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Cindy S. Vincent
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Cindy Vincent, assistant professor in Communications and faculty fellow for the Center for Civic Engagement, was accepted to serve as a steering member for the inaugural Boston Civic Media Consortium. She is the only state university representative in the consortium among 40 prestigious universities in the Boston area, to include Harvard, MIT and Emerson College.
She recently attended an academic-community collaboration event through the consortium where faculty members and community partners engaged in a variety of discussions and interactive exercises for problem solving to address themes of language, accessibility, creating mutually-beneficial terms of collaborations, data literacy, and capacity-building with an eye toward envisioning new models of support.
Vincent is in the initial planning phases for two projects with consortium members from MIT and Emerson. The first project will be a DiscoTech (Discovering Technology) event with Sasha Costanza-Chock from MIT in April 2016. The second project will be a long-term research and service-learning project with Paul Mihailidis from Emerson College that will begin the Fall 2016 semester.
The consortium is currently working on building the first community IRB in Boston that establishes more mutually beneficial research guidelines to improve the collaboration process to better address community needs, build trust, and ensure more direct representation of communities.
The mission of the Boston Civic Media Consortium is to build academic-community relationships, share knowledge and develop innovative curriculum in civic media. This initiative is housed at the Emerson Engagement Lab and is made possible by the Teagle Foundation and Microsoft Civic Engagement.
Civic media are the mediated practices of designing, building, implementing or using digital tools to intervene in or participate in civic life. The emerging domain of civic media includes researchers and practitioners from many fields and sectors including art, design, communication, computer science, social sciences, humanities, government, urban planning, community organizing, law & policy, education and more.