Cadmore media player playing video Where is Your Community? (Global / Local)
Video Player
Accessibility
Using forms mode, you can utilize keyboard shortcuts to make usability more efficient.
Space bar will play and pause the video. Pressing escape will close all displays and pressing it again will jump to the end of the player.
You can press A to open the Keyboard Shortcut Dialog which also provides an audio description of the player and all of its features.
Language
1x
Play Speed
Adjust Volume
Transcript
Search
Result Count
of
Click to jump to result
Search
Re-center
Segments
Result Count
of
Click to jump to result
Search
Name:
Where is Your Community? (Global / Local)
Description:
Where is Your Community? (Global / Local)
Thumbnail URL:
https://cadmoremediastorage.blob.core.windows.net/cd1fd3ed-dc74-43cc-a4dd-1166fd2ad242/thumbnails/cd1fd3ed-dc74-43cc-a4dd-1166fd2ad242.png
Duration:
T00H50M27S
Embed URL:
https://stream.cadmore.media/player/cd1fd3ed-dc74-43cc-a4dd-1166fd2ad242
Content URL:
https://cadmoreoriginalmedia.blob.core.windows.net/cd1fd3ed-dc74-43cc-a4dd-1166fd2ad242/Session 2_Society Street_Recording.mp4?sv=2019-02-02&sr=c&sig=TMexkV03fDbEFw7c1ATgIxHwJx7p14E2oCxb%2FTPzgpM%3D&st=2025-05-09T11%3A41%3A56Z&se=2025-05-09T13%3A46%3A56Z&sp=r
Upload Date:
2022-05-02T00:00:00.0000000
Transcript:
Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
SIMON INGER: Hi, everybody. Welcome back for session 2 of Society Street Virtual. This session is, Where is Your Community? And in the chair is Colleen Scollans. And I shall pass over to Colleen straight away. Thank you.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Hello. Welcome back. This has been great so far. Welcome to the Where is Your Community session. In the interest of time, I'm going to pass introductions over to our four esteemed panelists. First up is Beth Craanen from the Electrochemical Society. Beth, over to you.
Segment:1 Beth Craanen.
BETH CRAANEN: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. So today, as we consider the question posed for this session, I'm going to talk a little bit about what global and local activities mean for the Electrochemical Society. So before we begin, just a little bit about me. I spent the first 15 years of my career working in higher education administration. I was heavily engaged as a member and volunteer in multiple associations related to the field throughout that time period.
BETH CRAANEN: I took a jump over to the association side in 2014, when I joined the Electrochemical Society as the associate director of Development and Membership Services. Then I served in the role of director of Membership Services starting in 2015, and then moved into Publications, which is the current role that I serve as the director of Publications for the society. So again, as I consider the question posed for this session, it made me think back to the beginning of ECS.
BETH CRAANEN: ECS was founded as the American Electrochemical Society in 1902 to advance the theory and practice of electrochemical and solid state science and technology. In their early days, organizational leadership had the forethought to recognize the importance of being inclusive of a broader community. So in 1930, the society dropped American from the organization name. And I think, in many ways, they were ahead of their time, when you think of such a major change to an identity of an organization.
BETH CRAANEN: Fast-forward to today, when you think about how the community would describe ECS, we actually did a study recently in 2018, where we actually asked our community about how they would describe the organization. And global, actually, became the resounding top adjective from that study, to say that people do consider the society to be global overall in everything that we do.
BETH CRAANEN: Today, the organization serves over 8,000 individual members and 50 organizational members worldwide. But we recognize our community as much more broader than membership. The interactions of our community intersects through attendance at our two biannual meetings a year, our engagement online through our website, our blog, and social media, submission to our two peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings publication.
BETH CRAANEN: We recognize it as individuals serving as peer reviewers in 13 technical areas for our journals, individuals accessing over 160,000 articles and abstracts in our digital library. We also consider our volunteers, who serve the society on numerous boards and committees, individuals who applied to over 50 awards, fellowships, and grant programs, and individuals that engage with us in other aspects, such as educational and career opportunities.
BETH CRAANEN: So ultimately, when you piece of those together, we would say that our engagement of our community is 50,000-plus worldwide. So to support this philosophy from a society perspective, with our new leadership coming in, we recently merged our membership and marketing departments into what's now functioning as community engagement to serve that global perspective. As we look at how we engage our community as a whole, the ECS focus is a niche science.
BETH CRAANEN: But the science that we serve is very broad. Our organization overlaps with numerous organizations, such as the American Chemical Society, Materials Research Society, IEEE, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, NACE, Optical Society, and then when you go global with electrochemistry, organizations such as International Society of Electrochemistry and many more. So because of the overlap, we know that our community is engaging in more than one organization, and we recognize the need for us to engage our community outside of ECS-sponsored events and conferences.
BETH CRAANEN: So in 2017, we began to exhibit at conferences and meetings related to our community. And while we're in a given local region, we look to engage stakeholders in activities, such as hosting a dinner, visiting a local chapter, or setting up one-on-one appointments. As you consider how we engage locally, ECS has 23 sections that host electrochemical and solid state science events in a specific region of the globe.
BETH CRAANEN: And it brings together activities where individuals who aren't able to attend meetings on a regular basis, that they can engage with their community from a local perspective. Our sections provide networking opportunities for those in the field or those who are advanced in their careers. They also provide recognition through awards.
BETH CRAANEN: And then some sections also provide travel grant funding to ECS meetings. In addition to our sections, ECS supports 93 student chapters from 23 countries around the world. These student chapters are an extension of the society. They host events, symposia, activities, to promote the science at their institution and beyond. This is really the fastest-growing area of ECS. And in the last five years alone, we've actually doubled the number of chapters that we have within the society.
BETH CRAANEN: Any organization out there, student engagement and involvement is the lifeblood of any organization from a long-term perspective. And our society recognized the importance of local grassroots engagement. And we actually recently expanded our staffing structure to further support both our sections and student chapters. Serving our community on a global scale is always at the forefront of our decision-making when we consider partnerships in all of our programs within the society.
BETH CRAANEN: I think we do a good job of having an interconnected approach to our programs, whether you consider our meetings, membership, our publications, education, our grant programs. We know that programs, at the end of the day, drive membership, so we always look for ways to tie this component to the application process of our grant funding and our awards. Researchers are always looking for ways to fund their research, and we look for opportunities to capture that research output in our meetings and publications.
BETH CRAANEN: Meetings and publications are synergistic, in that we are capturing meeting content in our publications and vice versa. And meetings provide an opportunity for us to engage our members and our donor community in person, through events and receptions on site. A recent example of a global decision-making through a new partnership with IOP Publishing, which is a society publisher headquartered in the UK-- as a US-based independent publisher, we made a decision to move our content onto IOP Science and work with their sales force to have them engage our subscriber community.
BETH CRAANEN: This was really purposeful as a smaller society publisher. When you consider our reach of 2,000 institutional subscribers with 3 million users a year and with over 3.5 million downloads just in 2019 alone, when we think about our engagement and made a decision to look to partner with IOP, that opportunity to expand our reach grew, as IOP supports scientists from 6,618 institutions from 126 countries, and they see over 60 million downloads a year.
BETH CRAANEN: So our goal was to increase our reach by also being on an evolving, state-of-the-art platform. And as you can see, ECS's content is now part of a greater 1-million article community, which provides us great potential to expand our science that is critical to the sustainability of the planet. In my closing, for ECS, as we consider recent implications of COVID-19 and what our community reach means to us, we realized that technology is going to play a critical role.
BETH CRAANEN: We recently canceled only the second ECS meeting in our 118-year history due to the pandemic. And with that, now we really do need to consider technology, what role that can play, and as we all are experiencing today how critical it's going to be to connect with more researchers worldwide. Thank you everyone for your time, and I'm going to hand it back over to Colleen.
