The CDSN Midterm Moment!

 Yesterday, we held the Canadian Defence and Security Network Midterm Conference.  We are 3.5 years into a 7 year SSHRC Partnership Grant.  This means we had to send off to SSHRC a report that gauges how well we met our original goals and how we plan to move forward.  We used this moment and also the Inter-University Seminar in Armed Forces and Society-Canada [IUS-Cnaada] biannual conference to organize a workshop for the leaders of the research teams to present the work they have completed and what they plan to do in the second wave of research.  We also had all three CDSN post-docs present the work they did during their fellowships with us.

I can't express how impressed I am by the work these folks have done and how grateful I am to them for taking the CDSN objectives and running with them.  Below, I am posting the slides from my presentation that reported my take on where things stand.  

I discussed the original goals set out in the SSHRC grant and suggested that we made clear progress in four and, well, hard to measure progress in the other two.  How do we know we are helping to improve the defence and security literacy of Canadians?    This is something we will be considering in the next few years.

 I went through the stuff we have been doing and talked about how the four themes (down from five) have done great work, as the subsequent presentations proved--lots of co-production of knowledge with government and private sector partners, such as the surveys we have done and the personnel theme's work led by Irina Goldenberg of DGMPRA (DND's personnel analysis branch) and Stefanie von Hlatky of Queens).  The pandemic did impact what we did and how we did it, but we managed to implement most of our ideas that we specified in our grant four years ago.  Some stuff has been more challenging--that we have more than 40 partners, for instance, has made it a bit more work to keep most of our partners engaged. 

 I then addressed what we do well and what we have had problems with.  We have not only produced much research, but we have been consulted by and we have consulted government through a variety of ways.  We are doing policy-relevant work, and a number of actors have realized that.  So, we are not just in an ivory tower yammering to ourselves.  We have been energetic uses of social media, which has helped us get through the pandemic.  We have added a variety of partners that have helped us reach out to more people, get more ideas, and embrace diverse perspectives. 

The big challenges have been trying to get folks to apply for our opportunities.  We get only handfuls of applications for our post-doc, for our book workshop, for our undergraduate excellence scholars.  It has also been difficult to get larger audiences for our activities.  Neither of these problems are unique to the CDSN as our friends in other networks have had similar problems.  We need to get more creative and put more resources to get more folks to show up.  I also suggested that we could do better communicating with each other.  The Midterm Conference was partly aimed at addressing this.

 I concluded by discussing the big question of sustaining beyond the SSHRC grant.  We have a variety of paths ahead of us, and we plan to take all of them.

Overall, I am most proud and pleased about what the CDSN has done and what it has become.  As I told everyone, my role is mostly taking credit for everyone else's hard work.  I am very grateful for the teams we have built--the staff at Carleton, the co-directors leading the research efforts, the advisory board, the emerging scholars, scientists, and policy makers that have contributed so much to our events, and the partners in academia, government, the military, and the private sector.    And yes, I enjoy the associated dinners when we meet!