What We Support
Creating a culture of engagement that increases the university’s public impact is a collective effort. We know faculty, staff and students across campus are already doing this work— through conferences, symposia, guest lectures, workshops, training, film screenings, performances, exhibits and more. We want to help.
Public Scholarship and Engagement provides co-sponsorship funding for events that align with our vision of a university that serves the public, equitably and inclusively, resulting in reciprocal and mutual benefit to California’s communities and beyond. The events we support should have a clear public engagement focus, for example: exchange of knowledge between university and non-university partners; gathering collective input on projects that impact diverse audiences; building or strengthening relationships between the university and communities.
Who is Eligible
- You must be a registered student organization (RSO) and/or student, faculty or staff affiliated with a UC Davis college, school, department, center, institute or office.
- Your program or event must align with the PSE’s vision and mission and further public scholarship and/or public engagement at UC Davis.
- We define public engagement as: The many ways individuals and groups engage one another to listen and learn, share and create knowledge that aims to be publicly impactful and mutually-beneficial through purposeful action.
- We define public scholarship as: Scholarly activity (research and creative activity, teaching and learning, equity and leadership) that aims to have a positive public impact by improving the well-being of individuals, communities, and/or the planet.
- At this time, we are not able to provide funding for community-led activities or individual pursuits.
What We Offer
Public Scholarship and Engagement provides financial support up to $500 and marketing assistance and promotion for events that meet the above criteria. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis with a limited amount of funding available, so we encourage you to apply early. Requests for $150 or less will receive a response within 10 days; larger requests may take up to 3 weeks. We recommend applying at least two months in advance of your event as the fund transfer process can take time.
What We Require
- You will need to explain how your event relates to the vision and mission of Public Scholarship and Engagement.
- You will need to include a basic budget worksheet that indicates how funds will be used and the name and email of the Fiscal Officer, Financial Analyst, or CAO who will process the fund transfer (RSO's may need to complete the agency account transaction form to request departmental funding. If you are unsure, learn more about the process.)
- If approved for co-sponsorship, you will need to include the Public Scholarship and Engagement logo on your event publicity materials and submit a brief post-event summary form.
- If you would like marketing assistance or promotion, please provide us with relevant graphics and event information.
- If you have questions about the form or our selection process or are interested in discussing a collaboration with PSE that is more sustained than event co-sponsorship, please email engaged@ucdavis.edu.
2021 Co-Sponsorships
- Seizing the Pandemic Portal: Transforming Universities for Community Engaged Scholarship
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All In - All Together Event Series
Hosted by UC Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation
We know that the turbulence of our time and places can only be navigated safely when we are ‘all-in’ ‘all-together’ to find creative ways to deploy our resources, resist the ongoing assaults on vulnerable communities, and renew our bonds of connection that sustain us. As we try to navigate the opportunities for ‘building back better’, how can we help expand the space for community engaged scholarship? How can we more effectively deploy our resources, to strengthen truly equitable community partnerships across all aspects of the research process? What does this mean for graduate students and early career faculty? For individual research centers? For university administrators, and cross-university networks? The panel discussion focused on how we can seize the moment to help transform universities in the post-pandemic world, to be truly powerful partners in co-creating knowledge for justice, featuring:
Kal Alston, National Advisory Board Chair, Imagining America and Professor; Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Syracuse University
Anibel Ferus Comelo, Director of Student Programming, UC Berkeley Labor Center
Claudia Maria Lopez, Assistant Professor of Sociology, California State University, Long Beach
RJ Taggueg Jr., Ph.D. Student and Mellon Public Scholar, UC Davis
May 2021 - From Red Power to Wallmapu Libre and Land Back, Engaging Hemispheric Indigenous Resistance Movements
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Ninth Annual Native American Graduate Student Research Symposium
Hosted by the Native American Graduate Student Association
The Native American Graduate Student Symposium is the only Native American and Indigenous studies symposium organized by and for graduate students in the United States. Our symposium has fostered a reputation for cutting-edge research and engaging discussions that have led to collaborations and partnerships across campuses. This conference provides an essential platform for Indigenous studies graduate students, who often face many barriers in accessing high-cost professional conferences, to share their work and develop their skills. This year’s theme, “From Red Power to Wallmapu Libre and Land Back: Engaging Hemispheric Indigenous Resistance Movements,” hopes to facilitate a forum that recognizes and connects the continued relevance of Indigenous resurgence especially significant in recent events.
