Dated: 8/1/2012
Informed Citizens in Convergent Cultures:
Transforming Scholarly Communication for Social Justice in the Digital Era
Some of us live in the best of times, more of us live in difficult times, yet few of us can explain such
disparities. Should we know where to look, however, key research produced by academics can
help us explain the causes and consequences of the growing problem of inequality. On one
standard measure of inter-household income inequality, for example, the U.S. ranks highest (25th
out of 25 countries). This sobering statistic is drawn from the Luxembourg Income Study, an
initiative housed at the Graduate Center (GC) of the City University of New York. Such vital work
needs to be more thoroughly connected to citizens and activists beyond the academy who desire a
more informed public debate in order to effect social change.
The issue: Institutions of higher education and major media outlets are just beginning to come to
terms with a shift in the way content is created and shared in a digital world. Both the traditional
broadcast media model ("one-to-many") and the traditional expert-knowledge paradigm of
academia (“few-to-few”) have been challenged by the rise of user-generated content and the
radical democratization of distribution (“many-to-many”), in which anyone can create media
content, become a self-appointed “expert,” and share news and opinions with their networks.
These new practices of sharing content without traditional gatekeepers have reshaped the roles of
academics, media figures, and citizens within the public sphere. For academics, the Internet
presents new challenges to scholars hoping to contribute to important public debates. For media
professionals, the Internet signals the emergence of a new convergence culture in which broadcast
and digital technologies inform, influence, and reinforce one another. For citizens who want to be
informed, digital platforms present a plethora of options, but the rapidly shifting news-andentertainment cycle can prove overwhelming and unsatisfying. This new media landscape requires
innovative approaches to both academic research and media production in ways that scale to meet
the demands of multiple audiences and that transform mere ‘audiences’ into active, engaged, and
informed citizens.
The aim of this project is to leverage the opportunities of convergence culture to connect expert
knowledge with engaged citizens who want to be better informed about inequalities across several
domains: income and economic, criminal justice reform, race and ethnicity, health, housing and
education.
The initiative: Neither the media nor academia nor Internet activists can address the problem of
creating an informed citizenry by working in isolation. Researchers, policy makers, and think tanks
have relied for most of the 20th century on “white papers,” but the 21st century calls for radically
different strategies that share data and research through networked and transmedia
communication techniques, leveraging the reciprocal power of social networks and the connected
platforms of digital media to meet marketplace demands for accessible and impactful information
that retains the integrity and authority of scholarly research.
What is needed is a project of cross-skilling new ‘hybrid’ practitioners who combine the best of these
worlds and can work together for the public good.
We thus propose to bring together media practitioners, academics from a variety of institutions,
community leaders, and social activists in a coordinated effort to create teams of ‘media-academicactivists’ fully familiar with the perspectives, practices, and skills of each field. This will produce a
range of benefits:
1
Dated: 8/1/2012



scholarly research, connected to engaged citizens through broadcast media techniques,
will reach large audiences demanding better quality information;
media outputs, informed by the latest scholarship and connected more widely to citizens
and activists through social media practices, will foster responsible debate and address a
broader range of issues in the public sphere; and,
social activism will gain greater effectiveness by being informed by research and linked to
effective policy advocacy and social media strategies.
The impact of academic work will be tracked using innovative metrics that take into account the
dynamic flows of information within and among social networks; such metrics can be used within
academia to substantiate the wider impact of scholarly work and can be used outside of it to create
effective roadmaps for engaging the public sphere to promote social justice (See separate
Evaluation Metrics Rubric). The beneficiaries of this coordinated approach to research will be a
more informed citizenry and a media equipped with the most up-to-date scholarship on critical
areas of public concern, one that has the potential to foster conditions that create a fairer, more
diverse, and more open society.
The GC is especially well suited to address these challenges. Given its central location in New York
City, the GC is often the institution where scholars from around the city and the region come
together. Because New York is simultaneously a city marked by substantial activism about
disparities in wealth and education, the media hub of the nation as well as a vibrant center for new
media technologies, the CUNY Graduate Center is uniquely situated to serve as a valuable resource
for non-governmental agencies, community activists, and scholars interested in and working
toward a more equitable society available to all.
