledging the expertise and active roles played by research users in making impact happen involving users at all stages of the research, including working with user stakeholder and participatory groups flexible knowledge exchange strategies, which recognise […]
One of the clear themes which emerged for me when reading Merchants of Doubt, a detailed exploration of corporate propaganda by historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, concerns the politics of public engagement. What might in other circumstances seem like anodyne issues confined to the university, who talks about science in public and the status […]
In recent months, I’ve become preoccupied by how we make sense of the experiences of academics being harassed or trolled when using social media. My initial interest in this was in my capacity as a trainer and consultant. One of my roles is to encourage, train and support academics in their use of social media. […]
Many researchers are excited about the potential social media offers for making an impact with their work. However 500 million tweets per day, 3 million blog posts per day and over a billion websites poses an obvious challenge: how can you ensure you are heard above the din? How can social media be used by […]
Why do psychologists and economists enjoy more prominence in the public sphere than sociologists? I’ve been thinking a lot in the last couple of days about what seems to me to be a failure of sociology to value or encourage media engagement by sociologists. It should go without saying that these aren’t the only reasons for the difference […]
There’s a really important piece in the LSE Impact Blog by Philip Moriarty describing his experiences using social media for public engagement. In many ways he has been the embodiment of the engaged academic, driven by a sense of responsibility to communicate scientific knowledge and an enthusiasm for engaging with the public about that knowledge. […]
What does it mean to speak and listen on social media? It’s a question which might seem to invite a platitudinous response but it’s one which increasingly concerns me. In the last couple of years, I’ve found myself increasingly sceptical that a platform like Twitter facilitates meaningful debate given the constraints it imposes on expression. […]
In her wonderful Lower Ed, Tressie Cottom describes how her public profile led to her being in contact with someone who was enormously relevant to her ongoing research. From pg 103: Aaron found me through my public writing and blogging and social media and decided that speaking to me might be interesting. He emailed me […]
When we talk about the possibilities which digital media offer for rethinking scholarly communication, it’s easy to slip into the trap of thinking this ambition is a new one. We counterpoise the ‘new’ and the ‘old’, the innovative and the traditional, the digital and the analogue. In doing so, we obscure past projects which sought to rethink […]
In recent weeks I’ve become fascinated by what I’ve thought of as the poetics of impact and engagement. What linguistic techniques can we identify in how ‘impact’ and ‘engagement’ are written about? What work do they do in terms of foregrounding and backgrounding the issues entailed by this paradigm shift within the university? This fabulous essay […]
In the last couple of years, prominent commentators have increasingly claimed there is a crisis of free speech in higher education. Well meaning participants in reasoned debate are apparently unable to move without being accosted by left-wing activists keen to shut them down or move them on. As I wrote a couple of years ago, the timing […]
I just came across this description of Robert Moses, by the American Sociologist and former Secretary of Labour Frances Perkins, concerning his attitude towards the public. It was quoted in an essay by Jackson Lears in vol 38 number 6 of the London Review of Books: He loves the public, but not as people. The public […]
In a recent article on the LSE Impact Blog, Martha Henson reflects on the challenges which typify digital projects and the implications this has for the uptake of social media in higher education. She highlights a pattern which occurs with depressing frequency, in which “a failure to understanding digital marketing, and a failure to invest any serious […]
An interesting podcast produced at the Independent Social Research Foundation’s Workshop in Edinburgh earlier this year: https://soundcloud.com/isrf/2015-isrf-annual-workshop-social-science-as-communication (I can’t get it to embed it for some reason). I’m interviewed about social media a few minutes into the podcast.
In the last year I’ve had a selection of requests from the media to talk on an eclectic range of issues: contemporary sexual culture, the quantified self, dystopic social change, the limits of liberal tolerance and hipster hatred. I’m fairly confident in dealing with the media and I enjoy the challenge of condensing ideas in the way […]
