Forging Links Between Public Scholarship, Civic Tech, and Open Data: A Showcase of CUNY Public Scholarship Practice Space (PS2) Projects

Public scholarship has been a core value and practice of The CUNY Graduate Center since its founding 1961, and long part of the culture of CUNY, the largest urban public university in the United States. Increasingly, public scholars committed to creating and disseminating knowledge in service of the public good work with open data in their projects, and disseminate their work in open scholarly publishing platforms, curate and release public datasets, and engage in digital media to share their work for public audiences.

This interactive panel discussion will provide an overview of how public scholarship, scholar activism, and open data have many existing links in projects supported by The Public Scholarship Practice Space (PS2) at The Center for the Humanities at The CUNY Graduate Center. It will then showcase and reflect on several recent projects completed by graduate students at CUNY whose work focused on public scholarship, activism, arts-based methods, digital equity, and civic tech. Three of the identified presenters were 2025 Early Research Initiative/Public Scholarship Practice Space 2025 Summer Research Fellows and two presenters were Social Practice CUNY Fellows.

– Ian G. Williams will share his research on digital literacy, civic tech networks, and democracy through participation in The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference (TICTeC) in Mechelen, Belgium in July 2025, experiments in creating pedagogical tools bridging open data literacy and data justice in a social work classroom while examining 311 complaints about homelessness, and involvement with the NYC Public Interest Tech (PIT) Pop-Up this fall. Read Ian’s write-up on summer activities here.

– Seon Britton will share his research on community technology organizations (CTOs) working to advance digital equity and inclusion in New York City through broadband internet service provision, including fieldwork with Silicon Harlem and NYC Mesh. His work argues that CTOs are a new type of organization that can help in providing internet access to currently underserved communities. Read Seon’s write-up on summer activities here.

– Jaclyn Reyes and Erza Undag will share their work with The UKAI Initiative, a transnational collaboration of artists, cultural workers and researchers in the US and in the Philippines that aims to advance environmental and climate justice through art, culture and community-building. The UKAI Initiative has several projects; this presentation will focus on the project, “Transnational Clothing Pathways.” Read more about The UKAI Initiative here.