April 2021 - Activist and Public Scholarship (Un)Working Group
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Publicly Engaged Graduate Student Dialogue
Hosted by Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana and Alana Haynes Stein (co-sponsored by Imagining America's Leading and Learning Initiative)
April - June 2021
The Activist and Public Scholarship (Un)Working Group is a collaborative online series that seeks to provide a space for scholars to gather and exchange ideas about activist and public scholarship. This five-part series is organized by Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana (Spanish and Portuguese) and Alana Haynes Stein (Sociology), UC Davis graduate student who were Mellon Public Scholars on Imagining America's LLI in 2020. This series aims to connect and convene UC David graduate student scholars who are committed to activist and public scholarship, and to build a collective, multi-faceted voice towards advocacy and action. We hope this group will connect, collect and redistribute resources that scholars can use to advocate for change towards greater support of activist and public scholarship. - UC Davis Grad Slam
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Public Scholarship and Engagement Award
UC Grad Slam is an annual contest in which master’s and Ph.D. students present the significance and fundamental points of their work at UC Davis in a clear, direct, and interesting manner that appeals to general audiences. This year, Public Scholarship and Engagement offered an award for the finalist whose research was conducted in collaboration with non-university partners or demonstrated the highest potential for public impact. The inaugural awardee is Paul Kasemsap, a Ph.D candidate in horticulture and agronomy studying plant physiology (i.e. how plants turn sunlight, air, water, and dirt into food). His Grad Slam presentation — “Mission N Possible: Let There Be (Nutritious) Bread” — explores how we can make staple crop wheat resilient to changes in the climate system.
April 2021
- Seeing is Believing: Communicating Research through Virtual Worlds
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A Five-Part Webinar SeriesHosted by Jiyoon Yi, Professors for the Future
Being able to effectively explain complex research outside academia is incredibly important–for networking, collaborating, teaching, and leading. This five-part 30-min webinar series lead by Professors for the Future Fellow Jiyoon Yi explored how data visualization can help graduate students and postdoctoral researchers better communicate with public audiences–using virtual reality. https://gradpathways.ucdavis.edu/pftf-current Public communication of scientific findings can often be challenging due to the complexity of research design and datasets. Graphics can help, yet graduate education in science and engineering focuses on the ways that require additional training for non-experts to read. Moreover, learning motivation and public engagement can be limited when using the graphics that are designed for research articles. This project aims to provide graduate students and postdoctoral scholars with resources that can be used to visualize scientific data for public communication purposes, utilizing virtual reality (VR). VR will be used as a tool for bringing interactive experiences similar to the real world and allow target audiences to visit the designated places where research findings can be applied. A series of webinars will include 1) target audience analysis, 2) tutorial of a 3D visualization tool to implement VR environment, and 3) utilization of the VR environment to develop a learning module to help participants increase the impact of their research and enhance the public understanding and engagement, especially in situations where physical traveling or face-to-face meetings with scientists are limited.
April 2021 - eXplorartion: TEDx at UC Davis
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An Independently Organized TED Event
TEDxUCDavis is an annual, two-day conference organized around TED’s mission to discover “ideas worth spreading”. Over the course of the weekend, six speakers from diverse backgrounds (five of which were UC Davis alumni) shared their unique ideas related to exploration and engaged in conversations with public audiences. Additionally, TEDxUCDavis helps create a sense of community for undergraduate students (especially transfers and first years) who have not yet had the opportunity to fully experience Davis or campus culture due to another year of distance learning.
March 2021
2020 Co-Sponsorships
- Just Us: An American Conversation
Claudia Rankine Reading and LectureHosted by Professor Allison Coudert, Paul A. and Marie Castelfranco Chair in the History of Religion; Professor Katie Peterson, director of the Creative Writing Program; Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum
Claudia Rankine, an award-winning author, playwright, poet and multimedia artist, comes to UC Davis (virtually) for a reading and lecture based on her new book, “Just Us: An American Conversation,” which is being hailed as a must-read book this fall, and her “magnum opus.” Her previous book, “Citizen: An American Lyric,” a meditation on race relations in the United States, is widely considered one of the most influential books of our age. In revelatory and ingeniously written essays that mix text and visuals, Rankine questions what it means to interrogate white privilege, liberal politics, white male aggression and much more. Coming the day after the U.S. presidential election, this online event, like Rankine’s intimate book, promises to bring us into a necessary conversation about what we don’t know. As Rankine says, “It’s all right to not know; it’s what you do with your not-knowing.”
October 2020- Through Tumultuous Times: Reimagining and Rebuilding America
A Collective Creative EngagementHosted by Imagining America
This year, in place of an in-person IA National Gathering, Imagining America invites creative responses that offer opportunities for community reflection, healing, and the creation of spaces and places for a radical reimagining of the world in which we live. This collective creative engagement will explore questions such as:
- What is the role of art, design, and creative culture in reimagining and rebuilding our world in ways that create antiracist institutions, structures, practices and ways of thinking?
- How can we work towards a post-COVID university that lessens rather than deepens inequality in access, pedagogy, and forms of knowledge production?
- How might we re-imagine our educational systems, and particularly our colleges and universities, in ways that divest from forms of violence and inequality and invest in cultures and communities of care within institutions and as stakeholders in regions? What are the opportunities and imperatives of our moment? What are local communities doing to move towards a more caring, just, and liberatory ‘America’ and world? What are the new and remembered ideas, images, symbols, forms of knowledge, and ways of being that will lead the way?
