PMRC 2024 is pleased to offer a variety of pre-conference workshops held on Wednesday, June 26. Lunch is included with each workshop as part of the registration fee. Learn more about each workshop below.
Pre-Conference Workshop Offerings
Organizers:
- Jodi Sandfort, University of Washington
- Julia Carboni, Washington State University
- Keala Aronowitz, University of Washington
Time: Full-day, June 26
Cost: $90
More than ever, today’s public servants (including scholars) must learn how to engage diverse communities and co-create effective ways forward. Join us for this workshop to experience, explore, and practice ways that support the design and implementation of public sector innovation.
The Taster will introduce participants to a powerful methodology, called Art of Hosting and Harvesting Conversations that Matter, developed by an open-source community of global practitioners. Aligned with research, the approach enables authentic engagement, builds community, and activates shared intelligence. It provides methods and frameworks that help groups work with complexity, scaling up from the personal to the systemic.
During the workshop, participants will practice various participatory methods, and leave feeling more confident in their ability to use these approaches in various settings for teaching, research, and service engagements. There will even be an opportunity to practice what is learned later in the PMRC conference, itself. Each participant will receive a comprehensive workbook that provides a range of resources, tools, and practices that can be applied after the training.
The workshop is hosted by the Evans Policy Innovation Collaborative (EPIC), an initiative of the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance at the University of Washington that focuses upon deep engagement with researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and the public to co-design actionable solutions to complex societal problems. Dean Jodi Sandfort and Julia Carboni (Ruckelshaus Center Director) will be joined on the hosting team by Julianne Slate Weaver, Keala Aronowitz, Amen Tsegai, and Jessika Gill.
For more about the Art of Hosting methodology, its implementation and impact, please see:
- Jodi Sandfort and Trupti Sarode. 2021. “Art of Hosting Frameworks and Methods for Participatory Research,” SAGE Handbook of Participatory Research and Enquiry, volume 1, edited by Danny Burns, Jo Howard and Sonia Ospina. London: SAGE Publications.
- Rosamund Mosse and Lewis Muirhead. 2020.. The Art of Hosting Participatory Practices in Social Labs: Moving Beyond Participation to Deep Engagement: A case study of the Economic Immigration Lab in New Brunswick, Canada. FormAkademisk, 13(4), Article 3. https://doi.org/10.7577/formakademisk.3383
- Jodi Sandfort and Kathryn Quick. 2017. “Deliberative Technology: A Holistic Lens for Interpreting Resources and Dynamics in Deliberation,” Journal of Public Deliberation, 13(1). Article 7;
- Alissa Schwartz. 2016. Evaluating Participatory Facilitated Conversations within the Art of Hosting Framework,” New Directions for Evaluation 149: 95-106
- Quick, Kathryn and Jodi Sandfort. 2014. “Learning to Facilitate Deliberation: Practicing the Art of Hosting,” Critical Policy Studies 8:3, 300-322
- Sandfort, Jodi and Laura Bloomberg, 2012. “InCommons: Supporting Community-Based Leadership,” Community Development. 43(1): 12-30.
Organizers:
- Patrick Carter, Results for America
- Max Crowley, Penn State University
- Yuan (Daniel) Cheng, University of Minnesota
- Weston Merrick, Minnesota Department of Management and Budget
Time: Half-day (afternoon), June 26
Cost: $45
Legislative branches at the federal and state levels authorize tens of billions in grant funding every year. In doing so, they also defer many policy choices to their executive branches. The civil servants charged with dispersing these funds are often overwhelmed with bureaucratic processes and not equipped to identify how this massive tranche of resources could be used in more equitable and impactful ways, despite often having an interest in doing so.
This represents a significant amount of shared responsibility to tackle pressing challenges like mitigating the opioid crisis, feeding our children, protecting vulnerable adults, and responding to pandemics. To date, there is only limited direct academic study of civil servants’ design of public grant programs as a lever to increase the impact of government funding.
After a brief review of grantmaking processes – and associated scale of impact – this workshop will provide scholars the opportunity to work hands on with national experts to identify the policy making discretion that executive branch agencies possess and opportunities for how engaged scholarship could contribute to this authority being used in equitable and impactful ways.
Attendees will collaboratively review a sample request for proposal document to identify opportunities for increasing the impact, equity, accessibility, and accountability of these programs. They will also work with others to identify ways that their skillset could contribute to this under-researched space.
