Thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research

This thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research, launched in anticipation of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference, showcases essays by luminaries who presented papers at the conference as well as allied scholars who have taken the field in new directions. Revitalising a tradition set out by the First Berkeley Women and Language Conference in 1985, the four biennial Berkeley conferences held in the 1990s led to the establishment of the International Gender and Language Association and subsequently of the journal Gender and Language, contributing to the field’s institutionalisation and its current panglobal character. Retrospective essays addressing the themes of Politics, Practice, Intersectionality and Place will be published across four issues of the journal in 2021. The final issue of our thirty-year retrospective shows how studies of language, gender and sexuality may be enlivened by seriously engaging with the notion of place – understood as one’s geographical location, locus of enunciation and/or position within the field. Bonnie S. McElhinny and María Amelia Viteri scrutinise lingering effects of colonialism and advocate for hope as a central affective dimension of decolonial practice. Drawing upon Black feminisms, Busi Makoni discusses the embodiment of refusal to racialised forms of patriarchy and Sonja L. Lanehart underlines the importance of bringing African American Women’s Language more centrally into the field’s remit. The next three essays move their foci to specific regions: Pia Pichler reflects on the entanglement of place, race and intersectionality in the UK; Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith warns against the dangers of reifying essentialised categories in Japanese language and gender research; Fatima Sadiqi criticises the underrepresentation of North Africa in the field by reviewing the emergence and resilience of feminist linguistics in the region. The two final essays highlight the importance of sociolinguistic activism and the urgent need of moving beyond the field’s Global North emphasis. Amiena Peck discusses the power of digital activism and the way it has reignited her passion for engaged scholarship. Ana Cristina Ostermann advocates for micro-interactional analysis as a method for illuminating Southern epistemologies of gender and sexuality. The theme series also pays tribute to significant scholars present at the 1992 Berkeley conference who are no longer with us; in this issue, Rusty Barrett and Robin Queen offer a lively account of the life and work of linguist and novelist Anna Livia.

Decolonial Dreamers and Dead Elephants

The 11 articles in this special themed issue examine the complexity of issues of power between individual researchers, between researchers and community organisations or higher education institutions, and between community organisations and institutions in relation to community-engaged research and scholarship. The articles uplift the pain and joy in community-engaged research, the harm and the benefits, the contradictions and tensions, and the true gifts and understanding gained in research with communities for the purpose of co-creating transformational change. We weave our own knowledge and experiences together with these individual articles as we seek ways to reimagine the future of community research and engagement. Specifically, we connect the near obliteration of African elephants and loss of Indigneous ways of knowing in Africa with the diverse communities, contexts and issues of power in community-engaged scholarship represented in this special volume. We, like the authors, hold a dream for the future of engaged scholarship that is more equitable, inclusive and morally just. We believe this dream is not only possible but achievable, as evidenced by the work of the authors in this volume. We present an African indigenous knowledge system, Ubuntu, whose principles, values and tenets simultaneously promote the conservation of the community as a whole and the harmonious existence of the individual within the community. We posit that the adaptation and adoption of this knowledge system within the scholarship and practice of community-university partnerships and community research relationships may enable the development of a mutuality and reciprocity that levels power hierarchies within the personal, organisational and societal arenas of community-university partnerships. We demonstrate that many of the cases described by contributors to this special volume resonate with this knowledge system, which itself has survived colonisation and its concomitant epistemicide. Together, the authors help paint a pathway for those who want to become decolonial dreamers (la paperson 2017) daring to reimagine the nature of power in research as we collectively find ways to dream bigger in order to uncover new and exciting possibilities for this work we call community-engaged scholarship.

