Keynote Speakers & Case

 Kai Kuang, PhD is Associate Professor of Communication at the School of Journalism and Communication, Tsinghua University. Her research focuses on health and risk communication at the intersection of mediated and interpersonal communication. Her recent projects examined uncertainty in illness, social support seeking, communication resilience processes, and climate risk communication. 

 Xiaoman Zhao, PhD is Associate Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Renmin University of China. Her research lies at the intersection of media, gender, and society, focusing on how digital platforms shape information dissemination and social support. She investigates the social impact of digital media on marginalized groups—especially marginalized women—to amplify underrepresented voices. 

Integrating Engaged Scholarship into Curricular and Social Practice Activities: Exemplars from Chinese Universities

Researchers within and beyond the communication discipline increasingly recognize the importance of engaged scholarship and the need to bridge the gap between theory and practice – a critical knowledge production problem (e.g., Barge & Shockley-Zalabak, 2008; Van de Ven, 2007). In the past two decades, the range of engaged communication works has been greatly extended (e.g., peacebuilding, Connaughton et al., 2017; sustainable development challenges, Easter et al., 2021). However, possibilities of engaged scholarship in non-western sociocultural contexts such as China are less frequently discussed. The idea of engaged scholarship is not a new one to Chinese scholars though. In fact, heavy emphases have been placed on bridging the research-practice gap, so much so that the following slogan − “Research papers should be written on the soil of our land” (meaning that all scholarly initiatives should be conducted with the goal of solving real problems in the society) – has become a popular saying among Chinese academics. More importantly, Chinese higher education’s focus on social practice activities – a mechanism that integrates service learning, community-based learning, internships, academic training and capstone projects – offers not only unique opportunities for engaged scholarship in Chinese contexts but also potential implications for the international community. In this presentation, we discuss possibilities of systematically integrating engaged scholarship into curricular and social practice activities using exemplars from several Chinese universities (e.g., projects on poverty in rural China, development in ethnic minority communities). Specifically, we examine how faculty and students collaborate with local community members, government agencies, business professionals, and media platforms to advocate for and promote positive social change, the process of which, if properly documented, analyzed, and theorized, may contribute meaningfully to both research and practice. In so doing, we seek to respond to Dempsey and Barge’s (2014, p. 682) call for “the articulation of robust models and practices of engaged scholarship that enable academics and their partners to jointly pursue ideas and topics that are of mutual interest and benefit.” At the end of the presentation, we discuss how “learning outcomes,” “engaged scholarship,” and “impact” could be (re-)considered interconnectedly in different cultural contexts (Boyer, 1990, 2019; Sandman, 2008).

References

Barge, K. J., & Shockley-Zalabak, P. (2008). Engaged scholarship and the creation of useful organizational knowledge. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 36(3), 251–265. https://doi.org/10.1080/00909880802172277

Boyer, E. L. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Boyer, E. L. (2019). The scholarship of engagement. In L. R. Sandmann & D. O. Jones (Eds.), Building the field of higher education engagement: Foundational ideas and future directions (pp. 15-25). Routledge.

Connaughton, S. L., Linabary, J. R., Krishna, A., Kuang, K., Anaele, A., Vibber, K. S., Yakova, L., & Jones, C. (2017). Explicating the relationally attentive approach to conducting engaged communication scholarship. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 45(5), 517-536. https://doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2017.1382707

Dempsey, S. E., & Barge, J. K. (2014). Engaged scholarship and democracy. In L. Putnam & D. Mumby (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational communication: Advances in theory, research, and methods (pp. 665-688). Sage.

Easter, S., Ceulemans, K., & Kelly, D. (2021). Bridging research‐practice tensions: Exploring day‐to‐day engaged scholarship investigating sustainable development challenges. European Management Review, 18(2), 9-23.https://doi.org/10.1111/emre.12443

Sandmann, L. R. (2008). Conceptualization of the scholarship of engagement in higher education: A strategic review, 1996–2006. Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 12(1), 91-104. https://ojs01.galib.uga.edu/jheoe/article/view/520/520

Van de Ven, A. H. (2007). Engaged scholarship: A guide for organizational and social research. Oxford University Press.