Enabling Public Scholars through Faculty Development

To support faculty as they remained civically engaged during the pandemic, the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of South Dakota (CTL) launched a training series on public scholarship partnering with facilitators from Emory, Baylor, and Harvard. Core outcome of the series were for faculty to find a home for themselves in public engagement and to support students in their own public-facing work. The series introduced faculty to public scholarship as a dialogical partnership and offered workshops on facilitating public-facing student work and organizing virtual conferences, concluding each term with a panel featuring academics who promote the common good in different ways. This article explains the development of this series with the theoretical underpinnings that guided it and concludes by proposing a definition of public scholarship that includes student voices and repositions universities within the communities they inhabit.

Making philosophical thought dangerous again: Heidegger’s attack on journalistic writing

When it comes to questions about alternative visions for philosophical engagement, Heidegger’s work makes for an interesting case study, especially if we focus on his texts from the turbulent 1930s. As a shortcut into this contested territory, it is instructive to examine Heidegger’s anti-journalistic gestures, centered on the question whether this animosity is bound to drive a wedge between, or rather prompt a re-approximation of, philosophy and public scholarship. To render this programmatic concern more specific, the present essay aims to reassess Heidegger’s profile by considering his account of language as the “most dangerous of goods” bestowed on humans. This theme can serve as an expedient starting point for scrutinizing philosophers’ self-understanding as daring explorers in pursuit of profound insights into the human condition, and their (in)ability to balance excitement and sobriety.

How Social Science Got Better

Social science research is facing mounting criticism, as canonical studies fail to replicate, questionable research practices abound, and researcher social and political biases come under fire. Far from being in crisis, however, social science is undergoing an unparalleled renaissance of ever-broader and deeper understanding and application—made possible by close attention to criticism of our biases and open public engagement. Wars between scientists and their humanist critics, methodological disputes over statistical practice and qualitative research, and disciplinary battles over grand theories of human nature have all quietly died down as new generations of scholars have integrated the insights of multiple sides. Rather than deny that researcher biases affect results, scholars now closely analyze how our racial, gender, geographic, methodological, political, and ideological differences impact our research questions; how the incentives of academia influence our research practices; and how universal human desires to avoid uncomfortable truths and easily solve problems affect our conclusions. To be sure, misaligned incentive structures remain, but a messy, collective deliberation across the research community is boosting self-knowledge and improving practice. Ours is an unprecedented age of theoretical diversity, open and connected data, and public scholarship. How Social Science Got Better documents and explains recent transformations, crediting both internal and public critics for strengthening social science. Applying insights from the philosophy, history, and sociology of science and providing new data on trends in social science research and scholarly views, it demonstrates that social science has never been more relevant, rigorous, or self-reflective.

Evaluating Digital Projects

Digital humanities takes public scholarship to the next level. Whether looking for the best tools or learning about new developments within the field, “The Download” can help you refine your work in digital religious studies. Professor Jeri Wieringa (University of Alabama) provides insight into this new mode of scholarship by highlighting the challenges and nuances of online platforms.

Groundwork for the Public

Public-facing research institutions and university centers have played an outsized role in collecting and disseminating knowledge about local news trends in the United States. Philanthropic support, attention by policymakers, and a sense of urgency around the crisis facing local journalism have incentivized the emergence of this particular kind of research that sits adjacent to, but not fully inside, the scholarly environment. This material is well positioned to engage and activate interventions aiming to help address the crisis in local journalism and provide empirical grist for deeper scholarly work. At the same time, however, this line of public scholarship is sometimes unmoored from theoretical considerations, highly descriptive, and exists outside of peer review systems. Many of these institutions setting the agenda for research about local journalism are bound by their own norms and cultures from making robust normative claims about how the industry should respond and adapt to their findings. This chapter traces the brief history of para-scholarly groundwork mapping local news, outlines the strengths and weaknesses of this model, and suggests collaborative practices going forward that connect this important groundwork with theory-driven and peer review practices.

Challenges and Opportunities for the Future of Media and Mass Communication Theory and Research: Positionality, Integrative Research, and Public Scholarship

In this essay I intend to tell a story of media studies and mass communication research as a field, based on the work of the late Denis McQuail – and that of editing the new edition of his seminal handbook McQuail’s Media and Mass Communication Theory (McQuail & Deuze, 2020). Using McQuail’s historical storytelling method, I specifically look at the challenge for the field in the context of a global pandemic alongside an infodemic, at a time when the whole world faces the consequences of recurrent lockdowns, social distancing measures, and institutional pressures to stay at home. Media studies and (mass) communication research, while having a distinct narrative, as a field has only just begun to articulate its relevance to society – we have only just started to tell our story. Using developments in understanding the self as a research tool, the implementation of integrative research designs, and calls for engaged and public scholarship, the paper outlines challenges and opportunities for what we can do with our field.