Topics and Questions We Can Help You To Answer:
Paper Instructions:
We will begin this course by exploring what it means to be a ″public″ scholar versus a purely academic scholar and how we, as academics, can learn, engage with, and contribute to that public scholarship. For the first three weeks we will explore how academics and thought-leaders in your discipline shape the discourse (or conversations) happening in your field. The purpose of this project is for you to become avid consumers of information on your chosen field and area of scholarly interest, for you to engage with notable voices in your field, and finally for you to become full-fledged contributors to that discourse. This deep-dive will also help you learn the ″lingo″ of your field, giving you keywords and hot topics to explore in our research project. For many decades, academics have been accused and guilty of keeping all their expertise trapped in an ivory tower of obscure specialist journals and classrooms accessible only to tuition-paying students. Today, however, scholars in many fields of study are turning to more public forms of scholarship to share their research with the world outside of academia and to advocate for and about a variety of topics. We will begin by examining our discipline discourse communities and looking at examples of public scholarship that demonstrate advocacy. You might, for example, discover that a group of computer science scholars have lately been publishing scholarly journal articles on applying the lens of social justice to the creation of algorithms to make them more fair for marginalized populations. In addition to the scholarly, peer-reviewed papers that they published, they also wrote a magazine article for the wider public and created an infographic (below) to help non-specialists understand their research. ***Find a piece of public scholarship in your discipline and post a link to it in our class discussion board. In your post, link to the item and answer the following questions about it using examples: ** Copy and Paste the link on the paper** 1) What strategies does the author use to reach a wide, non-expert/academic audience? 2) In what ways is the author’s expertise evident in the public scholarship? 3) Do you think this was a good choice of genre for the scholar’s ideas/research? Why or why not? 4) In spite of its public nature, what are the potential barriers for average citizens to access this piece of scholarship (paywall, literacies, etc.)? 5) Do you consider this piece of public scholarship to be advocacy/activism? Why or why not?