Scholars affiliated with the GC are internationally known for generating world-class research on
critical public policy issues in such areas as socio-economic inequality and immigration, education,
health, and housing inequities. To cite just a few examples, Philip Kasinitz, Richard Alba, Nancy
Foner, and John Mollenkopf have shaped the debate about immigration by demonstrating positive
outcomes in the integration of second-generation immigrants. Paul Attewell and Michelle Fine are
leading experts on education policy in the United States and around the world. Susan Saegert’s
research on housing and human development has led to innovative partnerships with architects
and urban planners to help re-envision cityscapes. Mary Clare Lennon and the Health and Society
Research Group are conducting research for NIH/NICD on the effect of residential instability on
young children. Roger Hart and the Children’s Environmental Research Group carry out research
for UNICEF about children in emergency situations. Juan Battle heads a team of researchers on the
Social Justice Sexuality Project that conducted the largest ever national survey of Black, Latina/o,
Asian and Pacific Islander, and multiracial lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people,
with over 5,000 respondents from all fifty states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. Senior faculty
members such as these, many of whom are already engaged with the public sphere but who are
generally not well versed in digital scholarly methods, will be encouraged to participate in the
project through a range of incentives. These will include: course releases, participation in high
profile events, free digital media training through the M-Camp, assistance through the Scholarly
Communications Lab, the apprenticeship of post-doctoral fellows (in year two), and the prospect
of reaching much wider audiences through the project.
These activities are part of the GC’s new initiative called the “Digital GC” that features the creation
of a new Scholarly Communications Lab in September 2012. This lab will work in conjunction
with existing units such as the New Media Lab (NML) to foster faculty and student research
projects and to create innovative knowledge streams. Current work of the NML ranges from a
student-led “counter-mapping” project that asks Israelis and Palestinians to map the imaginative
2
Dated: 8/1/2012
urban dynamics of a one-state solution, to “Children Framing Childhoods,” a project that gives
disposable cameras to low-income children so that they can take pictures of their family, school,
and community life in ways that illustrate social inequality. Central to the “Digital GC” initiative is
the CUNY Academic Commons, an innovative academic social network that connects the faculty
and graduate students of the twenty-four campus CUNY system. The developers of the Commons
recently received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to create a “Commons In A Box,”
which will make the CUNY Academic Commons available for other institutions and associations to
use, free of cost. The Modern Language Association has already signed on to use this new software
as the framework for an MLA Commons that will serve its more than 30,000 members.
The Informed Citizens initiative will be integrated into the strategic vision of the GC as a showcase
project of its newly established Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC), which is designed to
coordinate interdisciplinary research to focus on issues of local, national, and global significance,
and to facilitate connecting research to the public.
The goals of our project are ambitious but realizable. Leading social policy scholars will be trained
in the practices of modern media, thus equipping them with a deepened capacity for
communicating their research through print, broadcast, and web-based media. Selected media
practitioners will be immersed in key areas of policy scholarship, thus narrowing the gap between
each side and leading to more in-depth output for the thinking citizen. All parties will be brought
into closer interaction with community and Internet activists with the goal of sharing cutting-edge,
grassroots communication practices, insuring that scholarship is framed in ways that meet the
needs of activists and that foreground the diversity of popular experience. This initiative offers
advantages at several levels:





Media outlets partnering with us stand to gain access to cutting-edge research presented in
state-of-the art modalities by media-trained academics.
Community activists and policy advocates will gain access to modern media skills and a
fund of scholarly knowledge not widely available elsewhere.
Academics will see their research condition public debate.
The production of knowledge at the GC and the evaluation of its impact on the public sphere
will be significantly transformed by this initiative.
This transformation of the GC will serve as a model for other institutions of higher
education as they seek to meet the challenges of the 21st century. It is our intention that this
pilot program will ultimately serve as a model for other public institutions of higher
education that aspire to engage a wider audience and broaden the reach of scholarly
research
The project has four coordinated components:
Component I: Events in 21st Century Communication for Media-Academic-Activist
Partners will consist of a series of high-profile events, including a seminar on inequality operated
as a Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) and three additional forums that will provide the
opportunity leading figures from the media, the academy, and activist communities to come
together to share knowledge, experience, common perspectives, and skills.
