Designing Public-Centric Forms of Public Engagement with Research

What happens if we put ‘the public’ at the centre of our efforts to conceptualise, conduct and evaluate publicly engaged research? This Open University pamphlet outlines a public-centric approach to engagement you can make use of in your own settings. Drawing on insights from recent empirical research and key strands of the theoretical literature on the public the pamphlet foregrounds a set of questions you can ask at key stages of the engagement process to help you make choices about how you will engage. The public-centric approach is designed to support researchers working across all disciplines that are involved in publicly engaged research projects. By helping to make sense of the public in public engagement, the pamphlet also sets out to contribute to wider on-going debates and developments concerned with improving the effectiveness of public engagement with research.