Mark Cooper & Michael Rios

Project Summary

Our work during the HuMetricsHSS fellowship is based on a stocktake of how values driven scholarship is recognized among faculty and administrators at our university and an action research study of how values-driven scholarship is translated, or not translated, into the both official and implicit metrics that shape faculty practices at our university.

Conducting a stocktake of how values driven scholarship is recognized and valued – both explicitly and implicitly – among faculty and administrators at the university and reviewing formal guidelines and principles that structure academic practices will help us understand how faculty see values-driven scholarship as translated – or not translated – into metrics of merit and promotion, and how faculty perception of metrics has affected their engagement with values-driven scholarship.  The action research component of our work engages participants in our university’s Public Scholarship Faculty Fellowship to examine how faculty can intentionally re-design structures and norms to support values-driven scholarship.  Our aim is to understand how to translate research on the importance of community motivations into practice through a cooperative faculty re-design of structures and norms that support the development of these relationships and communities of researchers.