BETH CRAANEN:
Segment:2 Ed Liebow.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Ed, are you ready?
ED LIEBOW: Yes, I am. Good day, everybody. My name is Ed Liebow, and I'm the executive director of the American Anthropological Association. I also happen to have the privilege of chairing the Consortium of Social Science Associations for a two-year period. And I want to extend my thanks to the organizers for their flexibility and resilience. I happen to live just two blocks away from the headquarters of the American Geophysical Union, this amazing net 0 building that is just down the street here where the meeting was to take place.
ED LIEBOW: So I'm just going to spend a few minutes with a bit of a provocation for you, the central challenge we face as the American Anthropological Association. We are the world's largest and the best-resourced scholarly and professional association in our discipline. But the question is, how to be a good partner organization while overcoming a legacy of colonialism and scientific racism, whose projects the disciplines served for much of its early history, and to respond productively to the continuing claims that we are intellectual imperialists of some sort, especially from our collaborators in the post-colonial global south.
ED LIEBOW: I am an anthropologist. I was a volunteer leader in this association for many, many years, until about 7 and 1/2 years ago, when I became the executive director. So I have been learning on the job something about the world of associations and believe that we have four standard superpowers that we are responsible for how we are in the world. We have the power of setting standards for intellectual rigor and professional conduct.
ED LIEBOW: We have the power to convene, bringing people together for the purposes of scholarly exchange and the dissemination of the best practices for outreach and advocacy. We have the power of voice, because there is strength in numbers. And we also have the power of illumination, the ability to highlight the work, this remarkable set of contributions that our members make to advance human understanding.
ED LIEBOW: Our members, while we are called the American Anthropological Association-- and incidentally, today, March 26 marks the 118th anniversary of our founding here in Washington, DC, in 1902. Today, we have about 10,000 members, about 20% of whom live outside North America. And a much larger percentage of our members are associated with research sites and field schools around the world.
ED LIEBOW: We hold one large 6,000 or 7,000 person research conference each year. It's in November. We are discussing right now what the global pandemic means for the November meeting. We've had to cancel all of our spring meetings, which are smaller in scale and sharper in focus.
ED LIEBOW: We also hold a field school in the summer in Latin America. And it's not at all clear what the plans are for that this year, as well. So we're trying to be adaptable and investigate the possibilities for virtual participation and hybrid organizations. We have had some smaller successes with some of our section meetings in recent years.
ED LIEBOW: And just in recent weeks and days, we have been sharing with hundreds of enthusiastic participants a series of webinars. The analytics show that the transcripts and recordings of these webinars have been remarkably well-received around the globe. And we are going to continue every Thursday for quite some time now with topics related to the pandemic and its implications for response recovery and community impacts.
ED LIEBOW: Our publishing program includes 22 peer-reviewed titles and a member news magazine. These are all in English, with abstracts in other languages. And this is really kind of a sticking point for our cousins from around the world. We participate with our publishing partner, the Wiley-Blackwell publishers, in the Research for Life Foundation's efforts to distribute at low or no cost to about 6,000 subscribing institutions around the world.
ED LIEBOW: And we have, with Wiley, developed an open access repository and subject heading taxonomy for the field that will take materials in a variety of formats and any language that people choose to submit their materials to. Our history in the United States is closely linked to that of American Indian, Alaska Native communities.
ED LIEBOW: And it is implicated in the internal colonialism that these communities have experienced over much of the past several centuries. The history of anthropology in the United Kingdom and in much of Western Europe is similarly implicated in the colonial project of the 19th and 20th centuries. We've often been criticized for imposing the English language, specific theoretical frames and outcomes of our work, which has served, at least in some instances, to support colonialism, conquest, displacement, dispossession of rights and land and indigenous peoples' resources.
ED LIEBOW: And I'm here to tell you that we're fully aware of this legacy. And in recent years, I think that we've made great strides in coming to terms with our past, trying to find common ground with our colleagues around the world. But there's still much ground to cover. And I know that we're trying to open this up for discussion, so I'm not going to get into a lot of detail now.
ED LIEBOW: But please ask me questions about this. We work very closely with two global anthropology organizations that have recently merged to form the World Anthropological Union. And we also are credentialed observers and consultants to a number of UN programs, and active in the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Coalition for Science and Human Rights, as well as the Scholars at Risk program.
ED LIEBOW: So I will stop at this point, and I hope that you are able to ask me for more details in the discussion section.
Segment:3 Margaret Vitullo.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Margaret, you're up.
MARGARET VITULLO: Here we OK. All right, hello, everybody. Thanks for your patience with this new technology. My name is Margaret Weigers Vitullo. I'm the deputy director of the American Sociological Association. There we go. This presentation is going to focus on building bridges to and strengthening ties to local communities.
MARGARET VITULLO: I'm going to be sharing with you ASA's process of establishing a new program called the Sociology Action Network, or SAN. As I tell you about how we designed SAN, you may see opportunities for your own association to do something similar. The purpose of SAN is to connect individuals interested in volunteering their sociological knowledge and skills with not-for-profit organizations in need of technical expertise.
MARGARET VITULLO: Our motivation in starting SAN were several-fold. At the most abstract level, we were aware of our mission, two parts of it, that direct us to advance sociology as a science and profession, and to promote the contributions and use of sociology to society. More specifically, we wanted to raise public awareness of sociology. We wanted to help our members demonstrate the value of sociology to their own local communities and to their institutions, as part of an insurance policy for small departments.
MARGARET VITULLO: We also wanted to find a way to respond to the needs of communities suffering under the weight of increasing income divides and rising levels of racism and intolerance that we were seeing in our society. It strikes me, as I speak to you today, in the midst of this COVID-19 crisis, that the communities that were in need of support before are going to be even more in need of support in the wake of this crisis, as are the not-for-profit organizations that serve them.
MARGARET VITULLO: So perhaps similar programs that you might establish in your own organizations have an even more pressing need at this point. The question that we were asking in the American Sociological Association is, how could we establish a program that would achieve these ends? Were there models for this being done successfully? We didn't have to go too far to find those models.
MARGARET VITULLO: At the American Association for the Advancement of Science, there is a program called On-call Scientists, that connects scientists from across all disciplines to the specific issue of human rights and helping human rights organizations. The American Geophysical Union has a program called the Thriving Earth Exchange, which connects their members with community projects focused on solving changes related to the environment, climate change, and natural resources.
MARGARET VITULLO: But just talking to other organizations wasn't going to be enough for us to figure out how to do this right. We also needed to talk to our members. We wanted to understand what our members were doing, those who were already engaged with their local communities. So we sent out a call asking for examples. And our members quickly responded.
MARGARET VITULLO: Stephen Demuth was one of those members who responded. He's been offering his quantitative sociological skills to an organization called the Civil Rights Corp, analyzing pretrial process data within a specific county. And as a result of that work, a judge found that thousands of constitutional violations occurred each year in the county, and ordered an immediate injunction against the county, holding people, detaining people, only based on their inability to pay money bail.
MARGARET VITULLO: There we go. Furjen Deng also responded. Since 2007, Furjen has been using her sociological knowledge of immigrant and resettlement processes to help the Light and Salt Association, which is now part of a consortium of organizations focused on helping provide appropriate social services to Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Filipino communities, in Houston, Austin, and Dallas-Fort Worth.
MARGARET VITULLO: Through all of these efforts, the shape of SAN began to take form. We defined specifics for goals, criteria for SAN project, and eligibility for organizations and for our members. It was important to go through this process to be sure that we were investing staff time in a way that was productive and would reflect well on the association, and to protect both our members and the local organizations.
