About

Workshop Theme

Public scholarship includes a variety of activities through which those engaged in research create, disseminate, and discuss their work with the wider public. Popular forms include: (1) sharing research on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit; (2) discussing research in public where it can be seen by a broad audience, or with the public, by answering questions and responding to comments; (3) engaging with the media through interviews; (4) knowledge translation efforts such as blogging and writing articles and op-eds for popular press or news media venues; and (5) finding creative ways to share research results directly with researched communities. Engaging in public scholarship can have an array of benefits for researchers, many of which are career-oriented, such as having results seen, read, and cited. For example, tweeting published papers using academic hashtags can increase citations [19], blogging can make findings more accessible and citeable to busy colleagues [10], and social media use generally assists with networking, information sharing, and keeping up-to-date with new information [26]. Further, public scholarship builds important research career skills, such as writing for and justifying research to a broad audience [10].

Public scholarship to support ethical research

Beyond benefits for researchers, public scholarship can also benefit the public directly. Recent findings from Pew have shown that Americans trust practitioners more than researchers and that scientists lack accountability and transparency [12]. Public scholarship can provide the public with insights into the scientific process by demonstrating how research is conducted [14] and may help build trusting relationships between researchers and the public through added transparency [15].

Public scholarship also provides a way for research participants to be more involved in the re- search process. In fields such as medicine, disability rights movements and patient advocates have demanded participant inclusion in research (e.g., [3]). Public scholarship offers a way to build on existing participant-centered methodologies in social computing research, such as action research [16] and participatory design [18]. While these methods include participants in the initial phases of research, such as planning and data collection, public scholarship can include them in dissemination, further reducing power differentials between researchers, who often hold positions of privilege relative to their participants, by providing participants with additional insight and control over how they are represented. Further, disseminating results using formats and paradigms used by participants themselves can provide an "ethical space" for researchers and participants to meet and where dia- logues can occur [8]. For example, researchers can communicate results directly back to participants using research memes and zines [5], Reddit posts [9, 13], YouTube research videos [28], and impact seminars [27] .

Finally, public scholarship increases the overall benefits of research by opening up knowledge to more people. In fact, there have long been calls for public scholarship as part of the core mission of universities, particularly those that are publicly funded, as a way of facilitating knowledge discovery, learning, and civic action [23]. Publishing in open access venues, for example, drastically increases the odds that a piece of research will contribute to a Wikipedia article [29]; imagine the additional knowledge reach of research coverage in the popular press. On a more individual scale, a large percentage of Twitter users would want to read the resulting scholarship that came from using their tweets [11]. In big data research, which may use data from millions of "participants," an effective way of communicating results may be public scholarship with a broad reach.

Challenges associated with public scholarship

Public scholarship benefits both researchers and communities; however, there are also associated challenges and risks. While public scholarship supports ethical research, if not done with care it can also risk harming communities. For example, public scholarship may not be appropriate when working with communities where publicity would violate expected privacy norms [7, 22, 25], where sharing results could cause distress to participants, or in cases where the amplification of certain topics could risk broader societal harm through publicizing and normalizing antisocial groups or behaviours [1, 24]. Engaging with the media also involves risks of miscommunication of the work [27, 31] due to researchers’ inexperience or a lack of preparedness for media engagement, time constraints, difficulty producing high quality multimedia, and differing incentives and workflows between researchers and media workers [28].

Further, just as power differentials must be considered when scholars are in positions of power, uneven power differentials pose particular challenges for those who are, or wish to engage in, public scholarship, such as power differentials within the academy, and between researchers and the public. Within the academy, current hiring, tenure, and promotion models do not directly reward public scholarship. As a form of intellectual labour, engaging in public scholarship may be more difficult for early career researchers who would need to balance engaging in public scholarship with efforts that are formally recognized, and may need to justify their public scholarship efforts to superiors–an activity that is, in itself, an additional form of academic labour. Other common barriers to public scholarship include heavy workloads, hesitancy over being misunderstood, perception of a lack of requisite skills, and fear of distraction [26], which can discourage both early career and established academics from engaging in public scholarship.

Researching particular topics and groups may also place researchers at risk. For example, Massanari [21] discusses how the far right gaze takes advantage of the visibility of scholars to surveil and silence researchers through harassment and abuse. Social media scholars, who are expected to engage on the platforms they research, as well as those whose work addresses issues of social justice, are increasingly at risk of being targets of harassment. However, experiencing harassment and abuse in response to public scholarship is not limited to those who study particular topics (for example, scholars have written about these risks in geography [32] and journalism [2]). Harassment and abuse as a result of public scholarship is also disproportionately experienced by researchers who belong to marginalized or vulnerable populations [1, 20, 21, 30]. Experiencing harassment and abuse as a result of public scholarship can result in some researchers pulling away from engaging public scholarship [30].

There are also social, legal, and physical risks to scholars engaging in public scholarship. For example, Dye has had to be judicious in the way she frames her research in public scholarship and the amount of visibility she receives because, in addition to potentially putting participants at risk, it may impact her ability to return to her fieldsite or have legal repercussions [6]. If people refrain from engaging in public scholarship because of their identity, because of their junior status, because the topics they study place them at greater risk, or for the greater good, then the individual and career benefits of public scholarship are not evenly distributed. Further, the obstacles of engaging with public scholarship also minimize and obscure the experiences and perspectives of these scholars as well as the experiences of the communities that they are working with and learning from, perspectives that are critical for challenging dominant narratives and oppressive power structures.

References

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