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.

A Relational Approach to Transforming Power in a Community-University Partnership

We use a relational understanding of power to analyze power dynamics at the institutional and interpersonal levels in our multi-year Co-Education/Co-Research (CORE) partnership between Tufts University Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning (UEP) and Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI). Power in community-university partnerships is often examined only at the institutional level, conceiving of power as a resource to be balanced and shared. Indeed, CORE has advanced institutional shifts through co-governance, equitable funding, co-production of curriculum and cross-flow of people. While institutional policies and practices are critical, they alone do not transform deep-seated hierarchies that value university knowledge, practices and people over community. To understand how intertwined interpersonal and institutional practices can reproduce or transform these cultural and ideological dynamics, we use a relational approach, understanding that power flows in and through all relations. As community members, students and faculty, we reflect on the contradictions we have encountered in CORE. We examine how we reinforce the dominance of academic over community knowledge, even as we leverage institutional power to further community goals. These tensions can be opportunities for shifting, disrupting and transforming towards more equitable relations, but they can also reproduce and reinforce the status quo. Through reflective practice and a relational ethic of care, we can try to recognize when we might be shifting power relations and when we might be reproducing them. This is messy work that requires a lot of communication, trust, reflection and time. A relational approach to power provides hope that we can be part of the change we seek in all of our relations, every day. And it reminds us that no matter what we have institutionalised or encoded, our individual beings, organizations and communities are always in a process of becoming.

Promiscuous Care in Movement-Based Research: Lessons Learned from Collaborations in Manhattan's Chinatown

Decolonial and feminist studies scholars have long recognised the intricate ways in which the personal and academic are deeply interwoven and that the co-production of knowledge is essential for social transformation. This article examines the cultural organising of the Chinatown Art Brigade, an intergenerational collective of artists, activists, writers, educators and practitioners driven by the fundamental belief that cultural, material, and aesthetic modes of production have the power to combat gentrification. Specifically, I situate the collective within a longer lineage of Asian American cultural organising in Manhattan Chinatown and draw from years of movement-based research as a member of the collective. Incorporating personal reflection and interviews conducted with brigade members, this article speaks to how the themes of power, temporality and affectivity show up in movement-based research. How can we think more capaciously about academic and non-academic collaboration, to push the boundaries and explore new possibilities that honour the time, expertise and trauma of directly impacted communities? In reflecting on my work with the Chinatown Art Brigade, I discuss the nuances of intergenerational co-production of knowledge and interrogate how a feminist ethics of promiscuous care can uncover new possibilities for collaboration between cultural workers, organisers and movement-based scholars within and beyond the neoliberal academy.

When Consensus Falters, We Co-create: Attending to Power in a Practitioner/Scholar Partnership to Amplify Newcomer Belonging

This article interrogates the politics of belonging in scholar–practitioner collaborations by analysing and reflecting upon a group project that advocated for a more equitable approach to newcomer belonging and integration in an urban setting in the United States. The structure of our collaboration revealed unaddressed and unspoken dynamics that collectively reinforced boundaries and hierarchies in our group, despite a level of intentionality around democratic praxis among the community-engaged scholars who initially brought participants together. The article asks: How can we work towards a notion of belonging if we haven’t worked out an equitable approach within our own group where everyone, including newcomers, feels like they belong? The article relies on a methodology of critical reflexive dialogue between the four co-authors – two scholars and two practitioners – to analyse and reflect on the ways that power imbalances are bound up in questions of belonging and representation.

