The Collaborative on Media & Messaging for Health and Social Policy team gathered for a full team retreat in August, hosted at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
The goals of the meeting were to share work-in-progress from projects initiated in the last year for feedback from current study team members as well as potential future collaborators; to establish administrative procedures for effective collaboration; and to identify key research questions and plans for the year ahead. Underlying these explicit goals of the meeting, however, was the more intangible objective of gathering with our large team in person after a year of Zoom meetings. Over meals, snacks, and (lots of) coffee, the team had a chance to reconnect with one another and get to know some of our newest team members. This fall we are excited to welcome new postdoctoral researchers at all three of our sites: Furkan Cakmak and Meiqing Zhang at Wesleyan, Kristina Medero at the University of Minnesota, and Sarah Rozenblum at Cornell University (see here for a list of all of our team members).
We left the meeting with a strong sense of synergies across our collective work, opportunities to disseminate emerging research findings, and a lengthy list of research questions we will aim to tackle in the next two years and beyond. We grounded our priorities in the questions and research needs that we identified through our formative qualitative research this past year with communicators in practice. We also discussed policies and procedures to make our work together – even at a distance – more efficient and effective. We are excited to share the outcomes of this productive retreat in the coming months.
