Academics are increasingly asked to participate in public debates and comment on current issues. A credible plan for «impact and dissemination» is becoming a decisive checkbox of any successful funding application. As a result, the ability to disseminate research is an increasingly relevant asset in an academic career. But this is happening at a time of fragmentation, polarisation and anti-expert attitudes in the public sphere. Furthermore, public debates have some obvious gender, age, racial and class biases. All these combined make some early career and senior academics wonder whether it is worth at all to be involved in public debates.
The workshop is organised with the generous funding of ECPR SGEU by OpenEUdebate (https://openeudebate.eu/), a Jean Monnet network aiming to mediate, translate and communicate between different publics and types of knowledge. It intends to raise awareness of the skills required to address publics eager to pay attention to academics, discuss different strategies for outreach and provide networking opportunities. Participants will be given hands-on advice on a dissemination proposal based on their own research (blogs, podcasts, policy briefs for think tanks etc) and given the chance to contribute to the network’s platform to interact with some of the mediators mentioned above.