This week, Research Impact Canada (RIC) exhibited at Congress Expo 2025, which was held at George Brown College’s Waterfront Campus in downtown Toronto. As part of the 94th Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, RIC joined over 20 exhibitors in Canada’s largest academic book fair, engaging with researchers, students, and community members to highlight the importance of knowledge mobilization in research. Here were some takeaways from our week there:
- We saw familiar RIC member faces! RIC member MacKinley Darlington from Athabasca University stopped by to say hi to us on our first day there! As you may know, MacKinley was promoted to President of AU Press recently in the last year and she was on duty representing them at Congress. We were thrilled to see her in person! Then awhile later, we saw RIC member, Stephen MacGregor from University of Calgary, also come by our table to say hi! He was doing a presentation at Congress. It was truly amazing to bump into RIC members at the exhibit.
- We got to speak with folks from a variety of different institutions. While most of the attendees who dropped by our table were naturally from post-secondary institutions (since Congress primarily exhibits publishing houses and presses), we did met a few notable organizations, including Six Nations Public Library, Canadian Research Data Network, Canadian Association of Applied Linguistics, and Canadian Sociological Association.
- We met many graduate students who were interested in mobilizing their knowledge to the real world. We had several graduate students in their final year of PhD studies who were looking to publish their theses and were looking for support in that area. While RIC is not a publishing company, we did discuss with them alternative ways of disseminating their research findings through various outputs, targeting specific audiences, and methods of measuring impact. They were interested in learning more, as most of them were trying to help communities and make an impact, or wanted to disseminate their results beyond academia.
To wrap it up, Congress Expo 2025 will be the last time RIC will be exhibiting there. We have exhibited at Congress Expo pretty much year as far back as a decade ago when the network was still in its early stages and, initially, it made sense for RIC to continually publicize the network to post-secondary institutions. Now, the RIC membership has grown to include not only post-secondary institutions but also research hospitals, a college, funders, think tanks, and more. We feel the time has come to close the chapter on Congress Expo now.