Organizers:
- Anne Mette Moller, Copenhagen Business School
- E. Lianne Visser, Leiden University
Time: Half-day (morning), June 26
Cost: $45
As the recent virtual issue of the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory on Advancing Public Administration Research through Qualitative Studies demonstrates, rigorous qualitative research is an important driver of public administration theory building. Yet, much qualitative research does not quite fit the mold in relation to standardized ways of reporting and publishing scientific work. The challenges associated with reporting and evaluating qualitative research have fostered ongoing debates in public administration research and beyond, not least spurred by the ambition to increase transparency and move towards more open science. This workshop invites all interested scholars (including scholars who work mainly with quantitative data) to engage in dialogue to explore different ways of approaching the aim of increasing transparency in qualitative studies without compromising the nature and characteristics of qualitative research. The convenors will frame discussions through short presentations of current debates in adjacent fields and will share and reflect on our own experiences with publishing qualitative research in public administration journals. We will be joined by the new editor of JPART, Ole Helby Petersen who will briefly present their current thoughts and ideas on the topic and participate in the workshop discussions. The final program may include additional presentations from participants. If you are interested, please send an email to the convenors (e.l.visser@fgga.leidenuniv.nl or ammo.ioa@cbs.dk) about the topic and argument of your proposed presentation. There will be ample time for open discussion on how to report on the analytical process and other aspects of qualitative research in manuscripts, and whether and how to facilitate sharing of qualitative data.
Organizers:
- Don Moynihan, Georgetown University
- Kayla Schwoerer, University at Albany, State University of New York
- Sebastian Jilke, Georgetown University
- Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen, Utrecht University
Time: Full-day, June 26
Cost: No fee (Workshop is sponsored by McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University)
Civic tech is an emerging domain of practice that is reshaping government services in a way that will have long-ranging effects on public sector reform and service delivery. It applies technology, data, and human-centered design to improve policy implementation, often with a social justice focus. Since around 2010 it has become an increasingly prominent feature of the US local, state and federal government, and 2024 marks the 10 year anniversary of the creation of the U.S. Digital Service and 18F. It has also emerged in different forms in European settings. The aim of the workshop is to bridge the gap between the public management and civic tech communities by building greater awareness of civic tech as a field and the potential of public management research for helping to advance civic tech initiatives. The workshop will bring together researchers and members of the civic tech community, explain basic concepts, and offer examples of a potential research agenda, such as how to better measure administrative burdens or expand access in digital interfaces. No prior expertise in technology policy is required.
Organizers:
- Michael Overton, University of Idaho
- Eric Stokan, University of Maryland-Baltimore County
- Sarah Larson, Miami University
- Kayla Schwoerer, University of Albany, State University of New York
Time: Full-day, June 26
Cost: $90
The explosion of quantitative Big Data in public organizations is facilitating new data-driven research on public management. Effective engagement with Big Data necessitates not only proficiency in analytical methods like regression and machine learning but also the capability to capture, curate, and apply data to ensure the production of research that is valid, reliable, transparent, and reproducible. The purpose of this all-day workshop is to provide participants the opportunity to learn these overlooked data skills to promote data science literacy in public management research.
The workshop is composed of 5 mini-sessions:
- Mini-session 1: Data Science Literacy, Public Management Research, and R
- Mini-session 2: A Quick and Dirty Introduction to R Programming
- Mini-session 3: Data cleaning and the Tidyverse
- Mini-session 4: Visualization for Research Communication using ggplot
- Mini-session 5: Research Deliverables with R and Quarto
All mini-sessions will end with teaching points for those participants wanting to use the topics covered in the mini-session for their research method courses.
Organizers:
- Jessica Sowa, University of Delaware
- Zach Mohr, University of Kansas
Time: Full-day, June 26
Cost: No fee (Workshop is sponsored by School of Public Affairs and Administration, Kansas University)
Description:
PMRA is committed to fostering the development of early career scholars and has committed to providing the Ph.D. workshop as part of the annual conference. In this iteration, we are going to build on classic themes discussed in past PMRC Ph.D. workshops, such as how to review research and how to respond to reviews. We are also going to discuss timely and timeless topics that Ph.D. students and early career academics face–building strong routines for academic success, balancing career and life, and more. We also are going to provide opportunities to discuss new trends facing us today–and open the door to questions that are critical to our success but might be difficult or risky for people to ask. The workshop is sponsored by the University of Kansas School of Public Affairs and Administration so that Ph.D. students can attend the workshop without an additional charge.