Exploring the Scholarship of Engagement: Reassessing Public Knowledge; Revisiting Digital Media; Rethinking Public Participation

Location: The Ambient Technology Lab, Jennie Lee Building, Walton Hall
Contact

Places for this event are limited. Please see the colloquium's website for further details: http://www8.open.ac.uk/creet/main/events/exploring-engagement.

Event description: This cross-disciplinary colloquium has been organised by CREET (The Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology) and eSTEeM: exploring the frontiers of STEM engagement. The colloquium will explore the scholarship of engagement.

The scholarship of engagement is increasingly generating interest among academics, across the HE sector, and within user communities. New challenges and opportunities are being addressed as academics work with peers (and sometimes also with user communities) to envisage, theorise and instantiate new places, spaces and methods for engagement. In so doing, scholars of engagement are working to identify (and increasingly to assess) more effective ways of generating, representing, circulating and debating knowledge in the public sphere.

The advent of a scholarship of engagement, and of an emergent community of practice, is apparent in the UK and internationally. However, uptake is far from comprehensive; enthusiasm for engagement remains uneven across the HE sector and within and across academic fields. And significant challenges remain, not least in terms of defining success and failure in relation to public engagement activities, and to what extent publics value different engagement practices.

The colloquium will focus on three related themes: reassessing public knowledge; revisiting digital media; rethinking public participation. In so doing, the event brings together distinguished public engagement experts to explore engagement research and practices that are (re)conceptualising contemporary and next generation practices and technologies.

Confirmed external speakers include: James Gillies, Head of Communication at Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research; Eric Jensen, University of Warwick; Joan Leach, University of Queensland, Australia; Nancy Longnecker, University of Western Australia; and Paul Manners, Director of the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement.

Open University contributors include: Trevor Collins (KMi); Richard Holliman (CREET/eSTEeM/Science); Nick Mahony (CCIG/Social Sciences); John Oates (CREET/FELS); Eileen Scanlon (CREET/IET); and Jonathan Silvertown (CEPSAR/Science).

The book of abstracts can be downloaded at the following link: http://isotope.open.ac.uk/?q=node/864