Writing to Influence: Turning Academia into Compelling Journalism with Torie Bosch

Writing on the Job: Communicating Effectively in the Workplace with Martha Coven

Writing is an essential skill in today’s workplace. From messaging platforms and social media to traditional forms of communication like memos and reports, we rely on words more than ever. Based on her popular writing classes as well as her decades of experience in the public and private sectors, this workshop with Martha Coven provides practical advice for how to write in professional settings and communicate effectively in the digital age.

About the series: 
In close collaboration with Princeton University Press, Princeton Writes, the Program for Community-Engaged Scholarship, and other partners, this GradFUTURES Learning Cohort will help you hone writing (and other communication) skills in order to connect your ideas with audiences that need to hear them. We’ll cover how to keep your writing clear, interesting, and relevant.
The series will feature online presentations and in-person, hands-on workshops. You’ll hear from nationally-recognized voices in a series of Zoom Lunch & Learns with Princeton University Press authors like Christopher Paul Harris, Jelani Favors, Marybeth Gasman, Joseph C. Ewoodzie, and Tara Dawson-McGuinness, and you’ll also connect with people and resources that will help you move from theory to practice. In the Spring, you’ll have the chance to earn a badge in public writing—while producing public-facing work of your own in a supportive, mentored environment.

Writing for Politicians: How to Translate Research into Policy with Tara Dawson-McGuinness

Tara McGuinness is the founder of the New Practice Lab where she leads a team of designers, researchers and project managers working to improve family economic security and well being.  She has spent her career in public service: nonprofits, congressional offices, think-tanks and in the federal government, including the White House.  She led the domestic policy team for the Biden Transition and served as a senior advisor to President Obama where she was responsible for leading the effort to sign up millions of Americans for free and low-cost health insurance through Obamacare. Having a front-row seat in both politics and research, Tara knows first-hand how to translate academia into effective policy – and how to make sure that important findings are not ignored or overlooked by politicians. Join her for this workshop where she will explain how to write research that will be heard, understood, and applied by those with the power to effect national change.
Pre Reading: 

Introduction to the speaker and the Government Technology (podcast from ‘The Future in Context’)

About the series: 
In close collaboration with Princeton University Press, Princeton Writes, the Program for Community-Engaged Scholarship, and other partners, this GradFUTURES Learning Cohort will help you hone writing (and other communication) skills in order to connect your ideas with audiences that need to hear them. We’ll cover how to keep your writing clear, interesting, and relevant.
The series will feature online presentations and in-person, hands-on workshops. You’ll hear from nationally-recognized voices in a series of Zoom Lunch & Learns with Princeton University Press authors like Christopher Paul Harris, Jelani Favors, Marybeth Gasman, Joseph C. Ewoodzie, and Tara Dawson-McGuinness, and you’ll also connect with people and resources that will help you move from theory to practice. In the Spring, you’ll have the chance to earn a badge in public writing—while producing public-facing work of your own in a supportive, mentored environment.

Grant Writing to Influence: How to Show Your Impact When Applying for Funding with Betty Lai

Many scholars need to apply for grant funding at multiple points in their careers. Betty S. Lai is a scholar with insights not only in her own field of psychology, but also into the state of scholarship as it stands today. In this workshop she will teach you how to use grant-writing to gain control over your scholarly career, covering how to develop grant ideas to show the impact of your research. Based on her book The Grant Writing Guide: A Road Map for Scholars she explains how to craft pitches and align them with your values, structure timelines and drafts, communicate clearly in prose and images, solicit feedback to strengthen your proposals, and much more.

Advanced reading materials:
NIH Lai One Pager 
NEH Ariew Sampl

About the series: 
In close collaboration with Princeton University Press, Princeton Writes, the Program for Community-Engaged Scholarship, and other partners, this GradFUTURES Learning Cohort will help you hone writing (and other communication) skills in order to connect your ideas with audiences that need to hear them. We’ll cover how to keep your writing clear, interesting, and relevant.
The series will feature online presentations and in-person, hands-on workshops. You’ll hear from nationally-recognized voices in a series of Zoom Lunch & Learns with Princeton University Press authors like Christopher Paul Harris, Jelani Favors, Marybeth Gasman, Joseph C. Ewoodzie, and Tara Dawson-McGuinness, and you’ll also connect with people and resources that will help you move from theory to practice. In the Spring, you’ll have the chance to earn a badge in public writing—while producing public-facing work of your own in a supportive, mentored environment.