Component II: Media Camp (M-Camp) for Academics in 21st Century Communication
Methods and Skills will consist of parallel training sessions for academics, drawn largely from a
pool of select faculty and advanced graduate students, who will lead the way in transforming
scholarly communications in the digital era.
Component III: Producing Innovative Knowledge Streams for Social Justice will begin
the production of innovative, open-source, open-access knowledge streams through the Scholarly
Communications Lab.
3
Dated: 8/1/2012
Component IV: Social Justice Impressions: Creating New Metrics for Publicly Engaged
Social Justice Research will develop new ways of measuring the reach of academic research by
building upon the nascent “alt-metrics” and extending it to include ways of measuring impact on
social justice to reduce inequality.
Component I: Events in 21st Century Communication for Media-Academic-Activist Partners.
This component includes a series of four high-profile events that will bring together key
influencers in media, academic research, and activism around specific content areas to promote
cross-silo engagement.
The primary purpose of these events is to build a community of practitioners who are familiar
with each other’s work and who understand both substantive areas of research and the multimodal media strategies that can produce an informed and engaged citizenry. An important
secondary aim of these events is to address the resistance among some senior faculty to using
social media as a mechanism for scholarly communication. These dynamic and hands-on events,
led and facilitated by participants and consultants, will offer ongoing opportunities for new
insights for the media-academic-activist partners involved. All events will spark new ways of
approaching intractable problems by bringing together natural allies around shared topics of
concern.
Planning has already begun for one major event, a public graduate seminar on “Assessing &
Addressing Income Inequality in the Digital Era” to be offered in the spring 2013 semester
(January-May) through ARC. The course will be run as a Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) on
the CUNY Academic Commons, which will allow for widespread public participation in all courserelated activities.
Each event will focus attention on specific program areas of interest to the Ford Foundation by
showcasing the interdisciplinary research of the GC in general, and ARC specifically, and by
bringing together media and activist partners, as well as academic colleagues from nearby
institutions of higher learning, such as Columbia, NYU, Princeton, and Yale. These events may
address the following substantive areas:


Reforming Criminal Justice
Systems through AcademicActivist-Media Partnerships
Designing Access to Quality
Housing to Improve Health


Assessing & Addressing
Income Inequality in the
Digital Era (MOOC-Seminar)
Exploring Issues of Racial
Justice through AcademicMedia Activism
These media-academic-activist partnerships will build upon existing ties that many faculty and
graduate students at the GC have to advocacy and activist groups, both in New York City and
around the globe. Juan Battle, for example, has partnered with the National Black Justice Coalition
and a dozen other advocacy organizations to work on development, administration, and
dissemination of the results of the Social Justice Sexuality survey. In association with the Occupy
movement, David Harvey has been speaking about income inequality and urban space at events
organized by the Free University. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a leading figure in the campaign to
reform criminal justice systems through her work with activist groups such as the Prison
Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance.
4
Dated: 8/1/2012
Partnerships with media companies have already been forged by GC faculty members who
regularly appear as guests on local, national, and international interview shows. The GC partners
with Fora.TV, which is often employed by think tanks and cultural organizations, to film, edit, and
host our public programming. We work closely with CUNY TV, which is located in our building on
Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, and with the CUNY School of Journalism, which is located nearby in
Times Square. We have had talks with WNYC about featuring our faculty in podcasts. And we are
well underway in forming a partnership with WNET to feature the research of GC faculty members.
Still, these media-academic partnerships often lack the potent involvement of grassroots activists
and grasstops policy advocates who often have a much clearer angle of vision about how to
address entrenched social problems.
Using digital tools that encourage off-site participation, Component I events will reach well beyond
the walls of the GC into the public sphere. Social media tools will be deeply integrated into all
activities, including live-streamed online video through the CUNY Academic Commons and on-site
digital monitors displaying event-related discussion on social networks such as Twitter and
Facebook. This will encourage wider public participation in each event and instantiate integrated
models of academic-media-activist communication.
Component II: M-Camp for Academics in 21st Century Communication, Methods, Skills and
Infrastructure. This component features a series of nine training modules intended to develop
scholars as hybrid practitioners with digital media skills. The trainings will run alongside, and
regularly intersect with, the events for Media-Academic-Activist Partners (Component I).
