Engaged research with active publics: (re)making lively connections
A one-day symposium and workshop for early-career researchers whose work concerns the interrelated roles played by academia, activism, practice and other areas of social action.
Call for Papers and Participants now closed.
Commonground Cafe, Coventry | 10am - 4.30pm 7th Nov 2024
Travel bursaries available
In recent decades there have been growing calls to understand the relationship between academic researchers and the publics we engage with. While different intellectual traditions express varied disciplinary and political orientations, what unites this scholarship is a recognition of lively engagement with active publics as a core principle of research.
Engaged research offers opportunities for forms of knowledge-making that learn from and with publics, and demand thinking across disciplines. Yet there are reasons to be cautious, with these forms of research ‘susceptible to institutional co-option and to being over claimed by academics’(Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly, 2021: 33). Institutional and disciplinary pressures canbe in tension with the priorities of publics, and with more honest analyses of academic contributions to feminist, antiracist, anticolonial, and other movements for transformation and liberation.
Featuring:
Writing workshop with Dr Nirmal Puwar
Roundtable dialogue on Uncomfortable Exchanges
Papers on engaged research
We invite participants to this one-day event in a spirit of learning and curiosity. Panel sessions will be followed by aninterdisciplinary Rountable Dialogue and a workshop on ‘Writing active public(s)’ led by Dr Nirmal Puwar, in which we will reflect on the pleasures and challenges of writing about this work.
Please join us for a day of conversation and learning on the following themes:
- Relationships, practices and contributions in engagements with ‘public(s)’
- Multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and epistemic power.
- The institutional, social and political contexts of engaged research
- Connections and interrelations between social action in academia, activism, practice or policy
- The contradictions, limits, risks and harms in engaged research
- Representing and writing active public(s) and social change.
By ‘active publics’, we refer to a way of understanding the people and places with whom we research as lively and mobile, foregrounding the interactions that shape research and the worlds in which it operates. Participation is particularly encouraged from those whose work concerns the interrelated roles played by academia, activism, practice and other areas of social action. We invite reflections that foreground learning from publics and from spaces of (sometimes uncomfortable) dialogue and connection.
Contact: activepublicsworkshop@gmail.com