What are the Boundaries of Public Engagement in a More Connected World?

Abstract

The proposed paper discusses how the relationships between the researchers and the ‘field’ in social sciences have been transformed during the last decades. It explores the concept of the ‘public engagement’, its ethical and conceptual boundaries, and the criteria of its ‘successfulness’ – in relation to the academic research, researchers, and the local communities where the research is conducted.

Biographical Note

Sofia Gavrilova (SFB 1199 & Leibniz-Insitut für Länderkunde, Leipzig, Germany)

Sofia Gavrilova is a human geographer of the post-Soviet spaces. For the past six years she has been working in the field of the human geography and social anthropology of post-Soviet countries, focusing on the production of the ‘military landscapes’, ‘the North’, border regions, and peripheries during and after socialism, and their representation. Her doctoral research project at the University of Oxford was dedicated to the analysis of the production of places in Russian regional museums in the transformational period between the socialism and Russian capitalism. During her post-doctoral fellowship at Christ Church Sofia Gavrilova was working on the Gulag mapping research project (www.gulagmaps.org). Now she is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig.