Tag: public engagement
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Institutionalising Civic engagement: what we can learn from the mistake of pressuring academics to use Twitter
I attended an interesting webinar earlier today organised by European University Association analysing the relationship between universities and democracy, through the lens of civic engagement. It’s one of a series they’ll be running over the coming weeks. It was immensely useful as someone who is currently thinking about how to embed civic engagement into the […]
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What is the ivory tower becoming?
In recent years, we have seen an explosion of social media activity within the university. In some ways, this isn’t a surprise, with students leading the way in social media becoming a ubiquitous part of everyday life. It’s also not a surprise that this has led universities to increasingly see social media as an important part of their recruitment and engagement, leading to widespread use in communications and student affairs. What is perhaps more surprising is how faculty have taken to social media, both to talk among themselves and to engage with wider publics beyond the academy.
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What does public engagement with academic research mean in an increasingly polarised society?
produced and how this is changing. The etymology of ‘public’ highlights the dynamic character of this adjective, from the late 14th century “open to general observation” through to the Latin root “of the people; of the state; done for the state,” and “common, general, of or belonging to the people at large; ordinary, vulgar”.
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Why academics need to organise, collectivise, and ‘socialise’ social media
A significant perception shift about how academics and universities share their research on social media is urgently needed according to new analysis which calls for a more ‘subversive’ approach to engaging audiences online.
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New Paper: Public Scholarship in the Platform University
Social media has figured prominently in two literatures in recent years: the rise of authoritarian populism and the desirability of publicly engaged scholarship. These platforms offer incredible opportunities for more publicly engaged scholarship but they also make it more likely this scholarship will be politically contested by groups and individuals outside the academy.
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Civic decline and the valorisation of debate
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 […]
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The orthodox narrative of civic decline
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 […]
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Making an Impact with 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 […]
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Intellectual diversity, disciplines and public engagement
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 […]
Mark Carrigan 