Dr. Aída R. Guhlincozzi, University of Missouri Preparing Future Faculty Post-Doctoral Scholar in Geography and Women’s and Gender Studies Departments
As part of my program, Preparing Future Faculty – Faculty Diversity (PFFFD) Postdoctoral Scholars Program, there is an expectation of teaching a course in the second semester of the scholar’s second year in the program. I have vacillated on the topic of this course during my whole time in the program. After a brainstorming session last year, I decided with excitement and some trepidation, on a community geography course. The excitement stems from the certainty that teaching more students about the power of community geography will only benefit them. The trepidation comes from the question of whether I am really the best person to teach them about community geography’s power. That question comes from both community geography’s superpower, and what some, particularly university administrators, might consider its weakness.
A community geographer’s ethos may vary, but as I intend to share with my students, such an ethos starts and ends in action towards social justice. But measuring social justice as an outcome is difficult. Measuring social justice as part of a research agenda, with research output, with evaluation at the end of a funding period, as part of a tenure and promotion package, seems nearly impossible. Measuring social justice as happening in the “community” part of community geography – who is even the right person for answering that question?
One of my favorite ways of speaking of a community-engaged approach comes from a tweet – essentially, a call to do work in the community that can’t be published. As a person who has been an active community member her whole life, this call is so plain it’s almost redundant. Of course that’s what you do, it’s part of what being a community member is. As an academic whose job is to publish on the work I’m doing, which I have defined as being community geography, this call is crucial. Academia has long established an extractive relationship with non-academic society. It is necessary to say that an academic should do work in a community they are doing research with or in that cannot be published on, or else that extractive pattern becomes too easy to fall into.
To be recognized by the university, to convince funding agencies to continue supporting this type of work though, publications are the currency. I have successfully managed to publish my community-engaged research. I have thus been successful in the traditional academic regard. I went to the community; I did the research; I published the research. I’ve succeeded. The box is checked.
But checking the box of publications are not the boxes I seek to check for my primary research agenda and outcomes. I do want to see social change, I do want to see long-term commitments. I do want to see the dismantling of harmful systems and something better in their places. By these metrics, I began wondering – am I really the one to teach my students community geography? Am I a successful community geographer? What change has my work actually wrought? Has it been as community-engaged as it could be? What are the lasting impacts?
These are evaluative questions that I do not yet have the answers to. They are outcome-oriented, rather than action-oriented. I believe they are also inspired by the university environment. I think the true questions for community geographers to be reflecting on are tougher to lay out and knottier to answer. What does being in community mean as academics seeking to do research? How do we co-design research projects that can lead or concurrently create action, produced by thoughtful effort? What are the conversations we should seek to have with the communities we work with? And how do we help to bring our students these questions as well, while pursuing the answers?
What helps me when I find myself facing the university-inspired questions is the academic community of geographers who do this work and face all of these questions. When I reread Block et al 2017, Robinson et al 2017, and Ehrman-Solberg et al 2020, I am reminded of the many avenues forward community geography supports. I may not have a yes answer for all of my university-inspired questions, but I do recognize that I am ready to discuss the hard questions of what comes next in the field with my students. Together, I think we will find some answers.
Key to learning community geography is doing community geography. As I prep for my first time teaching this course, I an excited to see what my students will do. And I believe the more my students and I do together, the more real community geography will be to my colleagues and university administrators. Earning recognition from our colleagues that community geography is not only promotable work but also valuable and necessary work requires having those conversations with our colleagues. When we write our P&T documents, our department guidelines, and design new programs, we have to be ready to stand up and ask our colleagues what these documents look like with the communities our university belongs to supported by them? What are we willing to ask of ourselves as individuals and as a department, college, or university? The answers may be more than we expect.
Dr. Guhlincozzi studies healthcare accessibility for vulnerable populations. Her work incorporates community geography, Latinx geographies, feminist geographies, and qualitative GIS theory and methodologies. She also studies justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in the Geosciences, especially around the recruitment and retention of students of color, and dismantling structures of oppression and white supremacy in academia.