Kate Derickson, University of Minnesota
There are many different types of community engaged work, each of which has a distinct set of ethical, analytical, and formatting considerations. I am resource communities that have not historically had access to what I call the “means of knowledge production.” These collaborators have perhaps been the object of analysis, but they have seldom had a chance to define the research question. The goal of my research is to mobilize the resources of the research university to resource the communities I partner with to ask and answer questions that are a priority to them. I partner with organizations or constituted groups that have their own established networks and forms of accountability, solidarity and relations with the grassroots of their community. This is different from other kinds of work that aims to either call a group into being through their collaboration or work that aims to get a representative sample across a group. This means that I can come to shared agreements with the organizations about how the work should proceed. It also means that the aim of the work is to resource that group to achieve their goals, not to adjudicate across the merits of competing goals. In the case of policy oriented work, one might take a different approach that is aimed at discerning the most effective way of achieving an end and take a position based on the findings, for example. It is also worth noting that in the experiences I have had to date I have not been a member of the groups I collaborate with – if I were, there would likely be a different set of ethical, political and epistemological considerations.
There are generally three types of audiences for the community engaged work I do. Work for each audience has its own set of considerations, and the research itself is often shared with different audiences at different points in time. The first audience is my community partners; my students and I often do small and medium scale projects with finding communicated to our community partners only. These are projects that are done in response to a specific need the partners have identified, and we will often turn the research and findings over to the partner, who uses it in a variety of different ways. Sometimes the work is on sensitive topics that partners want to know more about but are concerned that sharing the findings publicly will undermine their goals, or that the findings will be put to use in ways that are antithetical to the shared goals of the collaboration.
The second kind of work I do is that which takes seriously the priorities, concerns, questions, framings of my community partners and is aimed at sharing those with the general public. I have two examples of this kind of work I want to talk about. One example is a series of StoryMaps I’ve made with my students in collaboration with the Gullah/Geechee Nation. These maps aim to elevate the history, culture and matters of concern to Gullah/Geechee people. The bring the resources of the research university – research capacity, website hosting, technical skills, creative and graphic design, cartography – to share with the general public how Gullah/Geechee people want to be represented and recognized. The most robust one was done largely by graduate students in a course taught by me and Queen Quet, the Chieftess and Head of State of Gullah/Geechee Nation and my main collaborator. Students were challenged by the awkward fit between their own intellectual curiosities and disciplinary matters of concern and the priorities of our partner; the things they wanted to highlight, the things they were curious about, the things they thought other scholars or activists might want to know did not always align with what our community partners wanted to highlight. Even for students and researchers committed to the self-determination and resourcing of communities can struggle with the suspension of particular kinds of analysis that is sometimes required in projects like this. The experience of doing this kind of work can bring into relief the contours, features, blind spots, prejudices of a discipline and our own presumptions in ways that are intellectually profound and can invite new lines of scholarly inquiry.
The third audience is the scholarly community. While the outlets for this kind of work are more straightforward, the challenges associated with writing up community-engaged work for a scholarly audience are complex. It is beyond the scope of this blog post to explore these considerations in detail, but I have written about this process in other publications, including blog posts and academic articles linked to below.