Category Archives: News

JustPublics@365 Hosted Conference in NY Observer

National Day of Unplugging lasted from sunset on Friday, March 1 to sunset on Saturday, March 2. But judging from the smartphones, Macbooks, and tablets at the third annual Theorizing the Web conference, no attendees took them up on the challenge.

This past weekend was the first time the conference has been held in New York City, at the CUNY Graduate Center near Herald Square.

Gatherings of this sort are typically insular, academic affairs, but organizers Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey, both sociology grad students at the University of Maryland-College Park, have attempted to broaden the tent to include bloggers, writers, and journalists of all stripes. “We wanted to create the sort of conference we would want to attend,” said Mr. Rey.

In the opening remarks on Saturday, Mr. Jurgenson elaborated, “We would go to theory conferences, and nobody wanted to talk about the Internet.” What ties the two worlds together, he added, is a concern with social justice—public intellectualism rather than institutional prestige.

Friday’s panel, “Free Speech For Whom?” was a good example of that hybrid approach.

Panelists included social media scholar Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research better known as @zephoria; Gawker staff writer Adrian Chen, an editor at The New Inquiry; and University of North Carolina professor Zeynep Tufekci, a fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. CUNY Professor Jessie Daniels, author of Cyber Racism, moderated.

You can read more of Brendan O’Connor’s article in the NY Observer here.

 

    Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus: Social-Justice Researchers Meet Social Media in New Effort at CUNY

    The City University of New York’s Graduate Center has announced a project to expand the social-media reach of academics working on social-justice issues.

    The project, called JustPublics@365 and supported by a $550,000 grant awarded this month by the Ford Foundation, seeks to “move conversations that happen within the ivory tower of academia into the wider world where they have broader impact,” said Jessie Daniels, a professor of public health and sociology and co-principal investigator for the grant.

    The project will train professors and graduate students to use social media to make their social-justice research more visible to a wider audience and to measure its impact.

    JustPublics@365 will hold a number of events, beginning in March, to connect researchers, social-justice activists, and journalists, including conferences on such topics as racial justice and the intersection of health and housing. “MediaCamp” workshops, co-sponsored in January with the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, will teach skills like using Twitter, setting up a blog, and writing op-eds. The project will also play host to a free massive open online course, or MOOC, focused on East Harlem.

    You can read the complete article by Alisha Azvedo here.

     

      Center for Digital Media: Digital Media Meets Social Justice Research in CUNY Project

      Traditional academic research is about to get a digital makeover.

      The Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY) is mixing social justice research, activism and digital media in an effort to connect research with broader audiences. Leaders of a project dubbed JustPublics@365hope to change academic conversations about what research looks like and connect research to wider audiences through social media.

      “We’re really thinking about what are new ways that we could connect these pieces: the research, the engagement with social media and wider publics through that, and also this focus on social justice,” said Jessie Daniels, professor of public health and sociology at The Graduate Center and a project leader.

      You can read the complete article by Tanya Roscorla here.

        Diverse Issues in Higher Education:: CUNY Graduate Center Launches Social Justice Initiative

        The online higher education publication, Diverse Issues in Higher Education, conducted an interview this week about JustPublics@365 with co-PI, Professor Jessie Daniels of the CUNY School of Public Health and Hunter College. Here’s a quote from Daniels:

        People today who are concerned about social justice are really at a loss if they’re not using social media. What the Ford Foundation was interested in was connecting the very good research happening at the Graduate Center with social justice movements and social justice advocacy. The project is really intended to transform the way scholars/academics think about their work and use that work in a way that really engages with social justice work going on in the world.

        You can read the complete article here.

          Graduate Center Launches JustPublics@365

          Press Release, 11/14/2012.

           

          Graduate Center’s (CUNY) Newly-Formed JustPublics@365 Receives Research Grant from the Ford Foundation to Address Social Inequality through Digital Media

           

          Ambitious Program Will Link Work of Academics, Activists and Journalists to inform the public

          New York, NY (November 14, 2012) – The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (GC) announced today that the Ford Foundation has provided a research grant to launch JustPublics@365, which will bring together journalists, academics, activists and policy advocates who are working to address social inequality through digital media.

          “We’re delighted that the Ford Foundation shares our long-term vision for bringing academic research to bear on pressing problems of social justice,” said Graduate Center Provost Chase F. Robinson. “JustPublics@365 is an ambitious effort to maximize the influence of faculty research through the innovative use of a wide range of social media, by creating partnerships among academics, activists and policy-makers, and by seeking new ways to measure impact.”

          “The Graduate Center, with its distinguished history of research on inequality, is uniquely qualified to work with the Ford Foundation to create a more informed public sphere,” added Robinson.

          At the Graduate Center and beyond it, JustPublics@365 engages a dialogue among researchers on inequality, activists and media. It uses the networked landscape of the internet and the physical environs of the GC – JustPublics@365 is named for the institution’s address at 365 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan – to bring attention to those inequalities across several domains: economic, housing, race and ethnicity, immigration, health, and education. The program’s first Summit will be held at the GC on Thursday, March 6, 2013.

          “The pathway for scholars working on social justice research to engage the public via traditional and new forms of media will require collaborative models like JustPublics@365 now and into the future,” said Darren Walker, vice president of the Education, Creativity and Free Expression program at the Ford Foundation. “An informed citizenry is a prerequisite for democracy and embarking on creative experiments to connect the public to research on critical issues is a necessary priority.”

          JustPublics@365 will be overseen by Chase Robinson, Provost of the GC, Jessie Daniels, a professor of Public Health and Sociology at the Graduate Center, and Matthew K. Gold, who serves at the GC as Advisor to the Provost for Master’s Programs and Digital Initiatives and Acting Executive Officer of the M.A. Program in Liberal Studies.

          Through the $550,000 research grant, Robinson, Daniels and Gold will develop an innovative “alt metrics” measurement program with GC to assess the impact of academic research on the public sphere and social justice initiatives.