The engaging researcher event (Vitae NW Hub & Manchester Beacon)

15 July 2010

By Emma Gillaspy

I thought I would share the success of our recent event ‘The engaging researcher’ which was held in Manchester on 6 July 2010. The Vitae North West Hub and Manchester Beacon for Public Engagement collaborated on developing this one day event which was hosted at Manchester Metropolitan University. The event also launched ‘The engaging researcher’ booklet which was written by the Beacons for Vitae.

Over 60 researchers from 10 North West universities attended the event, including postgraduate researchers, research staff, supervisors and Principal Investigators. The participants came from a diverse range of research fields, from Analytical Science to Visual Arts so the event gave them the rare opportunity to network and socialise with researchers they would not normally meet. We hope this will stimulate interdisciplinary collaboration as well as a sense of community with those in the region interested in public engagement.

There was also a broad range of previous experience in the audience from those who had not done any public engagement to some who had engaged with lots of different age groups and communities using activities such as festivals, school visits, broadcasting, public dialogue and co-inquiry.

As you can imagine, this gave us quite a task in designing a day that would be useful for all of the participants no matter what their experience or field was!

I’m not going to talk about the structure of the day so if you are interested the full programme content can be found at www.vitae.ac.uk/engagingresearcher. What we wanted to achieve from the programme was some inspiration, hopefully provided by good keynote speakers and experienced public engagement practitioners, some short workshops to provide lots of ‘input’ and longer workshops which split participants by experience that allowed them to explore what public engagement meant and how they could formulate a personal action plan.

We also provided a public engagement ‘opportunities zone’ over the networking lunch to give researchers access to some experienced public engagement organisations with which they might be able to work in the future. The Manchester Beacon has launched their Early Career Researcher Awards 2010 which will help fund such partnerships (for more info, see www.vitae.ac.uk/engagingresearcher).

We have started to collate some post event resources on www.vitae.ac.uk/engagingresearcher including a record of the Twitter conversation around the event and handouts from the sessions to help those who did not attend to still access some of the information. Soon to be added to the website is audio and video clips of the speakers and facilitators and photos from the day. We are currently collating feedback from participants but initial responses have been extremely positive.

Where to next then? Well, we are hosting a ‘reunion’ networking lunch in November where we will also showcase the successful applicants to the Early Career Researcher Awards 2010. If you are interested in this or want to know more about our event, just drop me a line at .

Any thoughts or comments about this post (which turned out to be much longer than I initially thought I could write for!) are most welcome or maybe you attended the event and would like to share your experience below.

(this post will also appear on my blog http://vitaenwhub.posterous.com/)