Engagement ??? sometimes called action research,
contribution, or intervention ??? is the participation
of the researcher in the object of study. It is a key
contemporary feature in making iSchool research
accessible and relevant to broader communities.
However, it also presents novel challenges for the
traditional academic endeavor. We have many
???shorthands??? for these difficulties: misaligned
reward structures, diverging goals,
miscommunication across heterogeneous
expertises, multiple membership, challenges of
multidisciplinary collaboration, or unrealistic
expectations on social science. Often these
difficulties are precisely what our research
attempts to address but only rarely do we give
ourselves leeway to discuss how they affect our
own practice. We have arranged this session to
open and encourage discourse on the experiences,
approaches and outcomes of engagement.
The core of the presentations will be centered on
storytelling. Stories, or narratives, are ideal
devices for capturing and conveying the
complexities of real world field experiences. The
four participants in this interactive panel will
recount exemplary narratives of their engagement
at the intersections of social research, information
studies and domain sciences. These stories will
serve as the material for an open discussion. Our
participants were selected both for their diverse
modes of interface with their objects of study and
a shared commitment to engaging social
/information/domain science. This includes a
range of activities stretching from policy
recommendations, to participant observation or
contributions to technology design; from
distanced roles such as ???shrink wrapped???
consulting, to long view historical studies, to
becoming a daily members and ???stakeholders??? in
the success of projects
