Workshop: Public Scholarship- Practicing How we Tell Stories (pre-reg. required)

Facilitated by Dr. Laurie Moberg, University of Minnesota Institute for Advanced Study. Editor of Open Rivers and Project Manager for the Mellon Environmental Stewardship, Place, and Community (MESPAC) Initiative

What is public scholarship and how can it be a strategy for confronting the complexities of contemporary environmental issues and injustices? As environmental upheaval, crises, and uncertainties intensify, we recognize that the problems are multifaceted; the methods we use for engaging and solving these challenges need to be  just as comprehensive. Public scholarship—sharing work, experiences, research, and ideas with a broad audience—is a critical way to demonstrate intersections of differing forms of expertise and to build relationships for innovative problem-solving and for justice. Public scholarship is a strategy to cultivate conversations that brings together voices and perspectives of academics, community members, artists, activists, practitioners, and professionals, an opportunity for bridging different ways of knowing, and a way of laying a foundation for better, more robust, and more equitable solutions to environmental challenges. In this three-hour interactive workshop, join Laurie Moberg, editor for Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place & Community, a journal of public scholarship focused water as a lens for understanding environmental justice and climate change, to explore how public scholarship intersects with your work and with how we encounter the messy challenges of transdisciplinary environmental issues. Together, we’ll explore how public scholarship can connect academics and non-academics and foster productive collaborations. Please bring your own work that you’d like to transform into public scholarship. We’ll spend time focusing on how to craft public scholarship with the possibility of publication in a future issue of Open Rivers or other public platforms.