Speakers: Bjørn Bedsted, Blanca Guasch, Jill Jäger, Jonas Krebs, Cristina Luís, Anna Olsson, Ines Vaittinen
Organisers: Joshua Cohen, Anne Loeber, Malene Vinther Christensen, Ulrike Wunderle
The urgency and relevance of engaging citizens in research and innovation is widely acknowledged. In EC R&I funding policies and in many universities’ ethical guidelines there is a call for public engagement. Moreover, researchers are themselves often highly motivated to engage with citizens. But how to do so? Where to find citizens to engage with, and how to organise the interaction in a productive and rewarding manner? This session provides answers to these questions by drawing on the experiences in the NewHoRRIzon project with stakeholder engagement.
The NewHoRRIzon project brought to light many reasons why stakeholder engagement is worth investing in, but also that it is often difficult to arrange in practice. This session started off with an exploration of the reasons why it is worth investing time and energy in stakeholder engagement. We discussed democratic considerations next to strategic and instrumental considerations, and touch on citizen science and co-creation processes. Most of all, we discussed practical aspects of setting up processes of engagement in research. The session offered opportunities to become acquainted with a number of methods to organize public engagement that are easy to apply. You were offered an opportunity to try out a concrete tool, out of a selection of tools as developed in the NewHoRRIzon project. The session came with a free digital gift bag.