Participants in these trainings will be drawn from CUNY faculty and doctoral students, as well as
from faculty and graduate students from nearby institutions, such as Columbia, NYU, Princeton,
and Yale who, working with programmers and digital journalists, will acquire a broad range of
cutting-edge skills, fostering the birth of a new generation of cross-skilled scholar-digital-activists.
This work, which will be designed and delivered in conjunction with the CUNY Graduate School of
Journalism, will be specifically tailored to address the challenges identified in the MediaAcademic-Activist Partners Events (Component I), and will be carried out in a variety of
settings—training sessions, laboratories, unconferences, and code sprints—as led and facilitated
by fellows, collaborators, and consultants. Work on this initiative will be supported by the
Scholarly Communications Lab that will debut in September 2012 as part of the “Digital GC”
initiative. Training topics will include, but not be limited to:





Big Media for Academics: Trainings will provide detailed knowledge of the structure,
functions, practices, and techniques widely used by the major global media;
Social Media for Academics: Trainings will provide a conceptual understanding of the
importance of a social media presence and with the hands-on social media skills needed to
share research with wider publics;
Beyond Bullet Points for Academics: Trainings will provide hands-on skills in creating
visually compelling slide decks for academic research presentations that retain intellectual
sophistication;
Internet Activism for the 21st Century: Trainings will bring together Internet/community
activists with media and academic support personnel to share techniques and experiences;
Framing Research for Public Audiences: Trainings will bring support personnel together
with researchers to build capacity for framing and messaging research that will resonate
with diverse audiences;
5
Dated: 8/1/2012




Digital Media Storytelling: Trainings will enable the support personnel of researchers and
media to create compelling audio and visual media content that ‘tells the story’ of research;
Data Visualization: Training will help attendees present complex, data-driven information
quickly and clearly, creating visually attractive renderings of datasets while allowing
viewers/readers to interact with the data itself. We envision the creation of model data
visualizations that can be shared with Internet activists as well as major media outlets.
Networked Communication: Support staff will learn to integrate social, big media and
community activist techniques into a coordinated set of powerful communication tools
through networked environments so as to establish consistent and influential presences
across media platforms;
High-Impact Short Videos: A series of cross-trainings in which support personnel,
academics, and activists are taught to master video production, editing, and presentation—
skills that are typically much more sharply honed in major media than elsewhere.
A key strategy will be establishing the M-Camp trainings as regular, institutionalized features of
the GC’s digital profile so as to broaden its educational mission in the public sphere. These
trainings will be provided free of charge to CUNY faculty and graduate students, while those from
other institutions will pay a small fee. Opening these trainings to academics and others outside of
the CUNY system on a sliding-fee basis will help make this a fiscally sustainable enterprise over the
longer term. Faculty trained in digital media skills and methods will be asked to transmit those
skills to their graduate students in their coursework and dissertation advisement, thus building
multi-generational capacity.
Viewed within the context of Everett Rogers’ diffusion of innovation theory (a theory that seeks to
explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread through cultures), the
training in Component II will appeal primarily to “early adopters” of such technologies, while
Component III is meant to assist “late adopters.”
Component III: Producing Innovative Knowledge Streams for Social Justice. As a culmination
of Components I and II, Component III will begin the development of innovative open-source and
open-access knowledge streams based on research by GC faculty and graduate students, and
informed by community activists, policy advocates, and media partners.
High-quality academic research is produced by experts who have honed their work over many
years with sustained, organized, and time-consuming attention. The same could be said for major
media practitioners and community activists, who possess expertise of their own. If collaboration
among these groups is to succeed, it must be built upon a robust infrastructure, especially an
effective support staff of trained participant-facilitators. These support personnel will be part of
the Scholarly Communications Lab, which will work with senior and junior academics to
produce innovative knowledge streams, including:




A podcast series, with content drawn from the events and seminar (Component I);
Live web streaming of events and seminar (Component I), will make use of the CUNY
Academic Commons;
A short, high-impact video presentation, deeply informed by the latest scholarship, featuring
broadcast-quality production values, spotlighting the most compelling content from the
events and seminar (Component I);
A data visualization (or infographic) of inequality, based on data presented in the seminar
(Component I).
