You Published a Paper, Now What?

It takes seventeen years from the time of publication in a journal for new interventions, thoughts, and ideas to make it to practice or street-level work; public impact scholarship can help close this gap (Coetzer-Liversage, 2022). Public impact scholarship intends to create social change through dissemination and implementation of research in alternative forums. Public impact scholarship is often outside the training of academic researchers, requiring new approaches to creation and dissemination of research that are time intensive and often not rewarded in tenure and promotion metrics (Silvia et al., 2019). The University of Houston's Graduate College of Social Work Hub For Engaged Action Research (HEAR), a team created within the research office, engages in these practices to actively democratize knowledge to widen the audience. The team is composed of administrators, faculty, doctoral students, and MSW students that express a desire to engage in public impact scholarship and provide support for the work. The mission of the HEAR Lab is to build the capacity of scholars to create and disseminate collaborative accessible anti-racist research that centers community and fuels social change.

The objective of the roundtable is to teach specific dissemination strategies that will allow learners to create products that match different constituent groups. Driven by an anti-racist approach, this group has developed a structure to support a variety of products that increase the impact of scholarship produced in the College. The HEAR Lab currently hosts and produces a podcast: The Action Research Podcast, creates regular and consistent social media content for Twitter, hosts a 6 week training for MSW students, creates infographics, public impact reports, and one-page research briefs. This roundtable will discuss each product, highlighting how they democratize knowledge and the impact they have. During the presentation, attendees will learn how to create their own products for their research and implement them at their institutions.

Presenters will include the Associate Dean of Research and three PhD student presenters. Presenters will ground learners in the mission of the HEAR Lab, discuss the role of positionality, and explain how democratizing knowledge is at the core of the work being done. PhD student presenters will share examples of products created by the lab, their experiences creating them, and offer a "how to" for each. Our goal is to share our products, provide the necessary knowledge and tools to create them, and then facilitate conversation with others interested in adopting similar products within their research. Implications of this roundtable include helping researchers build capacity to understand the potential impact of their work, enhance best practices for engaging in public impact scholarship, and outline concrete steps that can be taken to create and disseminate research to wider audiences. It is an ethical responsibility of the social work field to build public-facing, impactful scholarship. The feasibility of this work is enhanced when researchers are intentional in learning and creating products to do so. Engagement in this work is necessary for producing research that speaks directly to solutions that can achieve racial, economic and environmental justice.