Community Members as Facilitators: Reclaiming Community-Based Research as Inherently of the People

This article aims to rethink the positionality of community in community-based research collaboration and advocate the need for community members to facilitate CBR processes to counter power imbalances in community-university engagement. I reflect on my lived experience as a community-based facilitator through a feminist post-structural lens focused on the interplay between concepts such as subjectivity, margin-centre and performativity. I argue that, despite the community-engaged scholarship egalitarian ideal, university-community engagement still echoes the old researcher-researched binary in which academics remain the hegemonic pole. In addition, as a medium of power/knowledge, the university fabricates the community and its marginality. Thus, a margin-centre relationship is established, in which community groups must claim their marginality to receive a share of the centre (the university), such as research skills and information. In these margin-centre dynamics, university and community can be understood as identities and subject positions to be taken up by individuals. In essence, these positions are expressions of regulatory power that normalises subjectivities, a condition in which individuals exist as subjects in the social space. Insights from the work of Judith Butler lead to the understanding that, in order to conceive community members as CBR facilitators, normalised and stabilised binary identities (university-community) should be unsettled. This entails individuals who are subjected as ‘the community’ to escape subjection by moving towards recognition of a subjectivity that is not prescribed or is still marginalised within the discourse. In escaping subjection, community groups may exercise power in order to establish new power relations in which CBR becomes more community-led, yet still collaborative.

Harnessing the Power of Stories for Rural Sustainability: Reflections on Community-Based Research on the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland

Stories have the power to shape understanding of community sustainability. Yet in places on the periphery of capitalist systems, such as rural and resource-based regions, this power can be used to impose top–down narratives on to local residents. Academic research often reinforces these processes by telling damage-centric narratives that portray communities as depleted and broken, which perpetuates power imbalances between academia and community members, while disempowering local voices. This article explores the potential of storytelling as a means for local actors to challenge top–down notions of rural sustainability, drawing on a community-based research initiative on the Great Northern Peninsula (GNP) of Newfoundland. Five of the authors are community change-makers and one is an academic researcher. We challenge deficiencies-based narratives told about rural Newfoundland and Labrador, in which the GNP is often characterised by a narrow set of socio-economic indicators that overlook the region’s many tangible and intangible assets. Grounded in a participatory asset mapping and storytelling process, a ‘deep story’ of regional sustainability based on community members’ voices contrasts narratives of decline with stories of hope, and shares community renewal initiatives told by the dynamic individuals leading them. This article contributes to regional development efforts on the GNP, scholarship on sustainability in rural and remote communities, and efforts to realise alternative forms of university-community engagement that centre community members’ voices and support self-determination.

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.

Helping Homeless Youth: Epistemological Implications of Power in a YPAR Project

Text from Nasma: 'I’ve started moving my things out of the house. I’m putting it in your office for now.' Thus began the story of how one of the youth I had worked with for four years on various YPAR projects became homeless and turned to me for help. Entering this crisis with Nasma took time and an emotional toll, and it affected the power dynamics of our relationship when finishing our YPAR project. Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) works to rebalance power in inequitable relationships based on roles, age, race, gender, etc. Providing care to Nasma as she confronted the traumatic situation of homelessness affected our collaborative relationship as she became dependent on me for basic economic resources. Through this process, the inequities in age and material resources between Nasma and me were centred, displacing the more equitable interactions that we had constructed through YPAR projects. This article employs critical autoethnography to examine the epistemological ‘risks of care’ and argues that the calls for ‘care-full’ scholarship still need to contend with the pitfalls of differential power dynamics in YPAR.

'Midwife for Power': Towards a Mujerista / Womanist Model of Community Organizing

In recent years, communities have responded to police violence in U.S. cities through confrontational models of community organising that evolved from patriarchal and male approaches. Very often, these approaches have not produced the hoped-for outcomes. In this article, I argue that a women-led community organising model, grounded in feminine relational power-with epistemologies, can lead to innovative policy changes, including in contexts of intractable problems, such as police misconduct. This article presents the Midwife for Power community organising model, which creates space for women organisers to nurture solidarity and creativity across all lines of difference, centres personal testimony and uses collective inquiry to create relational power to address injustice. Theoretically, this model draws on the rich insights of Black and Latina organisers and scholars, as well as traditions of intersectional solidarity. In order to illustrate the model, this article presents an empirical case study of a successful police accountability campaign.