Writing for Everyone: Telling Real Stories in Academia with Joseph C. Ewoodzie

Food is a topic most people are happy to talk about. When writing his book  Getting Something to Eat in Jackson: Race, Class, and Food in the American South, Joseph C. Ewoodzie conducted an ethnography of a large cross-section of the African-American residents of Jackson Mississippi, to better understand how race and class interact with food choices and pathways in the city. The stories he heard were fascinating and moving, and have resulted in an award-winning ethnographic book. In this workshop, Professor Ewoodzie will explore how to gather real-life stories and how best to represent them on the page.

Pre Reading:

The Center for 21st Century Studies presents: 6.5 Minutes With… Joseph Ewoodzie, Jr.
All our Kin (Introduction and Chapter 1) - See attachments



About the series: 
In close collaboration with Princeton University Press, Princeton Writes, the Program for Community-Engaged Scholarship, and other partners, this GradFUTURES Learning Cohort will help you hone writing (and other communication) skills in order to connect your ideas with audiences that need to hear them. We’ll cover how to keep your writing clear, interesting, and relevant.
The series will feature online presentations and in-person, hands-on workshops. You’ll hear from nationally-recognized voices in a series of Zoom Lunch & Learns with Princeton University Press authors like Christopher Paul Harris, Jelani Favors, Marybeth Gasman, Joseph C. Ewoodzie, and Tara Dawson-McGuinness, and you’ll also connect with people and resources that will help you move from theory to practice. In the Spring, you’ll have the chance to earn a badge in public writing—while producing public-facing work of your own in a supportive, mentored environment.

Writing Collectively: How Personal Experience Influences Academic Writing with Marybeth Gasman

RSVP Here for Zoom Link for this and all of the events in the series.

Marybeth Gasman has written or edited over 35 books, penned over 150 peer reviewed articles and 650 opinion articles for the nation’s newspapers and magazines, and in 2022 was listed as #32 on Education Week’s list of the Top 200 Most Influential Public Scholars. Yet one of her greatest contributions to academia has been the collective efforts that have allowed her to use her professional experience to the assistance and betterment of others. From raising over $23 million in grant funding for her students, mentees, and MSI partners, to serving on the board of trustees of The College Board and multiple HBCUs, to her proudest accomplishment – receiving the University of Pennsylvania’s Provost Award for Distinguished Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring, for serving as the dissertation chair for over 80 doctoral students since 2000 – Marybeth does academia collaboratively. In this workshop, she will show you how working with others both within and outside your department and indeed beyond academia can improve your written work.
Introduction to the author

Pre Reading:

Marybeth Gasman: The Creative Process in 10 minutes or less

About the series: 
In close collaboration with Princeton University Press, Princeton Writes, the Program for Community-Engaged Scholarship, and other partners, this GradFUTURES Learning Cohort will help you hone writing (and other communication) skills in order to connect your ideas with audiences that need to hear them. We’ll cover how to keep your writing clear, interesting, and relevant.
The series will feature online presentations and in-person, hands-on workshops. You’ll hear from nationally-recognized voices in a series of Zoom Lunch & Learns with Princeton University Press authors like Christopher Paul Harris, Jelani Favors, Marybeth Gasman, Joseph C. Ewoodzie, and Tara Dawson-McGuinness, and you’ll also connect with people and resources that will help you move from theory to practice. In the Spring, you’ll have the chance to earn a badge in public writing—while producing public-facing work of your own in a supportive, mentored environment.

Writing to Empower: Academia and social advancement as modeled by HBCUs with Jelani Favors

See session files for pre reading materials.

For generations, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been essential institutions for the African American community. Their nurturing environments not only provided educational advancement but also catalyzed the Black freedom struggle, forever altering the political destiny of the United States. In this workshop, Jelani M. Favors - the first director of North Carolina A&T State University’s Center of Excellence for Social Justice – offers a history of HBCUs from the 1837 founding of Cheyney State University to the present, to explore how academia and academic writing can further and foster equity, even within elite institutions. Building on the previous session on activism, he will help you to see how your own work fits into an intellectual tradition seeking to ask the big questions about justice and equity.

About the series: 
In close collaboration with Princeton University Press, Princeton Writes, the Program for Community-Engaged Scholarship, and other partners, this GradFUTURES Learning Cohort will help you hone writing (and other communication) skills in order to connect your ideas with audiences that need to hear them. We’ll cover how to keep your writing clear, interesting, and relevant.
The series will feature online presentations and in-person, hands-on workshops. You’ll hear from nationally-recognized voices in a series of Zoom Lunch & Learns with Princeton University Press authors like Christopher Paul Harris, Jelani Favors, Marybeth Gasman, Joseph C. Ewoodzie, and Tara Dawson-McGuinness, and you’ll also connect with people and resources that will help you move from theory to practice. In the Spring, you’ll have the chance to earn a badge in public writing—while producing public-facing work of your own in a supportive, mentored environment.

Does all academia have to take place in an armchair or ivory tower? Drawing on his own experiences as an activist and organizer, Christopher Paul Harris will use this workshop to show how academic writing can be used as a form of protest and a catalyst for change, while also showing the ways that scholarly political thought has failed to meaningfully contribute to progress and social and social transformation. His first book, To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care, takes readers inside the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) against the backdrop of the centuries long Black freedom struggle. Advancing an abolitionist critique of the capitalist world-system, Harris will help you understand the political lives, thought, and cultures of the Black diaspora and the underlying social forces that shape them.

About the series: 
In close collaboration with Princeton University Press, Princeton Writes, the Program for Community-Engaged Scholarship, and other partners, this GradFUTURES Learning Cohort will help you hone writing (and other communication) skills in order to connect your ideas with audiences that need to hear them. We’ll cover how to keep your writing clear, interesting, and relevant.

The series will feature online presentations and in-person, hands-on workshops. You’ll hear from nationally-recognized voices in a series of Zoom Lunch & Learns with Princeton University Press authors like Christopher Paul Harris, Jelani Favors, Marybeth Gasman, Joseph C. Ewoodzie, and Tara Dawson-McGuinness, and you’ll also connect with people and resources that will help you move from theory to practice. In the Spring, you’ll have the chance to earn a badge in public writing—while producing public-facing work of your own in a supportive, mentored environment.

Writing the Zeitgeist: What Studying Influencers Taught Me About Researching Contemporary Phenomena with Emily Hund

Emily Hund studies social media influencers. In her book The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media, she tracked the development of the influencer phenomenon from a haphazard group of people scrambling for work to today’s multifaceted industry with expanding global impact. Her writing and commentary draws on eight years of research, analyses of 2,000 press articles, participant observation at industry events, and most crucially, dozens of in-depth interviews with influencers, brand executives, marketers, talent managers, trend forecasters, and other participants in the industry. In this workshop she’ll show you how her academic and professional experience – prior to pursuing a research career, she worked as a magazine writer and social media editor – helped her to write about a phenomenon so contemporary it is literally being played out right now.

Advanced Reading:
Social media analyst Emily Hund: ‘We can never know the truth behind an influencer’s seeming authenticity’


About the series: 
In close collaboration with Princeton University Press, Princeton Writes, the Program for Community-Engaged Scholarship, and other partners, this GradFUTURES Learning Cohort will help you hone writing (and other communication) skills in order to connect your ideas with audiences that need to hear them. We’ll cover how to keep your writing clear, interesting, and relevant.

The series will feature online presentations and in-person, hands-on workshops. You’ll hear from nationally-recognized voices in a series of Zoom Lunch & Learns with Princeton University Press authors like Christopher Paul Harris, Jelani Favors, Marybeth Gasman, Joseph C. Ewoodzie, and Tara Dawson-McGuinness, and you’ll also connect with people and resources that will help you move from theory to practice. In the Spring, you’ll have the chance to earn a badge in public writing—while producing public-facing work of your own in a supportive, mentored environment.

Writing for the Apocalypse: What Academia offers in times of crisis with Athena Aktipis
If you had to choose your survival team in the wake of a zombie uprising or some other disaster, would you include an academic? Athena is a psychologist and evolutionary biologist who studies cooperation in times of crisis and she also happens to be an expert on the zombie apocalypse. She studies the fundamental tensions between cooperation and conflict, and has done research on social behavior in apocalyptic times, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the aftermath of natural disasters. In this workshop, Athena will talk about her research on cooperation during times of need and she also will discuss how the apocalypse can be an excellent vehicle for communicating with general audiences about human behavior during challenging times. She has a forthcoming book A Field Guide to the Apocalypse: A mostly serious guide to our wild times, and she is the producer and host of The Zombified Podcast and her two educational livestream channels: Channel Zed and Cooperation Science Network.

Advanced reading materials:

Most recent episode of The Zombified Podcast

General readership article by Athena in Slate

Academic article on cooperation by Athena in Nature
About the series: 
In close collaboration with Princeton University Press, Princeton Writes, the Program for Community-Engaged Scholarship, and other partners, this GradFUTURES Learning Cohort will help you hone writing (and other communication) skills in order to connect your ideas with audiences that need to hear them. We’ll cover how to keep your writing clear, interesting, and relevant.

The series will feature online presentations and in-person, hands-on workshops. You’ll hear from nationally-recognized voices in a series of Zoom Lunch & Learns with Princeton University Press authors like Christopher Paul Harris, Jelani Favors, Marybeth Gasman, Joseph C. Ewoodzie, and Tara Dawson-McGuinness, and you’ll also connect with people and resources that will help you move from theory to practice. In the Spring, you’ll have the chance to earn a badge in public writing—while producing public-facing work of your own in a supportive, mentored environment.