MARGARET VITULLO: So let's look really briefly at each of these. OK, based on all of this work, the goal of SAN was defined as celebrating and encouraging community engaged sociology by raising awareness within not-for-profit profit organizations about the ways sociology could be useful to them, increasing interest among sociologists in bringing their sociological knowledge and skills to the service of local organizations, and creating a program that would build bridges between sociologists interested in offering their expertise on a pro bono basis and organizations in need of that technical advice and assistance, and doing so in a way that was very cognizant of the mutual process of knowledge creation, that it is is not that the sociologists are the experts and the community organizers are in need of that expertise, but actually that there is vital expertise on both sides of that equation, and that both partners would benefit from these interactions.
MARGARET VITULLO: So what is a SAN project? We decided that SAN projects needed to have specific characteristics. They needed to have sociology as the central skill. Just going and volunteering didn't constitute a SAN project. The results needed to be a tangible work product. And the primary goal had to be advancing the work of the organization, not the research agenda of the sociologist.
MARGARET VITULLO: Although research agendas are really important, that's not what SAN is about primarily. Although certainly, there are all sorts of ways for community-engaged research into end up benefiting the scholars, we wanted this program to be really focused on communities. Also, these projects had to be within a specified bounded time frame, so that the scholars didn't end up just being unpaid staff for organizations, well-intended though those might be.
MARGARET VITULLO: What organizations are eligible? Not-for-profit organizations, which can include nonprofit and public sector organizations. We ended up having some really interesting conversations with small municipalities that were trying to figure out how to deal with racial intolerance in their increasingly multi-ethnic community, something that sociologists have quite a bit to say about and quite a bit of research to bring to bear.
MARGARET VITULLO: And we wanted to make sure that those municipalities would also be eligible. We were also interested in making sure that the organizations really didn't have the ability to hire paid consultants to perform the work or that particular kind of work. There are many sociologists, many of our members, who work as paid consultants and we wanted to make sure that we didn't undercut them.
MARGARET VITULLO: And the organization, if there were going to be expenses associated with it, they needed to be able to pay for those expenses. Very quickly, we wanted SAN volunteers to be members, to hold a PhD, to have good references, and to be good communicators. Just a moment.
MARGARET VITULLO: There we go. We have a specific matching process, which allows us to do some vetting on both sides and help the organization hone and focus their projects. But that ultimately leaves the final decision of whether a match is a good match or not with the sociologist and the organization itself. None of this would have been possible without our fantastic SAN advisory board.
MARGARET VITULLO: These are all prominent sociologists in our field who offered to help us with this project. Thank you for giving me a few minutes to talk to you about SAN. I'd be happy to answer any questions. And I hope that this spurs you to think a little bit about whether a project like SAN might be a way for your organization to connect more directly with the community.
MARGARET VITULLO: Thank you so much.
Segment:4 Steve Smith.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I want to turn over to Steve.
STEVE SMITH: I'm the executive director of the American Political Science Association. I've been here since 2013. Prior to my work in APSA, I taught at different universities, including the University of Washington and Georgetown. My focus today is going to be on political science and public engagement. The American Political Science Association is an organization of about 12,000 political scientists.
STEVE SMITH: Over 20% of our members are from outside the US. Also, a significant number of our members work in non-academic settings, including think tanks and research institutes. But again, a vast majority of our members are in universities at, again, a wide variety of institutions. One of the major priorities of the association is public engagement.
STEVE SMITH: Our members study a lot of very urgent public issues, from democracy to voting rights to good governance, public services. And what we see is an important role for our association is how we can support the public engagement work of our members. And we take a broad view of public engagement.
STEVE SMITH: And we have many different initiatives that we have underway in trying to support our members to engage the public. So essentially, they are doing a lot of very important work. Their work can also be informed a great deal by working with community members, working with policymakers. How do we disseminate the valuable research that our members are doing to the public?
STEVE SMITH: And so we have several initiatives, as you can see on the slides, having to do with our public engagement work. We've instituted new awards for public service, communication of scholarly findings and public engagement. We have an Institute for Civically Engaged Research, which I will talk to you about more in detail in a moment, research partnerships, which is also going to be a focus of mine.
STEVE SMITH: We have public scholarship programs that helps translate political science research to a broader public audience. We've been working on tenure and promotion guidelines and how to incorporate public engagement work that faculty do into the tenure promotion guidelines. We have professional networking by political scientists who are working outside the world of academia. And then we've also been working with other societies on this public engagement work as well.
STEVE SMITH: So I want to focus on two major initiatives-- the Institute for Civically Engaged Research and the Research Partnerships on Critical Issues. So the Institute for Civically Engaged Research, ICER, was started in 2019, to train political scientists to conduct research in collaboration with community partners. And it's based at Tufts University.
STEVE SMITH: And it emphasizes the reciprocal nature of high-quality engaged research, and not only how research can serve the public, but also insights researchers gain from engagement with public partners. And it covers a wide variety of topics, from project conceptualization to methodology and how to work with partners. I think there's really an emphasis on the kind of collaborative research between scholars and community partners.
STEVE SMITH: And this kind of training we see is a really innovative aspect of our public engagement work because there's a kind of broad acceptance now by, I think, many of our members that they should be doing public engagement work. And they see it as valuable. But there's also, I think, a lack of training on how to actually do it and how to do it in an academically rigorous way.
STEVE SMITH: So here's a photo of the group from 2019 at Tufts of the training institute. We also are doing research partnerships on critical issues that support collaborative research-based projects that tackle issues of the public interest. And again, we do it across disciplinary and ideological lines.
STEVE SMITH: The first pilot we did was here in DC, and it focused on congressional reform. It was co-sponsored by the R Street Institute and the Brookings Institute here. And it brought together academic specialists on Congress with individuals from across Washington, DC, think tank, and advocacy community. And this was, I think, a good example of how we're bringing scholars together with members of Congress, their staff, researchers who are working in DC, to kind of problem-solve on an important issue having to do with reform in Congress.
STEVE SMITH: And the task force completed their report in October and was delivered to Congress. And also, we had some public forums where the public was invited to learn about the results of the task force report. And again, it's been very well-received. And it's also been widely disseminated. The other kind of continuation of these research partnerships-- again, the Congress was a pilot project, and then this research partnership we're doing on critical issues, the first recipients of a grant we have on research partnerships was recently announced.
STEVE SMITH: And it's based at Marquette University. And this project brings together political scientists who partner with experts in biology, computer science, education, environmental law, as well as local political leaders, environmental leaders, and farmers, to examine Kewaunee County's political efforts to address agricultural pollution. This interdisciplinary research will examine political processes at Kewaunee community and how they're using it to address water pollution and evaluate recent policy changes.
STEVE SMITH: So the goal, again, is to bring together political scientists with a wide variety of disciplines, working with community leaders to address an urgent public problem at the local level-- agricultural pollution. And again, we hope that this grant program will be just the beginning of many awards in the next few years. And I should say that this grant program, as well as many of our public engagement initiatives, is also a product of a presidential task force led by our immediate past president Rogers Smith of the University of Pennsylvania and the support of the Ivywood Foundation.
STEVE SMITH: I would just say in closing that, with the multiple initiatives that we have going on now about public engagement, I think we have a few key lessons I think I want to share with everybody. One, complementary programs maximize impact. For example, having training and grant programs enables us to provide members, who we train and engage with resources, to continue and expand their work.
STEVE SMITH: Similarly, conversations with participants in the advancing public engagement at ICER Institute suggested that new efforts to recognize and signal the value of public engagement, such as awards and other ways of recognizing good public engagement, can really be a valuable incentive. And supporting networking among political science practitioners also complements efforts to disseminate research and link researchers with public partners.
STEVE SMITH: So I think that, where possible, developing a complementary set of programs for public engagement work, I think, can facilitate synergy among these programs and help maximize impact. APSA members are already engaging with the public. We've done recent member surveys where our members have indicated that they have broad support for public engagement. And so I think we have turned our efforts to convincing our members that they should be doing public engagement, too.
STEVE SMITH: Well, how can we provide the incentives for their public engagement work and how can we train them and, again, provide grant opportunities and resources for them to do that work? And my final point around issues around defining public engagement, I think that this remains one of the key issues moving forward in kind of moving towards some kind of shared understanding about public engagement.
STEVE SMITH: Whether it's public scholarship, community-engaged research, or civic engagement, I think that, as we have a conversation within the discipline and more broadly about public engagement, I think that the association can play a useful role in helping define a kind of shared understanding of what this kind of work means and what is involved in doing more extensive public engagement.
STEVE SMITH: Because I think that this is a very important priority for not only political science, but the social sciences. Increasingly, policymakers and funders are looking to, what is the impact of social science research, and political science research in particular. And to the extent that you can encourage your members to engage in the public more broadly, I think it helps maximize the impact of political science research and social science research more broadly.
STEVE SMITH: So thank you. I look forward to any questions that you might have.
Segment:5 Q&As.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Thank you so much, Steve. We have one comment and one question from attendees, so I'm going to start with those. The first comment for Ed, just that they hope you have many more opportunities to share your presentation. And there's some more comments there, but I will continue with that. I'll leave that on the screen. Our question is, where did the funds come from to pay for the APSA grant programs, Margaret?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS:
SIMON INGER: I think that's for Steve.
STEVE SMITH: Isn't this for me?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Oh, sorry, for you Steve-- where did the funds come from to pay for your grant program?
STEVE SMITH: So we did have a significant grant from the Ivywood Foundation. We also have funded some of our public engagement work from our general operations, but we did have an outside grant from the Ivywood Foundation.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Great. We have another question. How do you define public engagement? How do you define, determine public involvement in the engagement, and assess impact? This sounds like it's also for you, Steve.
STEVE SMITH: OK, so I mentioned at the end of my comments, that I do think that the definition of public engagement is something that we see as an area that we wanted to continue to work on. The way we have approached public engagement is broadly trying to encourage our members to engage with the public sphere. And that could be their local community. That could be with policymakers.
STEVE SMITH: That could be with community partners. And it's essentially trying to take their research, and also sometimes their teaching, and bring the lessons learned and their research findings to a broader community. And sometimes that involves working directly with community partners and doing public engagement in that way. It also can mean, again, giving public presentations on your work or working directly with policymakers on an urgent public problem.
STEVE SMITH: I think sometimes the challenge that many faculty face is that there is often not the appropriate incentives to do public engagement work. And many of our members we found also sometimes may not have the training to do public engagement work. And so we're working both on helping our members learn how to do public engagement work, but also, I think we're also trying to provide them incentives through grand programs.
STEVE SMITH: But the tenure and promotion guidelines that I really didn't have a chance to talk about is another area where we're working with various universities and some of our members on how we might rethink tenure and promotion guidelines to incorporate public engagement work into the promotion process.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: That's great, Steve. This seems like a question the other presenters would have a view on as well. Margaret, would you like to start?
MARGARET VITULLO: Steve set us up well to be thinking about public engagement in broad terms, and I'd like to broaden it even more. I think that you can think of public engagement as bridging, as translational, or as direct engagement. And what I mean by that, by bridging, I mean bringing our research to public use. That might be through op-eds. That might be through conversations with policymakers.
MARGARET VITULLO: Translational I think of as I'm taking our research and making it something that the lay audience can use. The American Sociological Association has [INAUDIBLE] a series of short videos called Sociological Insights that are really designed to take some of the critical insights of the discipline and present them in a form that a lay audience could incorporate into their own thinking processes.
MARGARET VITULLO: And then the last one is this direct engagement. SAN would be an example of that. There might be other examples, as well, where people are working with organizations. Ed may be able to expand that typology. But the [INAUDIBLE] public engagement on many, many levels. Thanks.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Great. Ed, do you want to take the invitation and expand?
ED LIEBOW: Sure. One thing I'll say is that, for the work that most researchers in [INAUDIBLE] subfields of anthropology do, we could not do that work if we weren't collaborating with people in the communities. Because most of what we learn, distill, abstract, and generalize from, is based on our being invited in to the lived experiences of our collaborator.
ED LIEBOW: And so there is a sense in which all of the work we do has a significant public engagement element to it, whether you're doing archaeology, whether you're doing biological anthropology, or you're doing linguistic or cultural anthropological work. And I think that, as I said in my earlier remarks, for too long, it seemed as though we were sort of beamed into communities to have the voice of authority to then report back without any accountability to the communities who were our collaborators.
ED LIEBOW: And I think in recent decades that that is no longer the way to work. And in fact, there is built into the work we do, a training and capacity-building component. And the structuring and definition of problems on which we focus has to be something that our community collaborators find meaningful and applicable, or they're just not going to let us there.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: That's great. We have a few more questions. How do communities find out about you? And Ed, there's one building off of your question. Would you be interested in joining forces with programs at AGU and ASSS? So Ed, why don't we have you answer the, how do communities find out about you, and then you can talk about the building partnership question.
ED LIEBOW: Well, like Steve and Margaret, and I'm sure Beth, would say, we spend an enormous amount of energy in reaching out in primary and secondary schools, on college campuses, and increasingly through these explicitly collaborative programs, but of course, through our social media. I don't know how it is an Electrochemical Society or sociology or political science.
ED LIEBOW: But we have about 10,000 members and about 80,000 followers in our social media channels. There are clearly people with an interest in the work that is done here. And so we are actively using those. Is that the case for you, Beth, for example?
BETH CRAANEN: I think you can hear me. I'm going to jump on camera. So in terms of our engagement within our society, we're pretty niche in the type of science that we publish, the science that we report. And essentially, our engagement really is about advancing the research aspect of our society and what we're doing, as we think about, from our end. So I would say our engagement isn't really as general public focused, versus the researcher community, from our perspective.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Thanks, Beth. One more question for you, and then we'll probably have to wrap up because we have two minutes left. One of our attendees wants to know if the ECS has activity involvement in Africa? Are there specific areas or regions of the world where you've not developed programs or have members? And if so, why not? What are the impediments?
BETH CRAANEN: Yeah. Well, I think, like all of us, time and that aspect of-- we're a smaller society. Our CEO and executive director likes to say that, we punch above our weight in terms of the size of staffing, support, and what we do as a society. And we have to be really critical about the activities and programs and where we spend our time. We do have involvement, from a student chapter perspective, in Africa.
BETH CRAANEN: That's actually a recent chapter that came on board to promote ECS within that region of the world. Like I think Ed said earlier, we also participate from a publishing standpoint in Research for Life. We feel that's really important. If you know anything about ECS, it's that one of our goals is to free our science because our science is the science of sustainability, when we think about what's happening beyond the pandemic in this world.
BETH CRAANEN: And we are considering, on a regular basis, of how we can impact other areas. One of the things that we hear from our members is that they want to see our meetings and other places throughout the globe outside of the US. So we're trying to expand some of our biannual meetings in the upcoming years. But when we think about locally in regions, the importance of our sections and student chapters really drive those programs.
BETH CRAANEN: And we're here to support them from a staffing perspective to help them do that.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Great. Thanks, Beth. We have lots of other questions. The kind folks at Renew are recording them. We do need to wrap right now. So thank you everyone, and enjoy your break before our next session.
BETH CRAANEN: Great, thank you.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Thank you.
STEVE SMITH: Thank you.
MARGARET VITULLO: Thanks all.
Segment:0 .
