Public Engagement Landscape Map for The Berlin School for Public Engagement

The Collaborative Futures Academy ran in June 2023, bringing public engagement professionals from around the world together to develop their public engagement skills and practice through this four day conference over two weeks. I was commissioned to facilitate a workshop on mapping our collective public engagement landscape, which invited attendees to consider the landscape we are all navigating as global professionals, then develop and contribute their own landmarks and map elements into one collective map as a visual representation of this experience. 

From 'The Great Harvest of Meaningful Impact Stories' to the 'Dangerous Potholes of Procrastination' and the 'Hill of Biases', attendees shared their struggles and triumphs in their respective fields: from participation to citizen science, science communication, community engagement and others. The resulting map shows landmarks which were selected by the group as most important from attendees' individual maps, which spoke to the collective experience of working in this field.

About CFA
'To create a meaningful and inclusive dialogue between research and society, engagement needs to build on an ethical foundation of care, participation and authenticity. This starts with understanding our personal motivations and capacities as engagers, and it extends to interrogating the practices and power dynamics that shape our field. How can we foster more equitable processes of engagement that bring in those often left out? What are the tools that help us develop our own voice and drive change? The Collaborative Futures Academy invites you to explore these questions and develop a bold, creative and innovative engagement practice with integrity and equity at its heart.'
CFA, 2023

The Collaborative Futures Academy is a collaboration between the University of Cambridge Public Engagement team, Wellcome Connecting Science, the Kavli Centre for Ethics, Science and the Public, Stellenbosch University, and the Berlin School of Public Engagement and Open Science. It is funded by UK Higher Education Innovation Funding, The Wellcome Trust, Robert Bosch Stiftung and Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.