6
Dated: 8/1/2012
These knowledge streams created in the first year are initial steps toward more substantial
development of these in a second year, if funded. With increased funding in a second year,
additional forms of scholarly communication can and will be developed, including and not limited
to traditional media outlets, blog and tweeting activity, sophisticated website development, and a
system of cross-platform communication linking traditional and emerging scholarly media sites
with mainstream and alternative media, the Internet, and traditional television and radio media
outlets.
Component IV: Social Justice Impressions: Creating New Metrics for Publicly Engaged Social
Justice Research. This component will begin to develop new ways of measuring the impact of
academic research by building upon the nascent “alt-metrics” movement in higher education to
develop the means of tracking the reach of academic work across social networks.
Traditional practices of evaluating scholarly work, such as the prestige of a particular journal or
press, are inadequate for a context in which researchers have the ability to share their work
directly with their colleagues through social networks. Social media metrics, such as the number of
Facebook likes or Twitter re-tweets, will not replace traditional measures of academic work, such
as the number of citations a piece of scholarship receives, but we are increasingly seeing a
symbiotic relationship between the two spheres. For example, a recent report by the London
School of Economics (LSE) finds that if an academic paper is mentioned on a social media platform
such as Twitter, then citations for that article increase in the (closed) peer-reviewed journals.
Increasingly, scholarly discourse is not separate from the larger public sphere but part of it; altmetrics that account for sharing through social media can help us find more effective ways to
promote the active exchange of scholarly work both within and outside of the academy. (See
separate Evaluation Metrics Rubric).
Alt-metrics can also help us map the path of a scholarly work as it moves beyond the academy into
policy advocacy, helping to promote social justice. In the recent effort to address racially biased
policing in New York, including NYPD’s practice of stopping and frisking more than 600,000
mostly young Black and Latino men each year, the research of Professor Harry Levine has figured
prominently. As a result of these stops, more than 50,000 people are arrested each year on lowlevel marijuana possession charges, saddling them forever with a criminal record. Levine, working
in partnership with the Drug Policy Alliance, has presented his research on marijuana arrests at
New York City Council hearings and on WNYC. The advocates at the Drug Policy Alliance have, in
turn, used Levine’s research, along with a sophisticated social media campaign (including Twitter,
Facebook, blogs, and high-impact digital video), to pressure Governor Cuomo and Mayor
Bloomberg to change policy and practices that adversely affect some of our most vulnerable
citizens, Black and Latino youth. Other organizations, including the NAACP, SIEU, and ACLU, have
built on this work by demanding a series of policy reforms to end ‘stop and frisk’ and other racially
biased policing. Many of these changes are still being debated in the New York State legislature
and the New York city government, yet what seems clear is that this is an example of an academicmedia-activist partnership that has the potential to create real change in people’s lives. Opening a
national discussion of how to transform the academy by measuring the ‘social justice impression’
of this kind of partnership with a meaningful metric that resonates within higher education is a
crucial contribution of this initiative.
Project Leadership
The project will be led by Chase F. Robinson, Jessie Daniels, and Matthew K. Gold.
Chase F. Robinson
7
Dated: 8/1/2012
A specialist in early Islamic history, Chase F. Robinson is Distinguished Professor of History and
Provost and Senior Vice President of the GC. He received his B.A. from Brown University in 1985
and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1993. From 1993-2008 he was University Lecturer and Professor of
Islamic History at the University of Oxford. He is the author of several books, collected volumes,
and over 30 articles on Islamic history and thought, and he has held fellowships from a number of
organizations, including the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the British Academy, and the Institute
for Advanced Study, Princeton.
At the GC, he has focused upon strategic initiatives that foster interdisciplinarity and academic
excellence and that further the GC’s public mission. These include an award of $2.5 million from
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to establish three centers of interdisciplinary excellence in
science studies, globalization, and religion; the creation of the Initiative in the Theoretical
Sciences; and the spearheading of the “Digital GC,” which will position the GC as a national and
international leader in theorizing and establishing multi-platform scholarly communication of
advanced learning, scholarship, and research.
Jessie Daniels
An internationally recognized expert on Internet manifestations of racism, Jessie Daniels is
Professor in the CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College and the GC. She is the author of
two books about race and various forms of media, White Lies (Routledge, 1997) and Cyber Racism
(Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), as well as dozens of peer-reviewed articles in journals such as New
Media & Society, Gender & Society, American Journal of Public Health, and Women’s Studies
Quarterly. Her current work focuses on the ways gender, sexuality, race, and political economy
influence feminist blogging; a recent piece about this research appears in the edited volume,
Cyberfeminism 2.0 (Peter Lang, 2012). She has been awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for
2012-2013.
From 1995-1999, Daniels taught Sociology at Hofstra University, then left academia to work in the
Internet industry (1999-2000). There, she worked as a Senior Producer, creating live, online
events for Fortune 500 companies. She came back into academia through an NIH-funded research
project at Rikers Island (New York City's largest jail) that explored the role of masculinity and race
in promoting health for young men leaving jail and re-entering their communities (2002-2005). An
article in the journal Health Promotion & Practice based on that research recently won the Sarah
Mazelis Paper of the Year Award. Since 2007, Daniels has maintained a scholarly blog,
RacismReview, which regularly gets 200,000 unique visitors each month and has received well
over two million visitors since it began. Forbes magazine recently named her one of “20 Inspiring
Women to Follow on Twitter.”
Matthew K. Gold
A key scholar in the emerging field of digital humanities, Matthew K. Gold is Assistant Professor of
English at New York City College of Technology. At the CUNY Graduate Center, he serves as Advisor
to the Provost for Master’s Programs and Digital Initiatives, Acting Executive Officer of the M.A.
Program in Liberal Studies (MALS), Director of the CUNY Academic Commons, Co-Director of the
CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative, and Director of the “Looking for Whitman” project. He teaches
in both the MALS program and the Doctoral Certificate Program in Interactive Technology and
Pedagogy. He is editor of Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota, 2012) and has
published work in The Journal of Modern Literature, Kairos, and On the Horizon, as well as in the
edited collections From A to <A>: Keywords of Markup (University of Minnesota, 2010) and
Learning Through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy (iDC, 2010). His digital
8
Dated: 8/1/2012
humanities projects, including “Looking for Whitman” and “Commons In A Box,” have been
supported by grants from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, the National Science Foundation,
the U.S. Department of Education, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. His peers to the Executive
Council of the Association recently elected him for Computers and the Humanities, the premier
scholarly association for digital humanities in the United States.
Summary
This pilot project will bring together academics, media practitioners, and activists in new ways to
address social justice through four high impact events. The project will also begin the process of
cross-training academics, both faculty and advanced graduate students, in the digital tools for
engaging in the public sphere in the 21st century through a series of nine training modules. Using
tools acquired in these training modules, scholars at the GC will be equipped to push rich veins of
academic research into the public sphere through innovative knowledge streams. This project will
also utilize alternative metrics for measuring scholarly impact through the public sphere and
contribute to a broader discussion about how to assess scholarly communication in the digital era.
The cumulative effect of forging partnerships between academics, media outlets, and social justice
activists, cross-training academics in digital tools, creating new knowledge streams, and reimagining assessment will create a synergistic model for other public institutions of higher
education as they seek to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Robinson, Daniels, and Gold will
be the ambassadors of this program. As Provost, Robinson can have tremendous influence in
national meetings of other academic leaders. The leaders of this project will make a commitment
to work collaboratively with public relations specialists at the GC and at Ford to generate public
interest in the initiative, such as pieces in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and
The Huffington Post. Thus, we are not just a model for transformation but an active agent of change
in the academy and beyond.
More broadly, as the project gains momentum over time, the Informed Citizens initiative promises
to generate new models for cross-platform public communication in which all participants—
academic researchers, media practitioners, and community-led Internet activists—engage with
multiple perspectives, practices, platforms, and skills. The seemingly intractable problems before
us—rising income inequality, serious deficiencies in housing options for our most vulnerable
populations—must be met by bold experiments that make such trends visible and create clear
paths towards viable solutions. By offering a transformative new model of knowledge creation and
the evaluation of its impact on the public sphere, this initiative will foster an informed citizenry
equipped to address the complexity of a world in need of social justice for the common good.
9