SIMON INGER: Hi, everybody. Welcome back for session 2 of Society Street Virtual. This session is, Where is Your Community? And in the chair is Colleen Scollans. And I shall pass over to Colleen straight away. Thank you.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Hello. Welcome back. This has been great so far. Welcome to the Where is Your Community session. In the interest of time, I'm going to pass introductions over to our four esteemed panelists. First up is Beth Craanen from the Electrochemical Society. Beth, over to you.
Segment:1 Beth Craanen.
BETH CRAANEN: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. So today, as we consider the question posed for this session, I'm going to talk a little bit about what global and local activities mean for the Electrochemical Society. So before we begin, just a little bit about me. I spent the first 15 years of my career working in higher education administration. I was heavily engaged as a member and volunteer in multiple associations related to the field throughout that time period.
BETH CRAANEN: I took a jump over to the association side in 2014, when I joined the Electrochemical Society as the associate director of Development and Membership Services. Then I served in the role of director of Membership Services starting in 2015, and then moved into Publications, which is the current role that I serve as the director of Publications for the society. So again, as I consider the question posed for this session, it made me think back to the beginning of ECS.
BETH CRAANEN: ECS was founded as the American Electrochemical Society in 1902 to advance the theory and practice of electrochemical and solid state science and technology. In their early days, organizational leadership had the forethought to recognize the importance of being inclusive of a broader community. So in 1930, the society dropped American from the organization name. And I think, in many ways, they were ahead of their time, when you think of such a major change to an identity of an organization.
BETH CRAANEN: Fast-forward to today, when you think about how the community would describe ECS, we actually did a study recently in 2018, where we actually asked our community about how they would describe the organization. And global, actually, became the resounding top adjective from that study, to say that people do consider the society to be global overall in everything that we do.
BETH CRAANEN: Today, the organization serves over 8,000 individual members and 50 organizational members worldwide. But we recognize our community as much more broader than membership. The interactions of our community intersects through attendance at our two biannual meetings a year, our engagement online through our website, our blog, and social media, submission to our two peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings publication.
BETH CRAANEN: We recognize it as individuals serving as peer reviewers in 13 technical areas for our journals, individuals accessing over 160,000 articles and abstracts in our digital library. We also consider our volunteers, who serve the society on numerous boards and committees, individuals who applied to over 50 awards, fellowships, and grant programs, and individuals that engage with us in other aspects, such as educational and career opportunities.
BETH CRAANEN: So ultimately, when you piece of those together, we would say that our engagement of our community is 50,000-plus worldwide. So to support this philosophy from a society perspective, with our new leadership coming in, we recently merged our membership and marketing departments into what's now functioning as community engagement to serve that global perspective. As we look at how we engage our community as a whole, the ECS focus is a niche science.
BETH CRAANEN: But the science that we serve is very broad. Our organization overlaps with numerous organizations, such as the American Chemical Society, Materials Research Society, IEEE, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, NACE, Optical Society, and then when you go global with electrochemistry, organizations such as International Society of Electrochemistry and many more. So because of the overlap, we know that our community is engaging in more than one organization, and we recognize the need for us to engage our community outside of ECS-sponsored events and conferences.
BETH CRAANEN: So in 2017, we began to exhibit at conferences and meetings related to our community. And while we're in a given local region, we look to engage stakeholders in activities, such as hosting a dinner, visiting a local chapter, or setting up one-on-one appointments. As you consider how we engage locally, ECS has 23 sections that host electrochemical and solid state science events in a specific region of the globe.
BETH CRAANEN: And it brings together activities where individuals who aren't able to attend meetings on a regular basis, that they can engage with their community from a local perspective. Our sections provide networking opportunities for those in the field or those who are advanced in their careers. They also provide recognition through awards.
BETH CRAANEN: And then some sections also provide travel grant funding to ECS meetings. In addition to our sections, ECS supports 93 student chapters from 23 countries around the world. These student chapters are an extension of the society. They host events, symposia, activities, to promote the science at their institution and beyond. This is really the fastest-growing area of ECS. And in the last five years alone, we've actually doubled the number of chapters that we have within the society.
BETH CRAANEN: Any organization out there, student engagement and involvement is the lifeblood of any organization from a long-term perspective. And our society recognized the importance of local grassroots engagement. And we actually recently expanded our staffing structure to further support both our sections and student chapters. Serving our community on a global scale is always at the forefront of our decision-making when we consider partnerships in all of our programs within the society.
BETH CRAANEN: I think we do a good job of having an interconnected approach to our programs, whether you consider our meetings, membership, our publications, education, our grant programs. We know that programs, at the end of the day, drive membership, so we always look for ways to tie this component to the application process of our grant funding and our awards. Researchers are always looking for ways to fund their research, and we look for opportunities to capture that research output in our meetings and publications.
BETH CRAANEN: Meetings and publications are synergistic, in that we are capturing meeting content in our publications and vice versa. And meetings provide an opportunity for us to engage our members and our donor community in person, through events and receptions on site. A recent example of a global decision-making through a new partnership with IOP Publishing, which is a society publisher headquartered in the UK-- as a US-based independent publisher, we made a decision to move our content onto IOP Science and work with their sales force to have them engage our subscriber community.
BETH CRAANEN: This was really purposeful as a smaller society publisher. When you consider our reach of 2,000 institutional subscribers with 3 million users a year and with over 3.5 million downloads just in 2019 alone, when we think about our engagement and made a decision to look to partner with IOP, that opportunity to expand our reach grew, as IOP supports scientists from 6,618 institutions from 126 countries, and they see over 60 million downloads a year.
BETH CRAANEN: So our goal was to increase our reach by also being on an evolving, state-of-the-art platform. And as you can see, ECS's content is now part of a greater 1-million article community, which provides us great potential to expand our science that is critical to the sustainability of the planet. In my closing, for ECS, as we consider recent implications of COVID-19 and what our community reach means to us, we realized that technology is going to play a critical role.
BETH CRAANEN: We recently canceled only the second ECS meeting in our 118-year history due to the pandemic. And with that, now we really do need to consider technology, what role that can play, and as we all are experiencing today how critical it's going to be to connect with more researchers worldwide. Thank you everyone for your time, and I'm going to hand it back over to Colleen.
BETH CRAANEN:
Segment:2 Ed Liebow.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Ed, are you ready?
ED LIEBOW: Yes, I am. Good day, everybody. My name is Ed Liebow, and I'm the executive director of the American Anthropological Association. I also happen to have the privilege of chairing the Consortium of Social Science Associations for a two-year period. And I want to extend my thanks to the organizers for their flexibility and resilience. I happen to live just two blocks away from the headquarters of the American Geophysical Union, this amazing net 0 building that is just down the street here where the meeting was to take place.
ED LIEBOW: So I'm just going to spend a few minutes with a bit of a provocation for you, the central challenge we face as the American Anthropological Association. We are the world's largest and the best-resourced scholarly and professional association in our discipline. But the question is, how to be a good partner organization while overcoming a legacy of colonialism and scientific racism, whose projects the disciplines served for much of its early history, and to respond productively to the continuing claims that we are intellectual imperialists of some sort, especially from our collaborators in the post-colonial global south.
ED LIEBOW: I am an anthropologist. I was a volunteer leader in this association for many, many years, until about 7 and 1/2 years ago, when I became the executive director. So I have been learning on the job something about the world of associations and believe that we have four standard superpowers that we are responsible for how we are in the world. We have the power of setting standards for intellectual rigor and professional conduct.
ED LIEBOW: We have the power to convene, bringing people together for the purposes of scholarly exchange and the dissemination of the best practices for outreach and advocacy. We have the power of voice, because there is strength in numbers. And we also have the power of illumination, the ability to highlight the work, this remarkable set of contributions that our members make to advance human understanding.
ED LIEBOW: Our members, while we are called the American Anthropological Association-- and incidentally, today, March 26 marks the 118th anniversary of our founding here in Washington, DC, in 1902. Today, we have about 10,000 members, about 20% of whom live outside North America. And a much larger percentage of our members are associated with research sites and field schools around the world.
