Conference: CRISES: Engaging Communities in Developing Technologies to Support Community Flourishing

The social sciences give insight into human behavior and lived experiences that serve as a strong foundation for efforts to address societal crises. The 2.5-day conference, run by an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Lehigh University, builds a framework for convergence and innovation that includes community-based participatory research (CBPR) and computational social science (CSS), and emerging technologies.

CBPR focuses on collaboration and equity between community members with lived expertise and researchers with learned expertise, in the pursuit of knowledge and positive social action. CSS is an interdisciplinary methodological approach that builds on computational advances to enable social scientists to work with large-scale data in real-time to structure, scale, and iterate models to address complex societal questions.

Bringing together methodological experts in CBPR and CSS for extended, in-depth conversation about their tools and approaches with the goal of finding convergence between these methodologies has the potential to radically transform how research teams approach questions in many different domains of human-centered science.

The conference explores the idea that together these approaches (CBPR and CSS) are a powerful foundation for understanding of community needs and guiding the development of technologies to address specific societal crises. These separate approaches ask parallel questions. The conference is a place where researchers from both traditions, along with computer scientists and technology developers, are joining in knowledge sharing.

Additionally, the conference focuses on three case studies of societal crises: 1) housing insecurity, 2) climate change and agriculture, and 3) health literacy. Following a CBPR approach, community members directly affected by these three societal crises are attending the conference to share their experiences and begin the process of community building necessary for the long-term partnerships between research teams and community members needed to effectively engage in efforts surrounding community flourishing.

Presentations, discussions, and visioning activities are guided by questions drawn from three themes: Human-Centered, Scientific Innovation, and Well-being. The outcomes of the conference are expected to be: 1) the impact that the experience has on individual participants’ approaches to future research projects, 2) the success in establishing ongoing partnerships among conference participants, and 3) the continued effort to establish a center for engaging communities in co-developing technologies for community flourishing.

Concrete deliverables of the conference include a roadmap to guide the process of integrating CBPR and CSS approaches and a set of pilot project outlines based on the three case studies of local, regional, and national crises.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.