Public Voices: The OpEd Project

Ignacio López-Calvo
Center for the Humanities
UC Merced

The Public Voices Fellowship program develops the faculty’s capacity to translate their research for the public and helps them to engage in debate at a national level based on their areas of expertise. The program focuses on increasing underrepresented voices within these debates. Three one-day workshops were hosted in partnership with the OpEd Project, led by its facilitators at UC Davis, UC Merced, and UCLA, with 20 fellows in each workshop, from across all disciplines and nine campuses (UCSF, UCSB, UCI, UCR, UCSD, UCSC), for a total of 60 fellows. Invitational priorities for fellows included: 1) sustainability and the environment 2) social justice and inequality 3) big data and digital humanities 4) public health and medical humanities 5) arts and public life. Following the 1-day workshop, fellows had access to a year-long mentorship with media mentors through the OpEd Project. This program was first piloted at Yale, Stanford, and Princeton and is currently being hosted at several other institutions.

The project also received supplemental graduate student funding which allowed the associated Graduate Student Researcher, who had worked on the project from its foundation, to work through the summer to manage the virtual hub, support workshops, participate in assessment, scope funding sources, and write proposals to sustain the project.