Past Workshops
We hosted our fifth annual workshop on May 22nd and 23rd, 2025, with twenty-four engaging jam sessions with the most diverse mixture of academics and practitioners we’ve hosted to date.
Our closing panel on Addressing the Disconnect: How Research Can Support Practice, involved stimulating presentations by Sana Syed, President of Poetic and Founder of Kimiya; Liz Trautman, Executive Director of Stand for Children in Washington; and Kwabena Edusei, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, Hamilton College.
Deep gratitude to this year’s organizing committee, consisting of Andrea Pena-Vasquez, Ashley Peifer, Brandon Phillips, Carrie Oelberger, Cheryl Ellenwood, Erica Sterling, and Francisco Santamarina.
2025
2024
Our fourth annual workshop was a rousing success, with twenty-five engaging jam sessions, new relationships formed, and stimulating conversations.
Thank you to everyone who made the workshop a success, with special gratitude to Alnoor Ebrahim, Tory Fodder, and Emily Masghati for serving as panelists for our final session on "Critical Dialogues: Navigating Difficult Conversations in Various Settings and Career Stages."
Deep gratitude to this year’s organizing committee, consisting of Andrea Pena-Vasquez, Ashley Peifer, Carrie Oelberger, Cheryl Ellenwood, Erica Sterling, Simon Shachter, and Tory Fodder.
We were thrilled to host our third annual workshop in May 2023, featuring engaging jam sessions with seventeen participants. We re-named the workshop this year to clarify our intentions together and make it more broadly accessible, as well as launching our new website spotlighting all the members of our community.
We had interactive discussion at the close of the workshop on Making Change Through Scholarship and Practice, where we heard from Cheryl Ellenwood, Meghan Kallman, and Mary Kay Gugerty about how they have approached this question at different career stages.
Deep gratitude to this year’s organizing committee, consisting of Ashley Peifer, Carrie Oelberger, Emily Masghati, James Clinton, Mary Kay Gugerty, Simon Shachter, and Tory Fodder.
2023
2022
Building on the success of our inaugural online workshop in 2021, we committed to our unique format of jam sessions and broadened the workshop to include a greater number of doctoral students and scholars from outside our networks, in the effort to meet our desire for a truly multi-disciplinary community. With fifty-one participants and eighteen engaging jam sessions, we were thrilled to maintain the same spirit and culture, but to expand our reach and the range of perspectives that people brought to our conversations. We opened our second day together with a multi-disciplinary panel discussion with Maribel Morey (History), Jennifer Mosley (Sociology), Brandi Blessett (Public Administration), and Cristina Balboa (Environmental Studies)
We intentionally broadened the scope of this year’s organizing committee to leverage additional perspectives, consisting of Carrie Oelberger, Emily Masghati, James Clinton, Mary Kay Gugerty, and Simon Shachter.
2021
When the pandemic showed no signs of slowing, even a full year later, we made the decision to move our workshop online. The benefit, of course, was that we were able to include twenty-five participants, from a broader array of geographic locations. We were delighted that the participants overwhelmingly felt we had succeeded in replicating the spirit of the workshop in an online format. While we would have enjoyed gathering in shorts and t-shirts over BBQ and gone for meandering walks with one another, we were able to create a workshop culture that was casual yet rigorous, while becoming more inclusive and accessible than we would have been able to do if we were holding the workshop in person. We called it the “public-private tensions” workshop and encouraged participation from those interested in the dynamics between public and private domains, broadly construed. The inaugural planning committee consisted of Carrie Oelberger (University of Minnesota), Mary Kay Gugerty (University of Washington), Melissa Stone (University of Minnesota), and James Clinton (University of Minnesota).
2020
We planned our inaugural workshop to occur in person, at the University of Minnesota. With sixteen participants from a variety of institutions and backgrounds, we envisioned a casual gathering with rigorous discussion, a spirit that we have worked to continue in our online format. We had planned to open with a BBQ in Melissa Stone’s backyard and long, leisurely breaks in between sessions where we could dive into the projects we were each working on and get helpful substantive feedback. Alas, the COVID pandemic had other plans and we were forced to cancel the first workshop.