Mind the PR Gap 2022: programme and booking
Being human: Making sense in a world of change.
Mind the PR Gap focuses on connecting PR research and practice. Open to practitioners, academics, researchers and students, it discusses contemporary topics to offer a clear agenda for change.
Hundreds joined us on 13 July 2022 for a free online programme that argued professional communicators need to be less concerned about their place as strategic managers with a seat at the senior table in organisations. Instead, it called for communicators to attend to complex leadership issues and interconnections by being human ‘in the world’.
Speakers addressed three worldwide changes that challenge the established strategic management focus of PR academia and practice:
- Speed and scope of technological developments, particularly AI.
- Pressures and expectations of activism and polarisation of perspectives.
- Complexity of issues affecting organisations, non-humans and natural environments.
These changes separately and together have a disruptive impact on organisational leadership, professional communication and wider society. Mind the PR Gap examines the real-world implications for practice, research, education, and scholarship of public relations.
The goal of Mind the PR Gap 2022 is to amplify ethical considerations, reflection, collaboration and meaning making. It aims to consider how through sense-making and sense-giving, communicators can help organisations be more human and relate better to the environment and others’ lived experiences.
Speakers
Simon Collister (PhD), Director of Unlimited Group’s Human Understanding Lab
Professor Marianna Fotaki, Professor of Business Ethics, Warwick Business School
Angie Ratcharak (PhD), Faculty of Business at University of Greenwich
Carol Stephenson (PhD), Director of Education in the Department of Social Sciences, Northumbria University
Meet Simon Collister (PhD)
Simon is an accomplished research and strategy consultant with over fifteen years’ experience helping high-profile global businesses and brands solve complex challenges through insight, creativity, and communications. He is a trusted advisor building strong relationships with clients and setting business vision up to board level to shape strategic growth. His expertise is informed through long-term client engagements delivering high impact work – from energy to logistics; aviation to HNWI; counter-extremism to humanitarian aid. Simon was recently appointed Director of Unlimited Group’s Human Understanding Lab that helps unlock business growth using deep human-powered data and insight.
Meet Professor Mariana Fotaki (PhD)
Marianna is Professor of Business Ethics at Warwick Business School. She holds degrees in medicine and obtained her Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Before joining academia she worked as an EU resident adviser to the governments in transition and as a medical doctor for Médecins Sans Frontières and Médecins Du Monde for 10 years in total.
She has published over 100 articles on gender, inequalities, and the marketization of public services appearing in the leading international journals. Her recent books include Business Ethics, and Care in Organizations (Routledge 2020, co-edited with Gazi Islam and Anne Antoni) and Working Life and Gender Inequality. Intersectional Perspectives and the Spatial Practices of Peripheralization (Routledge 2021, co-edited with Angelika Sjöstedt and Katarina Giritli Nygren).
Marianna currently works on solidarity responses to crisis and refugee arrivals in Greece and leads a UKRI-funded COVID scheme project ‘Understanding the financial impact of COVID-19 on the UK care home sector – implications for businesses and the workforce’.
Meet Dr Angie Ratcharak
Dr Angie Ratcharak joined Faculty of Business at University of Greenwich in September 2021. Prior to her career in academia, Angie enjoyed a professional career working in consultancy for international companies. She holds her PhD in Management, majoring in Leadership, Organisations, and Behaviour, from Henley Business School, University of Reading.
Her main research interests are Organisational Behaviour, Leadership, and Human Resource Management. The current research themes include the interplay of identity, traits, and emotion management among leaders in professionalised settings such as healthcare organisations and its impact on their well-being and organisational outcomes. Her most recent study is about the impact of change in clinical leader behaviour on safety climate during the COVID-19 pandemic, where effective leadership behaviours during emotionally challenging time were identified.
Meet Carol Stephenson (PhD)
Carol is Director of Education in the Department of Social Sciences, Northumbria University. A sociologist of work and employment, her research focuses on (a) post-industrial communities, precarity and identity; (b) class and gender inequalities; and (c) aspects of social cohesion and identification. She has practiced, researched, and published widely most recently on aspects of stigma, power, and solidarity in response to anti-open-cast mining activism in the coalfields of rural County Durham. Before entering academia, Carol worked in the trade union sector and in the National Health Service as a researcher.