CESS Public Outreach Award

The Central Eurasian Studies Society has awarded our blog their 2019 Public Outreach Award.

Here’s the message we sent to the annual conference of the Central Eurasian Studies Society to accept this award:

On behalf of my collaborators in the Mongolia Focus blog, I’m very happy to accept the CESS Public Outreach Award, what a meaningful recognition in our field of study that sometimes faces hurdles in reaching the public in North America! Thank you very much to Amb. Addleton for nominating us and to the CESS for selecting us for the award.
Our blog got started in 2011 when Byambajav Dalaibuyan was visiting me at the Univ of British Columbia as a sociology PhD student. I was able to provide him with some desk space right next to Mendee Jargalsaikhan who was embarking on graduate student in political science at UBC. We found ourselves discussing Mongolian current social and economic developments almost on a daily basis. We were delighted with this opportunity, but soon realized that we ought to include the world in these conversations that did not seem to be available elsewhere, at least not rooted in academic research or in English. And thus, Mongolia Focus was born.
Since then, more authors have joined us in keeping the blog going for over 8 years and with more than 600 posts, including many guest posts from other authors. We think of Mongolia Focus as an outlet for the results of academic research re-formulated for a wider public audience. We are always delighted to reach academic audiences as well as broader public audiences and to perhaps build interest in research on Central Asia broadly and on Mongolia specifically. Fittingly, the top three origins of readers of our blog are Mongolia, the U.S. and Canada.
With the encouragement of this award, we hope to continue providing information, analysis and news on Mongolia to a specialist and public audience. Thank you to our many readers for their attention and again to the CESS for this honour!

About Julian Dierkes

Julian Dierkes is a sociologist by training (PhD Princeton Univ) and a Mongolist by choice and passion since around 2005. He teaches in the Master of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He toots @jdierkes@sciences.social and tweets @jdierkes
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