Ahmed Allahwala, University of Toronto
While increasingly embraced and promoted by academic institutions, there continues to be a tension between publicly engaged scholarship (including what we consider as community geography) and tenure and promotion policies.
Making community-engaged work count in the academy is challenging and intimidating. This type of work is often seen as unorthodox or, worse, lacking academic rigor, not fully recognized within the nomenclature of standard academic practices and therefore considered “risky,” especially for early-career and BIPOC faculty members.
Commonly, the advice of well-meaning mentors (and chairs) is to focus on publications and grant applications and do “the community stuff” later.
In this short blog entry, I highlight some tensions and potential solutions that we, as community geographers, have to navigate when trying to reconcile our epistemological and ethical commitments with the institutional policies that govern our career advancement and progression.
Our commitments
As community geographers, we are committed to the co-production of knowledge, in partnership with community actors and members.
As community geographers, we are committed to the democratization of knowledge by creating research products and scholarly outputs “beyond the journal article.”
As community geographers, we are committed to ethical research in a broadest possible sense by centering participatory processes and community needs. We intentionally share authority and control with our partners and the community at large.
As community geographers, we are committed to avoiding colonial types research of research where knowledge is extracted for the primary benefit of the academic researcher and the institutions he works for.
As community geographers, we are committed to paying equal attention to people and processes and research products. We therefore invest time in building and nurturing relationships of care and trust with the communities we work with.
Resulting tensions
The products of community geography do not necessarily take the shape of the currency that most matters in the academy, the peer-reviewed journal article.
Co-authorship of academic publications with community partners can be rewarding but is also challenging and time-consuming.
Much community-engaged work sits at the boundaries of teaching, research and community service, which poses challenges about how to communicate the work to the academic institutions whose policies still see these categories as largely separate and discrete.
The institutional incentive to get work out quickly (aka “publish or perish”) might collide with our commitment honouring and centering questions of community representation, ownership of data, and participatory analysis.
Some pieces of advice (I look forward to hearing yours!)
Make space on your CV for community-engaged work and try to frame it as research output. For example, add a section like “Public Scholarship” or “Documentary Projects and Research Websites.” (I am grateful to my friend and mentor Caitlin Cahill for her advice on this.)
While you are doing research for and with the community, you remain the academic partner in the project and it is legitimate that you want to publish about the work in traditional academic format. Seek conversations about what “products” matter to the community and to you (in terms of your career progression).
Be intentional about project documentation and evaluation from the get-go. This will allow you to collect information and data to write up the experience as a systematic research project or formal evaluation in the form of an article. (It will also pre-empt reviewers’ comments that your manuscript is largely descriptive or, worse, anecdotal).
Keep in touch with your community partners and carefully document your research collaborations. If possible, solicit letters from (institutional) community partners at the end of a project as part of your documentation efforts.
Read your tenure and promotions policies carefully and identify “hooks” to frame your community work strategically. For instance, at my institution, the University of Toronto, the promotion policies allow for research to be demonstrated in the form of “creative and professional work, including community service, where such work is comparable in level and intellectual calibre with scholarly production and relates directly to the candidate’s academic discipline.” Similarly, teaching excellence can be demonstrated in the form of “the development of innovative and creative ways to promote students’ involvement in the research process and provide opportunities for them to learn through discovery-based methods.”
Seek out mentors and exchange with other community-engaged scholars, especially those who have already taken the tenure hurdle. The CGC mentorship initiative is an excellent initiative.
Dr. Ahmed Allahwala is an Associate Professor (Teaching Stream) in the City Studies program at the University of Toronto Scarborough. His work focuses on urban social policy, neighbourhood wellbeing, and community development within the context of contemporary state and economic restructuring in North America and Western Europe.