About

dialogue

 

 


About PublicSpace

www.publicspace.ac.uk  PublicSpace – Research Communication / dissemination

PublicSpace works with researchers to make academic insight available to inform policy, professional practice and debate.

PublicSpace is a collaboration of social science researchers and communication professionals, experienced in research, professional education, public consultation, documentary video and multi-media communication.  We are independent and not-for-profit.

The prompt to set up PublicSpace in 2005 was the experience (as researchers at Lancaster University) of an important dissemination being left to the end of an EC research project and becoming no longer feasible.  It let down the rural communities and the industry and policy experts who had contributed so much to the project.  It also meant that insights from a major publicly-funded project were not available to inform the subsequent government reports and policy reviews.

At that moment we realised that communicating research beyond academia can sometimes be more important than moving on to the next research project.

Our goal in PublicSpace has been to develop the practical and intellectual expertise needed to enable a wider communication of research and to engage policy and practice.  Our priority has been to maintain the intellectual rigour, ethos and integrity of the publicly-funded research we communicate.

literacies dvd
Our first video documentary received 300 pre-orders, and was submitted to the UK ESRC as one of the two ‘nominated outputs’ from the project.  This acknowledged its intellectual and communicative value.  The project was subsequently graded ‘Outstanding’ in its ESRC End of Award evaluation.

Since then we have taken on new challenges, gained further experience, shifted to professional technology, and developed a great team with complementary expertise.

We are currently the UK partner in the three-year EC-FP7 funded ORCHESTRA project.  We bring social science and applied linguistic expertise to clarifying and communicating insight on QSAR models in EU regulatory toxicology.

We deliberately work across disciplines, adopting the useful role of ‘semi-outsider’ for a particular field, and bringing to it our understanding of issues in research and communication.

Our services, expertise, quality assurance and ethical policy are explained on other pages.  Each can be printed as a pdf for consideration by your team.

 

If would like us to help to communicate your research with particular groups, and/or disseminate it more widely, please review our services and contact us.