October 2020- Finding and Building Your Online Community
A workshop and panel discussion with tools, tips and adviceHosted by Meghan Klasic, Professors for the Future
Geared toward graduate students and postdoctoral scholars, this workshop will communicate the role that online communities can play in engaged scholarship and learning. An online community can help facilitate broader, engaged discussions on research and teaching. These discussions can involve a more diverse audience with varying perspectives and experiences than what is possible with an in-person meeting. The online community has the added bonus of avoiding financial, travel, and other barriers. Further, using online tools, researchers can engage beyond academia to create more critically assessed and informed research. Digital tools can be used to translate research and engage a broader community whether it be through a tweet, a podcast episode, a blog post, or a networking date. By sharing ideas and experiences through public platforms, academics can integrate the public and other non-academics into the research and training conversation to help create a new era of scholarship.
April 2020- Building Community Engaged Scholarship
Engaged Scholar Workshop SeriesHosted by Deserea Langley, Native American Studies
Graduate student Deserea Langley invited two Native American scholars, Dr. Melissa Leal Professor of Social Science at Sierra College and Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy, Chair of Native American Studies at California State University, Humboldt to share their experience in community engaged scholarship through a Facebook Live event. Their work as Native American scholars is inspiring for the future of community engaged scholars. Dr. Leal and Dr. Risling Baldy provided insight on their careers as community engaged scholars. During the talk, audience engagement was encouraged, and questions centered on personal reflection; creating research questions with the community; major challenges; bridging the gap between community and scholarship; knowledge generation; reciprocity in academia; and personal growth. The series highlighted how these scholars have formed partnerships with communities to support and share issues that affect underrepresented communities and how they work to balance community engaged scholarship with teaching, research, and service.
April 2020- UC Davis Grad Slam
Public Engagement AwardUC Grad Slam is an annual contest in which master’s and Ph.D. students across UC campuses – in disciplines ranging from hard sciences to humanities – compete to sum up their research for a general audience. Students should present the significance and fundamental points of their work at UC Davis in a clear, direct, and interesting manner. Public Scholarship and Engagement sponsored a prize for the finalist whose research has shown demonstrable public engagement and/or impact. Due to the shelter-in-place order and the ongoing Coronavirus situation, UC Davis Graduate Studies canceled the 2020 UC Davis Grad Slam final round event on April 7. Though the event’s cancellation draws this year’s competition to a close, Graduate Studies continued rewarding and recognizing the efforts of this year’s finalists. Graduate Studies, along with Grad Slam sponsors Public Scholarship and Engagement and Global Affairs, has awarded each of the ten finalists a prize amount of $625. Learn more about this year's finalists.
April 2020- The Daphne Muse Letters Collection
Documenting Black History and Culture Across the Diaspora
Imagining America hosted a well-attended event at the International House in Davis. Daphne Muse, shared anecdotes and stories she witnessed as writer, activist, educator, editor, social commentator and a cultural broker. She documented her talk with visuals of her letter collection documenting the struggles waged, victories claimed, and rites of passage celebrated in the civil rights, Black Power, pan-Africanist, women’s, and disability rights movements. At the end of her presentation, she shared the stage with Dr. Kevin Miller, UC Davis archivist. Both Muse and MIller remarked the importance of documentation as a tool for social justice and cultural change.
February 2020- Collective Possibilities
Tenth Annual UC Davis Equity Summit
Hosted by the Office of Research and Policy for Equity
The UC Davis Equity Summit brought together educators, community members and experts from a range of disciplines for this annual event that coalesces people, ideas and institutions to deepen strategies, shape actions and create solutions. Public Scholarship and Engagement sponsored the Social Justice Awards for Community-Engaged Scholarship and Activism, awarded to Tracy Lachica Buenavista, Ph.D, a professor of Asian American Studies at California State University, Northridge and Savannah Shange, an assistant professor of Anthropology and principal faculty in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz.
February 2020
2019 Co-Sponsorships
- Power Equals Work Over Time
A documentary film on environmental justice activists in Kettleman City
Hosted by Environmental Health Science Center
The UC Davis Environmental Health Sciences Center is conducting a cumulative impacts study based in Kettleman City, a small farmworker town on California’s I-5 corridor dealing with myriad environmental contaminants and environmental health issues. Two local community organizations initiated the research project and are tightly integrated into its development, implementation, and envisioned application to policy and community change. The Center is making a documentary film about one of UC Davis’ most promising young researchers, sociologist Clare Cannon, and her relationship with environmental justice activists in the small farmworker community of Kettleman City.
December 2019- Laughter and Liberation: Comedy and Storytelling for Social Change
Screening, Panel and Writing Workshop with the Actors and Writers of The North PoleHosted by the Office of Research for Policy and Equity
Executive Produced by and co-starring Rosario Dawson, The North Pole is a dramatic comedy set in Oakland, CA that tackles the big issues of our time: Immigration. Race. Climate Change. And Gluten-Free Donuts. In this screening and interactive workshop, we explored the intersection of political humor and social justice. Combining creative writing and comedic storytelling, all participants created one original piece to take home with them.
October 2019