sutton033

Dr Steve Joy At a recent talk to early career academics, I was arguing for the importance of engaging non-academic audiences in your research, when one disgruntled participant shot back that I was encouraging them to become celebrities. This wasn't what I intended, but the response isn't untypical. It reflects an unease among a lot of early career researchers: on top of everything else, do I really have to learn to become a media don or children's entertainer? Is this what I actually need to do to improve my career prospects? Advocates will counter, rightly, that this view of public engagement is unfair. They will say that the reason to do public engagement is not solely to advance one's own career, and that we have a duty to explain to the public what we do. However, motivations for engaging the public can feel more practical than ethical. We all know that it's simply what's expected by the Research Excellence Framework (REF) assessors, the funders, university ...

This is Papertown, U.S.A. Last July, I moved to Canton, North Carolina - a town nestled between the mountains just west of Asheville and well known in the region for the paper mill that is the largest employer in the county. Numbering just over 4,000 souls, Canton is a small town. Because of the paper mill, Canton doesn't attract the same number of seasonal tourists that flock to the quaint mountain towns of Waynesville, Black Mountain, or Brevard. Instead, many of the people who call Canton home are folks who grew up here, who have family members who work at or have retired from the mill, who root for the high school football team and march in the Labor Day parade, who see their childhood teachers in the Ingles grocery store, and who run into their neighbors at Sid's on Main restaurant. Since everybody pretty much knows everybody else in Canton, news travels fast and prayer requests travel even faster. As the Yankee-kid-pastor appointed to serve Central United Methodist Church...