ED LIEBOW: We hold one large 6,000 or 7,000 person research conference each year. It's in November. We are discussing right now what the global pandemic means for the November meeting. We've had to cancel all of our spring meetings, which are smaller in scale and sharper in focus.
ED LIEBOW: We also hold a field school in the summer in Latin America. And it's not at all clear what the plans are for that this year, as well. So we're trying to be adaptable and investigate the possibilities for virtual participation and hybrid organizations. We have had some smaller successes with some of our section meetings in recent years.
ED LIEBOW: And just in recent weeks and days, we have been sharing with hundreds of enthusiastic participants a series of webinars. The analytics show that the transcripts and recordings of these webinars have been remarkably well-received around the globe. And we are going to continue every Thursday for quite some time now with topics related to the pandemic and its implications for response recovery and community impacts.
ED LIEBOW: Our publishing program includes 22 peer-reviewed titles and a member news magazine. These are all in English, with abstracts in other languages. And this is really kind of a sticking point for our cousins from around the world. We participate with our publishing partner, the Wiley-Blackwell publishers, in the Research for Life Foundation's efforts to distribute at low or no cost to about 6,000 subscribing institutions around the world.
ED LIEBOW: And we have, with Wiley, developed an open access repository and subject heading taxonomy for the field that will take materials in a variety of formats and any language that people choose to submit their materials to. Our history in the United States is closely linked to that of American Indian, Alaska Native communities.
ED LIEBOW: And it is implicated in the internal colonialism that these communities have experienced over much of the past several centuries. The history of anthropology in the United Kingdom and in much of Western Europe is similarly implicated in the colonial project of the 19th and 20th centuries. We've often been criticized for imposing the English language, specific theoretical frames and outcomes of our work, which has served, at least in some instances, to support colonialism, conquest, displacement, dispossession of rights and land and indigenous peoples' resources.
ED LIEBOW: And I'm here to tell you that we're fully aware of this legacy. And in recent years, I think that we've made great strides in coming to terms with our past, trying to find common ground with our colleagues around the world. But there's still much ground to cover. And I know that we're trying to open this up for discussion, so I'm not going to get into a lot of detail now.
ED LIEBOW: But please ask me questions about this. We work very closely with two global anthropology organizations that have recently merged to form the World Anthropological Union. And we also are credentialed observers and consultants to a number of UN programs, and active in the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Coalition for Science and Human Rights, as well as the Scholars at Risk program.
ED LIEBOW: So I will stop at this point, and I hope that you are able to ask me for more details in the discussion section.
Segment:3 Margaret Vitullo.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Margaret, you're up.
MARGARET VITULLO: Here we OK. All right, hello, everybody. Thanks for your patience with this new technology. My name is Margaret Weigers Vitullo. I'm the deputy director of the American Sociological Association. There we go. This presentation is going to focus on building bridges to and strengthening ties to local communities.
MARGARET VITULLO: I'm going to be sharing with you ASA's process of establishing a new program called the Sociology Action Network, or SAN. As I tell you about how we designed SAN, you may see opportunities for your own association to do something similar. The purpose of SAN is to connect individuals interested in volunteering their sociological knowledge and skills with not-for-profit organizations in need of technical expertise.
MARGARET VITULLO: Our motivation in starting SAN were several-fold. At the most abstract level, we were aware of our mission, two parts of it, that direct us to advance sociology as a science and profession, and to promote the contributions and use of sociology to society. More specifically, we wanted to raise public awareness of sociology. We wanted to help our members demonstrate the value of sociology to their own local communities and to their institutions, as part of an insurance policy for small departments.
MARGARET VITULLO: We also wanted to find a way to respond to the needs of communities suffering under the weight of increasing income divides and rising levels of racism and intolerance that we were seeing in our society. It strikes me, as I speak to you today, in the midst of this COVID-19 crisis, that the communities that were in need of support before are going to be even more in need of support in the wake of this crisis, as are the not-for-profit organizations that serve them.
MARGARET VITULLO: So perhaps similar programs that you might establish in your own organizations have an even more pressing need at this point. The question that we were asking in the American Sociological Association is, how could we establish a program that would achieve these ends? Were there models for this being done successfully? We didn't have to go too far to find those models.
MARGARET VITULLO: At the American Association for the Advancement of Science, there is a program called On-call Scientists, that connects scientists from across all disciplines to the specific issue of human rights and helping human rights organizations. The American Geophysical Union has a program called the Thriving Earth Exchange, which connects their members with community projects focused on solving changes related to the environment, climate change, and natural resources.
MARGARET VITULLO: But just talking to other organizations wasn't going to be enough for us to figure out how to do this right. We also needed to talk to our members. We wanted to understand what our members were doing, those who were already engaged with their local communities. So we sent out a call asking for examples. And our members quickly responded.
MARGARET VITULLO: Stephen Demuth was one of those members who responded. He's been offering his quantitative sociological skills to an organization called the Civil Rights Corp, analyzing pretrial process data within a specific county. And as a result of that work, a judge found that thousands of constitutional violations occurred each year in the county, and ordered an immediate injunction against the county, holding people, detaining people, only based on their inability to pay money bail.
MARGARET VITULLO: There we go. Furjen Deng also responded. Since 2007, Furjen has been using her sociological knowledge of immigrant and resettlement processes to help the Light and Salt Association, which is now part of a consortium of organizations focused on helping provide appropriate social services to Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Filipino communities, in Houston, Austin, and Dallas-Fort Worth.
MARGARET VITULLO: Through all of these efforts, the shape of SAN began to take form. We defined specifics for goals, criteria for SAN project, and eligibility for organizations and for our members. It was important to go through this process to be sure that we were investing staff time in a way that was productive and would reflect well on the association, and to protect both our members and the local organizations.
MARGARET VITULLO: So let's look really briefly at each of these. OK, based on all of this work, the goal of SAN was defined as celebrating and encouraging community engaged sociology by raising awareness within not-for-profit profit organizations about the ways sociology could be useful to them, increasing interest among sociologists in bringing their sociological knowledge and skills to the service of local organizations, and creating a program that would build bridges between sociologists interested in offering their expertise on a pro bono basis and organizations in need of that technical advice and assistance, and doing so in a way that was very cognizant of the mutual process of knowledge creation, that it is is not that the sociologists are the experts and the community organizers are in need of that expertise, but actually that there is vital expertise on both sides of that equation, and that both partners would benefit from these interactions.
MARGARET VITULLO: So what is a SAN project? We decided that SAN projects needed to have specific characteristics. They needed to have sociology as the central skill. Just going and volunteering didn't constitute a SAN project. The results needed to be a tangible work product. And the primary goal had to be advancing the work of the organization, not the research agenda of the sociologist.
MARGARET VITULLO: Although research agendas are really important, that's not what SAN is about primarily. Although certainly, there are all sorts of ways for community-engaged research into end up benefiting the scholars, we wanted this program to be really focused on communities. Also, these projects had to be within a specified bounded time frame, so that the scholars didn't end up just being unpaid staff for organizations, well-intended though those might be.
MARGARET VITULLO: What organizations are eligible? Not-for-profit organizations, which can include nonprofit and public sector organizations. We ended up having some really interesting conversations with small municipalities that were trying to figure out how to deal with racial intolerance in their increasingly multi-ethnic community, something that sociologists have quite a bit to say about and quite a bit of research to bring to bear.
MARGARET VITULLO: And we wanted to make sure that those municipalities would also be eligible. We were also interested in making sure that the organizations really didn't have the ability to hire paid consultants to perform the work or that particular kind of work. There are many sociologists, many of our members, who work as paid consultants and we wanted to make sure that we didn't undercut them.
