[Last week, I
had the chance to attend a national meeting of the Scholars Strategy Network, a
vital public scholarly organization of which I’ve been a
Member for almost four years. So this week I wanted to share a few sides to
my work with SSN, leading up to a weekend post on that national meeting and SSN’s
expanding role in Trump’s America!]
Before getting
into my personal experiences with SSN, a post on three important contexts for
how and why the group was created:
1)
Theda
Skocpol: The SSN was the brainchild of Dr. Theda Skocpol,
Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard; she remains
SSN’s Director and has been a vital force in
every aspect of its work to date. It’s fair to say that SSN embodies the publicly
connected scholarly work Dr. Skocpol had been already producing for many
decades, not only in her research and publications but in taking part in policy
debates at and around the Clinton White House (among many other such
efforts). But having had the chance to attend SSN events alongside Dr. Skocpol,
I would stress that she sees herself first and foremost as a Member of the organization,
a peer and colleague of all those scholars (781 to date,
from 192 universities around the country) whose work constitutes SSN’s
evolving body of contributions to American and global society and
conversations.
2)
Policy and Media: Like Skocpol (and, in a much
much briefer and smaller way, like me), numerous scholars had already been
producing publicly engaged work long before SSN’s founding. But it had been
very difficult for most of them to bring that work outside of the academy and
into two vital settings and conversations: government and its public policy
debates; and the mass media and its connections to public audiences. SSN’s
primary purpose was and remains to help individual scholars bridge those
gaps, to offer and facilitate opportunities for us to speak directly with legislators
and policy makers on the one hand and media outlets and pundits on the other. As
the next couple posts in this series will illustrate, my personal connections
have been more on the media side; but here in Massachusetts I’ve likewise seen
multiple, tangible examples
of policy debates to which SSN has connected its Members and which have
been significantly affected by those links.
3)
Community: SSN has never been solely about
connecting individual scholars to those different aspects of their regional and
national communities, however. Just as central has been a goal of creating
scholarly communities, of helping publicly engaged scholars find like-minded
folks and build collaborations and relationships with them. The most overt
examples of such scholarly communities are the SSN
Working Groups, in which scholars from around the country share resources
and ideas related to a particular contemporary issue. But I have found that SSN’s
communal connections can also develop in organic ways: to cite just one
example, through one of the SSN
Boston leaders Dr. Erin O’Brien I was connected to the WGBH Mass Politics
Profs blog (for which O’Brien is one of the principal
contributors), and had the chance to write a
post on public education ahead of the state’s 2014 gubernatorial election. Now
more than ever, it’s crucial that none of us feel that we’re going it alone,
and SSN’s communal connections have helped me feel that sense of solidarity
consistently and potently.
Next SSN post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Thoughts on SSN, or other organizations or efforts you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment