As a not-for-profit Community Interest Company, we have to report on the work we do in service of the community we exist for — scholars, scholarship, research, and academia.
While preparing that report, we started to realise just how much had actually happened inside Scholar Square over the course of our first year. Seminars, salons, peer-led sessions, guest lectures, community projects, 1560 hours of study sessions (so data from our community Zoom account tells us), and a frankly unreasonable number of hours spent trying to make all of it happen.
So we thought, “why keep all that hidden in a report?”
This page came out of that process. It wasn’t intended to be promotional material, although, hey, if it happens to make Scholar Square look good, we’re not complaining.
We’re proud of what we built. It took a lot of work, many long hours, and a good amount of doubt to pull all of this together in less than a year. So yes, we’re going to shout about it a little.
So go ahead and see what we got up to in Year One.
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And if you don’t want to miss Year Two, September is a pretty good time to join us. We’re celebrating our anniversary with membership at $10/month instead of the usual $16/month:
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Throughout our first year, we ran a series of structured seminars. These sessions went beyond the mechanics of research to explore the practices, ideas, and ways of thinking that underpin scholarly work.
We didn’t just organise formal, structured events aimed at helping scholars develop their research and scholarly practice. We also created space-times for scholars to come together, share what they knew, ask for support, encounter unfamiliar ideas, and be exposed to areas of scholarship they might never otherwise have come across.
At the heart of these sessions were experiments in what can happen when scholars are brought into a shared space and given room to talk, share, support, and become differently together.
We also invited external scholars to share their work and thinking about scholarship and it’s related practices and processes with the community. These sessions brought different disciplinary perspectives into Scholar Square and opened up discussion around wider questions in research, knowledge production, and scholarly practice.