Visualizing Scholarship as Social Change

This visualization attempts to broadly encompass what can be meant by the idea of “scholarship as social change.” By defining scholarship as the act of producing knowledge, “scholarship as social change” is any knowledge production that has a goal of exploring, articulating, and intervening in inequities and injustices, past and present. Moreover, while this work may be in service of academic achievements, such as a thesis, article, or other project that counts toward a degree or tenure, this is not the primary goal of the work. Rather, the work seeks to create a more just and liberatory present and future.

The recognition of what scholarship can be, and what it can accomplish, is a foundation and inspiration for all of the contributions to the CLIR Curated Futures Project. In addition to highlighting the specific contributions of the project (The Future of Interactive, Gamified Digital Collections and Exhibits for Inclusion and Accessibility; Geographies of Engaged Digital Scholarship: Remaking Space and Place in the Academic Library; Future Libraries, Archives, and Museums in Excavation (FLAME); and The Third Library and the Commons), the kinds of projects and work that inspired the team members’ contributions are added to the visualization as well. Each of the primary components of the overall project are nodes in the visualization, with the projects that inspired contributors linked to each group as separate nodes. If a project inspired multiple contributions, these shared links are also represented.

The projects represented in this initial version of the visualization represent a wide variety of attempts to understand, explore, and address important and urgent social issues and injustices. However, we recognize that these projects do not represent the totality of what scholarship as social change can mean, nor do they represent all the work within a given area (much less the necessary intersections between these areas of work). Therefore, we invite you to help us build this visualization out further so it can better encompass the many forms that “scholarship as social change” can take in order to inspire more connections and projects.

If you would like to submit a project for inclusion in this visualization, either one you are involved directly in, or one that inspires your own work, please fill out this form. In it, you will be asked for the title of the project, a link to the project, and a short description of why you think this represents the idea of “scholarship as social change.”

Submissions will not be added automatically but will be reviewed by members of the project team to ensure additions are unique and fall within the scope of the Curated Futures Project.

If you have questions about any aspects of this process, please email postdoc@clir.org.

CLIR commits to maintaining and updating this visualization for two years from the date of publication, though we cannot guarantee that links to specific projects will continue to work due to infrastructure/access changes beyond CLIR’s control.

(January 2022)