Lessons from the Public Interest Communication Summer Institute

A couple of weeks ago, May 28-30, 2024, I attended the Public Interest Communication Summer Institute. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect and whether it would be a good fit for me, but it turned out to be one of the best academic conferences I’ve ever attended. This was in significant part because it was much different than other academic conferences I’ve attended. There are lessons in this for people organizing other academic conferences.

The conference was interdisciplinary, rooted in the field of #communications, but I was not the only person from #sociology there. We were brought together by a concern with what communications strategies can advance the common good and #socialjustice.

One of the things that made it such a great academic conference is that it was not an entirely academic conference. It brought together both academic scholars and practitioners from non-profit organizations and public agencies. (Some of the practitioners I spoke with were bemused by the term since “practitioner” is only ever used in academic contexts. Until they came to the conference, many of them had never thought of themselves as practitioners.) Many sessions were led by practitioners or people who straddled the academic-practitioner divide.

This created great opportunities for mutual learning. Academics could share how their findings in their scholarly research spoke to the strategic goals practitioners were working for. As an academic, on the other hand, I learned a lot from presentations by practitioners about their campaigns and how they used social-scientific findings in them. It gave me a clearer sense of how I as an aspiring public sociologist could make my work relevant to people doing the hard work in the trenches to bring about social change.

There was not a single panel of speakers at the conference—all the sessions were interactive workshops. This made them great opportunities to interact with other conference attendees and learn from each other. Everything had a very hand-on feeling and I could immediately see the application of most of what I learned to fostering social change.

All this brought with it a focus not just on the causes of social problems—something you get a lot of at sociology conferences—but strategies to produce social change. Understanding the causes of social change is essential. But knowing why we have a social problem does not necessarily lead in any straightforward fashion to knowing how to solve that problem. That takes experimentation with new social policies. And to get such policies implemented, we need to engage in social movement-building to create the necessary social pressure on those in positions of power. Without a discussion of strategy, we won’t be able to engage in such movement-building effectively.

I don’t want to sound like I’m putting down traditional panel presentations. They can be a great way to find out about others’ work and make connections to people doing similar work to your own. But I think the Public Interest Communication Summer Institute gives us valuable lessons about how to make academic conferences more dynamic and relevant to creating social change.