Public Engagement often exists in silos making it difficult to find out what's going on. Now is the time to build on positive momentum and establish a university-wide network.
There is brilliant, innovative and life-changing public engagement taking place across the University, but it can be difficult to find. In the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation we’re opening up astrophysics research to vision impaired young people through the Tactile Universe project led by Dr Nic Bonne. Professor Deborah Sugg Ryan has inspired thousands of members of the public to become amateur historians through her contributions to the BBC Two series A House Through Time. Dr Matt Smith uses puppetry to build collaborative community engagement projects, changing theatre practice and educating communities on urgent health issues. These are some of the examples that I’m aware of and with the recent success of activities such as Stargazing events and the D-Day Museum’s Holocaust Memorial Day event, we are certainly gathering momentum. The problem that I’ve encountered over the decade that I’ve worked here is that this work often takes place in silos, making it almost impossible to find out what’s going on outside of our own departments or faculties.
We want to change this. On Thursday 30 March we’ll be holding the first event for a new grassroots, practitioner-led Public Engagement Network at the University. The momentum for this network came from conversations I had with various colleagues at the recent Festival of Research and Innovation, but we want to ensure that the network is open and welcoming to colleagues from across the University, and not come across as some exclusive club. This will be a practitioner-led network, open to all with an interest in public engagement, whether you interact directly with the public or work more behind-the-scenes in the process. You may have been engaging with the public for years, or not even be sure what public engagement is!
Public Engagement Bring & Share
An opportunity to share your public engagement activities, learn about what else is going on, and gain ideas
Public engagement can mean different things to different people (one of the things we’d like to explore through this network) and there are a multitude of reasons why you might want to engage with the public as a member of this University. Maybe your work is funded by public money and you feel a sense of duty. Maybe you’re a researcher using the prospect of a 4* REF impact case study as a justification for this work. Maybe you need patient involvement for your healthcare research. Or maybe you do it as a way to give back to the community that the University sits within.
Whatever your link to public engagement is, this first event is an opportunity for us all to find out what others are doing, meet like-minded colleagues who are enthusiastic about engaging with the public, and discuss what we’d like to get out of the network. We hope you can join us on 30 March and we look forward to growing this network with you over the coming months and years.