"Public Problem-Solving": Community of Practice Supports Engaged Research While Centering Community Expertise

In the three years since it was established, the Civic Engagement Initiative’s project on Amplifying the Voices of Engaged Researchers, a collaboration with the Talloires Network of Engaged Universities at Tufts University, has built a community of practice that fills a noticeable gap in support for academic research that is conducted with the cooperation of community partners.

This dedicated cohort of university scholars hailing from a diverse set of disciplines and locations meets regularly to share their insights and strategies for successful engaged scholarship across geopolitical boundaries. As they co-create new knowledge and lasting ties with each other, the members of the community of practice (CoP) prioritize developing long-term, sustainable community partnerships as a central component of research.

An environment for sharing knowledge and experience

“We are creating an environment where scholars are sharing their own experience, opening up and talking about what it's like doing this work,” explains Erin Cannan, Director of the Civic Engagement Initiative, which established the project in 2021 along with the Talloires Network of Engaged Universities. “We want to establish a place for engaged research to be recognized by institutions as critical to the body of knowledge it is contributing to,” she adds.
 
The project started out providing funding and online training sessions for a group of researchers operating in communities affected by Covid. It has since gone on to serve over forty individuals in three cohorts who share personal reflections on their work with the goal of discovering commonalities that benefit the collective. 

The composition of the CoP is unusual as it brings together engaged scholars from multiple disciplines, ranging from human rights and engineering to education, sustainability, and the arts, and incorporates faculty and graduate students. Scholars have found that they share several mutual interests, including the way they structure their community partnerships and the challenges they face.

“Pooling the knowledge of such a wide range of community-focused scholars creates a unique opportunity for making connections that would otherwise not be possible in more discipline- focused communities,” says Cannan.

Centering communities and inclusivity

A key tool the project has developed is a syllabus that provides guiding questions that prompt participants to produce written reflections on the impacts their work is having within partner communities. In the group’s biweekly online meetings, colleagues share their reflections and grapple with important questions related to incorporating ethical practices in their work and centering community expertise while balancing the expectations of their home institutions. 

“Engaged research employs a rigorous approach to societal transformation through a process of simultaneous action and scholarship, explains Tufts University Tisch College Dean Dayna Cunningham. “It is a collaborative approach to public problem-solving that seeks to balance unequal power dynamics and make research more impactful by fostering the co-generation of knowledge and learning between universities and communities,” she adds. 

“By centering the voices and perspectives of marginalized communities, engaged researchers call into question the notion of expertise as a limited resource, encouraging multiple ways of knowing and understanding. This CoP has served as a global virtual space for community partners, students, and faculty to generate new and relevant knowledge, to share best practices, and to educate and inspire the next generation of scholar activists,” she says. 

Engaged research includes all the standards of traditional scholarship while incorporating the expectations and ethical concerns that are involved in community engagement. Reflection provides an opportunity to consider these questions while designing and analyzing the research. The scholars are especially concerned with their responsibilities to the community and care deeply how they are building inclusive research practices that center the communities in which they are working.
  
“This type of research impacts scholars personally; it can feel much more complicated to scholars as they wrestle with these questions,” says Cannan.

For example, Diana Ordóñez Castillo, a scholar at Universidad de los Andes, says there is a tension between the work she has done conducting research in the field and the tasks, such as resource management and project design, that she does from within her academic institution. 
“Engaged research is perceived differently when you are in the field within the actual context of the community, in contrast to when you work for that community from the institutional setting,” says Ordóñez Castillo, who studies the role of women in peacebuilding in the context of armed conflict and violence in Colombia.

Ordonez Castillo says that when she shares daily life with the community members she is researching, “I feel more honest, less colonial.” On campus, she is viewed as “the official expert” representing the community she is studying but that perception is incorrect, she adds. 

“It has been the embodied knowledge, walking the territories, and understanding their fears but also their strengths, that has made me see clearly that I do not speak for these community members. Instead, I have become part of their struggles for social justice, and I am one of their voices,” she says. 

“A palpable sense of solidarity”

The engaged scholars have launched a series of global webinars that focus on the impacts of their research but also highlight the connections between their diverse communities and research topics. A recent online discussion on Educational Intervention in Vulnerable Contexts featured Belal Fallah, Associate Professor of Economics, Palestine Polytechnic University, who presented on the negative effects of conflict on children's behavior in Palestine. Yousuf Daas, Graduate Student, Kobe University, Japan, explained how non-physical parental disciplinary methods decrease primary school dropout rates in Afghanistan, and Mia Sasaki, Parami University, discussed the need for online courses to further education opportunities in Myanmar.
 
Mocke Jansen Van Veuren, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, talked about the benefits of a pedagogy model that involves community-based collective filmmaking in South Africa. He says that during the webinar, he felt “a palpable sense of solidarity” with colleagues from Palestine and Myanmar as he shared the impacts of his project. While acknowledging the contexts of political violence and inequalities experienced in all three countries might not be the same, he said that the connections he made during the talk provided a “lifeline” in overwhelming times.

Building on the support they have received in the CoP, several scholars have  had their research published in reputable journals, including Sameh Hallaq’s article in the International Review of Applied Economics on the impact of climate change on agricultural labor flows in Palestine. 

Bernadett Sebaly has published an article in HVG, a Hungarian weekly, focused on the database she assembled with colleagues that catalogs protest actions that emerged from eleven social movements in Hungary from 1989 to 2002. The continuously expanding The Story of Our Struggles: A Social Movement Database provides a crucial insight into the history of Hungarian social activism and how it has shaped the country’s civil society.

Sebaly says the CoP helped her to become more conscious of her role as an engaged researcher, which in turn enhanced the work she did on the database. The database was used by a training center for activist leaders at Hungary’s School of Public Life in a workshop designed to help them reflect on the history and outcomes of national social movements.
 
"Critical analysis of the past from the bottom up can help us continue to make sense of collective action, even across interest groups, and to develop a vision of the future that is attractive to many, and worth working for today,” adds Sebaly.

The Amplifying Voices community of practice has actively connected engaged researchers from around the world so they can share their experiences and expertise in a supportive environment. With research covering a wide range of social justice challenges in many corners of the world, the CoP’s online meetings, tools, webinars, and publications not only enhance that research but build more sustainable relationships with the communities fueling it. This has proved to be a successful model of scholarship that reaches far outside the confines of traditional academia.

Post Date: 04-24-2024