COMIXED
Overview
Who: This case study was presented by Sam Gray from the Manchester Beacon for Public Engagement. Sam is Public Engagement Manager at MMU / Manchester Beacon working to connect people, places and knowledge and supporting a cultural change in relation to how community relations are handled at MMU.
What: Using social media to engage academics, publics and research for mutual benefit.
Why: To use creative approaches to media-related public engagement by the Manchester Beacon.
Where: Manchester
When: Ongoing
Project description
The Manchester Beacon is part of the Beacons for Public Engagement initiative designed to create a culture change across the higher education sector to support, recognise, reward and build capacity for public engagement. Comixed is an example of using social media as a way of bringing different people together to explore ideas collaboratively. The first Comixed was themed around science and was planned to tie into the Manchester Science Festival.
Purpose
Comixed is about listening and speaking and learning. Subtitled "A Networked Conversation", it will be tracked and captured using different forms of social technology. It's being delivered in association with the Research Councils UK (RCUK) because it takes some of the RCUK's cross-cutting scientific challenges as a starting point for discussions. So, issues like the digital economy, climate change, synthetic biology, food security and ageing are all being discussed. The Manchester Beacon is working with a talented creative team to produce Comixed: A Networking Conversation.
The team is Julian from Littlestar TV, Chris from OH Digital, Chi-chi from Real Fresh TV and Geth and Pete from We Are Young.
Results/Outcomes
Ultimately, the hope is that Comixed will provide a blueprint for the way in which all of the Manchester Beacon's conversations should be handled. At the launch event, illustrators were invited to listen to, and take part in the conversations transforming some of the ideas and themes into comics, which could then be used to demonstrate what people think about some of the issues.
Another project is Moving Memories - a film that documents the African Caribbean migration into Hulme and Moss Side from the 1970s to the 1980s, made as part of an MMU Public Engagement Fellowship.
Resources
Comixed was funded by HEFCE, RCUK and the Wellcome Trust. For more information, visit the Comixed website.
Images taken from Manchester Beacon's Flickr photostream.
Contact
Name: Sam Gray
Name of organisation: Manchester Beacon for Public Engagement
Email: Sam Gray