MARGARET VITULLO: And the organization, if there were going to be expenses associated with it, they needed to be able to pay for those expenses. Very quickly, we wanted SAN volunteers to be members, to hold a PhD, to have good references, and to be good communicators. Just a moment.
MARGARET VITULLO: There we go. We have a specific matching process, which allows us to do some vetting on both sides and help the organization hone and focus their projects. But that ultimately leaves the final decision of whether a match is a good match or not with the sociologist and the organization itself. None of this would have been possible without our fantastic SAN advisory board.
MARGARET VITULLO: These are all prominent sociologists in our field who offered to help us with this project. Thank you for giving me a few minutes to talk to you about SAN. I'd be happy to answer any questions. And I hope that this spurs you to think a little bit about whether a project like SAN might be a way for your organization to connect more directly with the community.
MARGARET VITULLO: Thank you so much.
Segment:4 Steve Smith.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I want to turn over to Steve.
STEVE SMITH: I'm the executive director of the American Political Science Association. I've been here since 2013. Prior to my work in APSA, I taught at different universities, including the University of Washington and Georgetown. My focus today is going to be on political science and public engagement. The American Political Science Association is an organization of about 12,000 political scientists.
STEVE SMITH: Over 20% of our members are from outside the US. Also, a significant number of our members work in non-academic settings, including think tanks and research institutes. But again, a vast majority of our members are in universities at, again, a wide variety of institutions. One of the major priorities of the association is public engagement.
STEVE SMITH: Our members study a lot of very urgent public issues, from democracy to voting rights to good governance, public services. And what we see is an important role for our association is how we can support the public engagement work of our members. And we take a broad view of public engagement.
STEVE SMITH: And we have many different initiatives that we have underway in trying to support our members to engage the public. So essentially, they are doing a lot of very important work. Their work can also be informed a great deal by working with community members, working with policymakers. How do we disseminate the valuable research that our members are doing to the public?
STEVE SMITH: And so we have several initiatives, as you can see on the slides, having to do with our public engagement work. We've instituted new awards for public service, communication of scholarly findings and public engagement. We have an Institute for Civically Engaged Research, which I will talk to you about more in detail in a moment, research partnerships, which is also going to be a focus of mine.
STEVE SMITH: We have public scholarship programs that helps translate political science research to a broader public audience. We've been working on tenure and promotion guidelines and how to incorporate public engagement work that faculty do into the tenure promotion guidelines. We have professional networking by political scientists who are working outside the world of academia. And then we've also been working with other societies on this public engagement work as well.
STEVE SMITH: So I want to focus on two major initiatives-- the Institute for Civically Engaged Research and the Research Partnerships on Critical Issues. So the Institute for Civically Engaged Research, ICER, was started in 2019, to train political scientists to conduct research in collaboration with community partners. And it's based at Tufts University.
STEVE SMITH: And it emphasizes the reciprocal nature of high-quality engaged research, and not only how research can serve the public, but also insights researchers gain from engagement with public partners. And it covers a wide variety of topics, from project conceptualization to methodology and how to work with partners. I think there's really an emphasis on the kind of collaborative research between scholars and community partners.
STEVE SMITH: And this kind of training we see is a really innovative aspect of our public engagement work because there's a kind of broad acceptance now by, I think, many of our members that they should be doing public engagement work. And they see it as valuable. But there's also, I think, a lack of training on how to actually do it and how to do it in an academically rigorous way.
STEVE SMITH: So here's a photo of the group from 2019 at Tufts of the training institute. We also are doing research partnerships on critical issues that support collaborative research-based projects that tackle issues of the public interest. And again, we do it across disciplinary and ideological lines.
STEVE SMITH: The first pilot we did was here in DC, and it focused on congressional reform. It was co-sponsored by the R Street Institute and the Brookings Institute here. And it brought together academic specialists on Congress with individuals from across Washington, DC, think tank, and advocacy community. And this was, I think, a good example of how we're bringing scholars together with members of Congress, their staff, researchers who are working in DC, to kind of problem-solve on an important issue having to do with reform in Congress.
STEVE SMITH: And the task force completed their report in October and was delivered to Congress. And also, we had some public forums where the public was invited to learn about the results of the task force report. And again, it's been very well-received. And it's also been widely disseminated. The other kind of continuation of these research partnerships-- again, the Congress was a pilot project, and then this research partnership we're doing on critical issues, the first recipients of a grant we have on research partnerships was recently announced.
STEVE SMITH: And it's based at Marquette University. And this project brings together political scientists who partner with experts in biology, computer science, education, environmental law, as well as local political leaders, environmental leaders, and farmers, to examine Kewaunee County's political efforts to address agricultural pollution. This interdisciplinary research will examine political processes at Kewaunee community and how they're using it to address water pollution and evaluate recent policy changes.
STEVE SMITH: So the goal, again, is to bring together political scientists with a wide variety of disciplines, working with community leaders to address an urgent public problem at the local level-- agricultural pollution. And again, we hope that this grant program will be just the beginning of many awards in the next few years. And I should say that this grant program, as well as many of our public engagement initiatives, is also a product of a presidential task force led by our immediate past president Rogers Smith of the University of Pennsylvania and the support of the Ivywood Foundation.
STEVE SMITH: I would just say in closing that, with the multiple initiatives that we have going on now about public engagement, I think we have a few key lessons I think I want to share with everybody. One, complementary programs maximize impact. For example, having training and grant programs enables us to provide members, who we train and engage with resources, to continue and expand their work.
STEVE SMITH: Similarly, conversations with participants in the advancing public engagement at ICER Institute suggested that new efforts to recognize and signal the value of public engagement, such as awards and other ways of recognizing good public engagement, can really be a valuable incentive. And supporting networking among political science practitioners also complements efforts to disseminate research and link researchers with public partners.
STEVE SMITH: So I think that, where possible, developing a complementary set of programs for public engagement work, I think, can facilitate synergy among these programs and help maximize impact. APSA members are already engaging with the public. We've done recent member surveys where our members have indicated that they have broad support for public engagement. And so I think we have turned our efforts to convincing our members that they should be doing public engagement, too.
STEVE SMITH: Well, how can we provide the incentives for their public engagement work and how can we train them and, again, provide grant opportunities and resources for them to do that work? And my final point around issues around defining public engagement, I think that this remains one of the key issues moving forward in kind of moving towards some kind of shared understanding about public engagement.
STEVE SMITH: Whether it's public scholarship, community-engaged research, or civic engagement, I think that, as we have a conversation within the discipline and more broadly about public engagement, I think that the association can play a useful role in helping define a kind of shared understanding of what this kind of work means and what is involved in doing more extensive public engagement.
STEVE SMITH: Because I think that this is a very important priority for not only political science, but the social sciences. Increasingly, policymakers and funders are looking to, what is the impact of social science research, and political science research in particular. And to the extent that you can encourage your members to engage in the public more broadly, I think it helps maximize the impact of political science research and social science research more broadly.
STEVE SMITH: So thank you. I look forward to any questions that you might have.
Segment:5 Q&As.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Thank you so much, Steve. We have one comment and one question from attendees, so I'm going to start with those. The first comment for Ed, just that they hope you have many more opportunities to share your presentation. And there's some more comments there, but I will continue with that. I'll leave that on the screen. Our question is, where did the funds come from to pay for the APSA grant programs, Margaret?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS:
SIMON INGER: I think that's for Steve.
STEVE SMITH: Isn't this for me?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Oh, sorry, for you Steve-- where did the funds come from to pay for your grant program?
STEVE SMITH: So we did have a significant grant from the Ivywood Foundation. We also have funded some of our public engagement work from our general operations, but we did have an outside grant from the Ivywood Foundation.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Great. We have another question. How do you define public engagement? How do you define, determine public involvement in the engagement, and assess impact? This sounds like it's also for you, Steve.
STEVE SMITH: OK, so I mentioned at the end of my comments, that I do think that the definition of public engagement is something that we see as an area that we wanted to continue to work on. The way we have approached public engagement is broadly trying to encourage our members to engage with the public sphere. And that could be their local community. That could be with policymakers.
STEVE SMITH: That could be with community partners. And it's essentially trying to take their research, and also sometimes their teaching, and bring the lessons learned and their research findings to a broader community. And sometimes that involves working directly with community partners and doing public engagement in that way. It also can mean, again, giving public presentations on your work or working directly with policymakers on an urgent public problem.
STEVE SMITH: I think sometimes the challenge that many faculty face is that there is often not the appropriate incentives to do public engagement work. And many of our members we found also sometimes may not have the training to do public engagement work. And so we're working both on helping our members learn how to do public engagement work, but also, I think we're also trying to provide them incentives through grand programs.
STEVE SMITH: But the tenure and promotion guidelines that I really didn't have a chance to talk about is another area where we're working with various universities and some of our members on how we might rethink tenure and promotion guidelines to incorporate public engagement work into the promotion process.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: That's great, Steve. This seems like a question the other presenters would have a view on as well. Margaret, would you like to start?
MARGARET VITULLO: Steve set us up well to be thinking about public engagement in broad terms, and I'd like to broaden it even more. I think that you can think of public engagement as bridging, as translational, or as direct engagement. And what I mean by that, by bridging, I mean bringing our research to public use. That might be through op-eds. That might be through conversations with policymakers.
MARGARET VITULLO: Translational I think of as I'm taking our research and making it something that the lay audience can use. The American Sociological Association has [INAUDIBLE] a series of short videos called Sociological Insights that are really designed to take some of the critical insights of the discipline and present them in a form that a lay audience could incorporate into their own thinking processes.
MARGARET VITULLO: And then the last one is this direct engagement. SAN would be an example of that. There might be other examples, as well, where people are working with organizations. Ed may be able to expand that typology. But the [INAUDIBLE] public engagement on many, many levels. Thanks.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Great. Ed, do you want to take the invitation and expand?
ED LIEBOW: Sure. One thing I'll say is that, for the work that most researchers in [INAUDIBLE] subfields of anthropology do, we could not do that work if we weren't collaborating with people in the communities. Because most of what we learn, distill, abstract, and generalize from, is based on our being invited in to the lived experiences of our collaborator.
ED LIEBOW: And so there is a sense in which all of the work we do has a significant public engagement element to it, whether you're doing archaeology, whether you're doing biological anthropology, or you're doing linguistic or cultural anthropological work. And I think that, as I said in my earlier remarks, for too long, it seemed as though we were sort of beamed into communities to have the voice of authority to then report back without any accountability to the communities who were our collaborators.
ED LIEBOW: And I think in recent decades that that is no longer the way to work. And in fact, there is built into the work we do, a training and capacity-building component. And the structuring and definition of problems on which we focus has to be something that our community collaborators find meaningful and applicable, or they're just not going to let us there.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: That's great. We have a few more questions. How do communities find out about you? And Ed, there's one building off of your question. Would you be interested in joining forces with programs at AGU and ASSS? So Ed, why don't we have you answer the, how do communities find out about you, and then you can talk about the building partnership question.
ED LIEBOW: Well, like Steve and Margaret, and I'm sure Beth, would say, we spend an enormous amount of energy in reaching out in primary and secondary schools, on college campuses, and increasingly through these explicitly collaborative programs, but of course, through our social media. I don't know how it is an Electrochemical Society or sociology or political science.
ED LIEBOW: But we have about 10,000 members and about 80,000 followers in our social media channels. There are clearly people with an interest in the work that is done here. And so we are actively using those. Is that the case for you, Beth, for example?
BETH CRAANEN: I think you can hear me. I'm going to jump on camera. So in terms of our engagement within our society, we're pretty niche in the type of science that we publish, the science that we report. And essentially, our engagement really is about advancing the research aspect of our society and what we're doing, as we think about, from our end. So I would say our engagement isn't really as general public focused, versus the researcher community, from our perspective.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Thanks, Beth. One more question for you, and then we'll probably have to wrap up because we have two minutes left. One of our attendees wants to know if the ECS has activity involvement in Africa? Are there specific areas or regions of the world where you've not developed programs or have members? And if so, why not? What are the impediments?
BETH CRAANEN: Yeah. Well, I think, like all of us, time and that aspect of-- we're a smaller society. Our CEO and executive director likes to say that, we punch above our weight in terms of the size of staffing, support, and what we do as a society. And we have to be really critical about the activities and programs and where we spend our time. We do have involvement, from a student chapter perspective, in Africa.
BETH CRAANEN: That's actually a recent chapter that came on board to promote ECS within that region of the world. Like I think Ed said earlier, we also participate from a publishing standpoint in Research for Life. We feel that's really important. If you know anything about ECS, it's that one of our goals is to free our science because our science is the science of sustainability, when we think about what's happening beyond the pandemic in this world.
BETH CRAANEN: And we are considering, on a regular basis, of how we can impact other areas. One of the things that we hear from our members is that they want to see our meetings and other places throughout the globe outside of the US. So we're trying to expand some of our biannual meetings in the upcoming years. But when we think about locally in regions, the importance of our sections and student chapters really drive those programs.
BETH CRAANEN: And we're here to support them from a staffing perspective to help them do that.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Great. Thanks, Beth. We have lots of other questions. The kind folks at Renew are recording them. We do need to wrap right now. So thank you everyone, and enjoy your break before our next session.
BETH CRAANEN: Great, thank you.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Thank you.
STEVE SMITH: Thank you.
MARGARET VITULLO: Thanks all.
Form Title Download
Transcript
Form Title Bookmark
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Form Title Share
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Form Title Accessibility and Keyboard Shortcuts
The cadmore media player is a professional video and audio player experience designed to deliver media as well as relevant transcript, segmentation, and metadata. On the screen is a traditional html video player with buttons such as play, pause, forward, captioning, language and play speed selection and more. Adjacent to the video player are generally tabs, one of which shows a scrolling transcript of the video and the other shows any segmentation of the media, sometimes referred to as chapters. At the top of the video is a menu bar containing an Explore button and Tools button. The Explore button allows you to dig deeper into the video by opening up an explore dialog which contains tabs for a visual navigation of the video using thumbnails, an about tab which contains rich metadata about the media, a segments tab which contains further information about the video, and a related tab which contains links to other media related to this media. The tools button opens a menu with options for sharing the media on social media, creating bookmarking links, creating embed codes for your website, generating citations, and more.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts only work while you are in forms mode. By entering forms mode, you will be able to quickly access portions of the media player with single key commands.
Spacebar: Play/Pause Toggle
I: Info Menu,
O: Tools Menu
T: Transcript Tab,
S: Segments Tab
F: Forward 15,
R: Rewind 15
L: Languages,
P: Playspeed
M: Mute Toggle,
V: Volume Bar
N: Video Only Toggle,
B: Full Screen Toggle
C: Captions Toggle
Escape: Closes dialogs and menus / Exits Player
Z: Next Transcript Chapter
X: Previous Transcript Chapter
Q: Next Transcript Paragraph
W: Previous Transcript Paragraph
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Embed Size
-
You Size - Responsive
-
We Size - Responsive
-
Picture Overlay Popup
-
400 x 225
-
512 x 288
-
400 x 700
-
768 x 1024
-
1024 x 512
-
1280 x 608
Form Title Cite
No citation provided.
Info
Segments
Related
Thumbnails
Exit Clip Mode
You have requested to see a portion of the video outside of the clip.
Click OK to switch to the full video or click if you would like to stay inside the clip. You can always go back to the clip with Tools and Clip Mode