Engaged scholarship, Knowledge mobilization, Social innovation - all of these terms have been gained prominence in the past few years as ways to describe how researchers and scholars can connect with communities. Regardless of your preferred term, it is clear that strong relationships between researchers and communities have been developing, leading to many creative and constructive results.
On March 28, 2010, the Annual Meeting of the Federation's General Assembly featured an intriguing and thoughtful session on Engaged Scholarship, moderated by Karen Grant, VP Research Policy. Listen to the full podcast of the session below, or read the live blog account of the event here. Excuse the initial part of the recording - the session gets underway at 2:34 into the recording.
[podcast] http://fedcan-podcast.s3.amazonaws.com/Engaged_Scholarship_AGM_Plenary_March_28_2010.MP3 [/podcast]
In the plenary, you'll hear Shauna McCabe (Director, Centre for Humanities and Arts Research in Transdisciplinary Space at Mount Allison University) explore how creative research can offer an important tool for engagement, using examples of current research involving artistic and environmental practice coming together to explore landscape change.
Budd Hall (Director, Community Based Research, University of Victoria) discusses Canadian dimensions of engaged scholarship, the challenges that researchers face in the university, and the idea of the knowledge commons summit.
Lastly, Ian Graham (Vice President, Knowledge Translation, Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)) discusses CIHR's knowledge translation initiatives, outlining how health research can be quickly and effectively transfered into practice.