Guest Editorial: Power in Engaged Scholarship: Dimensions and Dynamics of Knowledge Co-Creation

Collaboratively engaged research is shaped by dynamic power relationships among individuals, institutions and communities. Where some disciplines have explored the theoretical and methodological implications of power relations, the engagement movement writ large has suffered from a lack of explicit conceptual models and in-depth analyses of the role of power in the process of knowledge co-creation. Over the last 30 years, considerable attention has been paid to how resources and expertise within academic institutions can be brought to bear on the intractable social and economic problems of local communities. A necessary, yet under-theorised aspect of these dynamics is the extent to which the positionality and interpersonal relationships between actors impact the outcomes and durability of these processes. In this introductory article, we describe our effort to cultivate a conversation about power in engaged research. We organised an Author Collective for scholars and practitioners with a wide range of perspectives to expand our theoretical understanding of power’s role in university- community engagement. By reflecting on identities, approaches and experiences, the authors in this issue explore power as a vehicle for understanding the impact of positionality and interpersonal relationships on the process and outcomes of collaborative research.

Navigating the Boundaries of Youth Violence Prevention and Reduction: Reflections on Power in Community Engaged Scholarship

Community-engaged scholars grapple with power asymmetries in community-university partnerships, generally working from the assumption that deliberate practices are required to moderate the researchers’ power vis-a-vis that of the community. In this article, we suggest that this dyadic framing masks the complexity of power dynamics within communities, of which the university is just one part, and examine how power is negotiated in the boundary zones of a partnership. We use Third Generation Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as a conceptual framework to analyse the structural and cultural dimensions of the boundary zone in which research, learning and action in our partnership occurred (Engeström 1996). A brief story sheds light on our boundary work which uses research and data to span, broker and shake institutional boundaries for the purpose of youth violence prevention and intervention. Our analysis illuminates the potential and limitations of our power to foster transformational change. It also allows us to show that underestimating power differentials and the diversity of values and cultures within an organisation and between a university and a community partner, and certainly across multiple institutions in the case of a cross-sector partnership, can slow down and even thwart work to address societal problems.

Trouillot Remixed

This collection of writings from Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot includes his most famous, lesser known, and hard to find writings that demonstrate his enduring importance to Caribbean studies, anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, and politically engaged scholarship more broadly.

More Than Just an Academic Exercise

Critical policy analysis (CPA) is a means by which to critique policy and promote agency, equity, and justice. However, most CPA scholars examine political discourse from a distance rather than actively participate in political processes. Meanwhile, there's a growing interest in community-engaged research whereby academics partner with community members in their research endeavors. In this article, we consider the value of conjoining the philosophies and processes behind both CPA and community-engaged research to create more powerful and meaningful research endeavors that potentially can lead to political action and policy change. For this article, we present a subset of data from a larger study that asked education policy scholars how critical policy analysis informs their work and what they consider to be key objectives of this approach. We focus on a subsection of participants who demonstrated how and what ways they consider community-engaged scholarship to be an essential component of CPA.

On staying: Extended temporalities, relationships and practices in community engaged scholarship

This article examines the complexity and affordances of staying in ‘the field’. Time as a resource for qualitative research is widely experienced as diminishing. Yet increasingly, academic emphasis is also being placed on the merits of time intensive approaches, like participatory scholarship. This tension raises critical questions about the ethics and practices of collaboration within arguably narrowing parameters. Taking a view from the edges of conventional research practice, this article focuses on staying beyond the formal completion of a sociological research project. Drawing on over 10-years of collaboration with youth service providers in an English city, I examine the dynamics and complexities of staying, where temporalities, relationships and practices extend beyond research. In doing so, this article contributes to methodological debates about research exit and participation, by introducing staying as a practice that affords new collaborative freedoms and possibilities.

Digitization and urban governance: The city as a reflection of its data infrastructure

This article introduces the ‘House Model’, an integrated framework consisting of four data governance modes, based on the urban and smart city vision, context, and big data technologies. The model stems from engaged scholarship, synthesizing and extending the academic debates and evidence from existing smart city initiatives. It provides a means for comparing cities in terms of their digitization efforts, helps the planning of more effective urban data infrastructures and guides future empirical research in this area. The article contributes to the literature examining the issue of big data and its governance in local government and smart cities. Points for practitioners Data is a vital part of smart city initiatives. Where the data comes from, who owns it and how it is used are all important questions. Data governance is therefore important and has consequences for the overall governance of the city. The House Model presented in this article provides a means for organizing data governance. It relates questions of data governance to the history and vision of smart city initiatives, and provides a typology organizing these initiatives.