Joseph Winberry (’19) to Co-Lead UT Webinar About Civic Engagement
SIS alumni and current CCI doctoral student Joseph Winberry (’19) will be co-leading in a university-wide webinar 2 p.m. Aug. 27 with the Office of Community Engagement and Outreach to discuss a LibGuide he wrote as a master’s student.
Nicole Bryant of the OCEO said she came across Winberry’s LibGuide while searching UT resources about civic engagement for a fall series of webinars to complement the Imagine Tennessee pilot program she manages. Anyone on campus can attend the webinar and those interested are encouraged to register ahead of time.
“We are really big on promoting resources that are already there, as UT is already siloed enough and our office is trying to bridge some of those gaps…we’ve been linking to a lot of the LibGuides, and I’ve used the library as a resource whenever I’m putting together training,” Bryant said.
Bryant’s job is all about connecting faculty and student projects with what is going on in the surrounding community, and she had previously met Winberrry to discuss interdisciplinary connections to internal and external partners for faculty and students. Winberry formerly worked at the Knox County Office on Aging, and is passionate about community and civic engagement.
“I appreciated all of the local resources that Joseph had put together, and it was non-partisan, which is good because we’re not trying to tell people how to vote, we’re just providing them with resources about civic engagement,” she said.
Winberry said he initially was prompted to write the LibGuide as a graduate student assistant at the Howard Baker Center for Public Policy in 2019. There was a lull in his workload and his boss, Kris Bronstad, encouraged Winberry to work on something that connected his education to a topic related to the modern political archives and the library.
“I saw a gap connecting students to both the political and community action processes. Civic engagement is a topic I have been passionate about most of my life and the information components to civic engagement is something I really became aware of during my time in the master’s program,” Winberry said.
Bryant said the webinar is geared to identify issues in Knoxville where civic engagement is needed, and how to strengthen existing efforts. They will also be joined by Lorna Hollowell, Education and Training Consultant for the Division of Diversity and Engagement, who will discuss barriers to engagement and how to better include diverse perspectives moving forward.