University-community engagement: Restoring the balance of power in knowledge production
A university’s purview is knowledge — but its mission is to work towards a social good. Institutions of higher education, especially those that receive public funding, have a responsibility to act in ways that serve people beyond their walls, and honour the public’s democratic right to know.
Over the course of the Fall 2018 President’s Dream Colloquium on Making Knowledge Public, invited guests shared their insights on how universities and research interact with the community. This three-part series reflects on some of the concepts discussed in the colloquium around how knowledge is produced in collaboration with community. These three pieces look at different aspects of community-university partnerships and their role in making knowledge public.
Part one explores some of the discourse surrounding community engagement work and its consequences. I discuss a brief selection of academic buzzwords — generally dictated by funding bodies — and how they can pose a barrier to transparency and authentic university-community connections. In drawing attention to this form of discourse, my hope is that people will read this language with a more critical eye — and that university communicators will make an effort not to hide their agendas behind inaccessible language.
Research by scholarly institutions plays a large role in evidence-based policy-making decisions. When certains voices are systematically excluded from these academic spaces, they are also denied that opportunity to influence how governments operate. Part two attempts to make a case for the value of community knowledge and the perspectives of people with lived experiences of research questions. I refer to some successful examples of community-based efforts that are contributing to science and public discourse as models for how community members can take action and how their work can be valued and supported by research institutions.
Part three is where I share some of my learnings from working in university-community engagement. I discuss how heavy-weight institutions are able to impose their systems on external partners. When this happens, it breeds inequity in partnerships, hurting the chances of having productive and mutually-beneficial collaborations. This last part looks to the work of local community groups and the experiences of some of the colloquium speakers for examples of a practice of engagement that empowers communities in their work with universities.
Part I - The rhetoric of making knowledge public
“Higher education, the community partnerships movement suggests, must as a part of its mission take ownership of its broader environment; the institution must see itself as a citizen with a responsibility to its neighbors.”1
David J. Maurasse, Beyond the campus
This metaphor of citizenship imbues academia with the characteristics and responsibilities of the people who power it. The post-secondary institution interacts with its scholarly peers and local communities. It changes and grows — and its goals are ever-evolving. Maurasse, who published the above passage in 1968, suggested that the idea of a neighbourly responsibility, or mandate of service, was a relatively newer development in higher education, in addition to the core missions around teaching and research.
Teaching and research — the idea of public service feeds back into those two pillars of academia. The concept of ‘service’ by a university can generally be understood as a university’s activities contributing to a social good. It can be interpreted many ways, but I will treat it here as a call for community involvement in research and knowledge production, as well as for better public access to that knowledge and an ‘open’ approach to education.
These days, as a university student and staff member,2 I am very accustomed to hearing the words “community engagement” in a post-secondary context. I have heard, spoken, and written them so often, at times they have felt at risk of losing their meaning. To me, they represent the work I see my colleagues doing every day. It is the work of building trust and sustaining reciprocal partnerships with community — the work of opening up our institutions to people who might otherwise be excluded from them.
Outside of the office, I study literature and linguistics. I believe that the language we use to describe our work is worth some reflection. The language that academics and administrators have developed to talk about this work leaves something to be desired. The rhetoric and academic buzzwords we use to describe making knowledge public sound far removed from the work being done by real people on the ground. The usage of different jargon is quite contested in the field of university-community engagement, leading to the emergence of varied terminology. This leads me to the question: what does “knowledge mobilization,” or “knowledge transfer,” or “knowledge exchange” mean in the university-community context? These terms are anything but empty to the people who use them. They are loaded with meaning that varies cross-contextually.
“Knowledge mobilization,” is a term that came to prominence when the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) began using it formally in the early 2000s.3 Sometimes referred to as “KMb,” “knowledge mobilization” as stated by Carleton University’s Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement initiative, is a “multifaceted” and growing field of work, but can simply be defined as: “all the activities and products created that help your research be useful and used.” The emphasis here is on how research is impactful and productive in the public sphere. For instance, does it influence policy? Can it be used as an educational tool? What is the overall impact of a research output?
“Knowledge transfer” is defined by Cambridge University as “the transfer of tangible and intellectual property, expertise, learning and skills between academia and the non-academic community.” Their understanding promotes a two-way flow of information between post-secondary institutions and non-academic communities, creating space for discussion of public educational resources and participatory research. The process is even touted as a return on investment for government and funders to the end of “economic growth and societal wellbeing.”
“Knowledge exchange” is taken up by the University of British Columbia (UBC) in articulating their mandate to engage in “collaborative research programs and reciprocal educational opportunities, and in the sharing of research outputs that enrich the lives of local and global communities.” This definition is as broad as the world is wide. While it resists mentioning any specifics, it still tells us something about UBC’s knowledge politics and the institutional attitude towards its various publics.
The nature of this kind of language has inspired some pertinent and critical scholarly work around the relationship between academic discourse and research funding. A doctoral thesis, authored by Johanne Provençal at Simon Fraser University4 argues that SSHRC, in naming “knowledge mobilization” as a funding priority, inadvertently created the conditions for what she calls, a “zero-sum language game” in the social science and humanities research community — given that “what is well received in one discourse community is not always well received in another.” This game is not without consequences. Provençal reasons that an increased pressure to “mobilize knowledge” and engage with non-academic stakeholders comes at the cost of that knowledge being seen as legitimate within academia.
Whatever the preferred term or the motivation, the concept of extending academic work into the public realm has been taken up by plenty of institutions. In my reading, the general consensus across institutions appears to be that research must be put to work outside the bounds of academia in ways that are beneficial to the public good. I found that universities are keen to prioritize, or at least advertise that they are prioritizing, this kind of public work.
This genre of discourse serves not only to communicate a public mission, but to advantageously raise the profile of an institution. In a piece published in Hybrid Pedagogy, Robin DeRosa writes, “I’ll try to continually point out [. . .] when ‘open to the public’ is actually an ironic marketing tool used by powerful entities to obscure a system that continues to shut out the voices it claims to include.”5
This obscurity — the opacity and vagueness of the language of community engagement — concerns me. I see it as indicative of an institution’s mandate to serve the public good being at odds with how it is pressured to operate as a competitive business.6 I worry that this pressure can lead to the exploitation of the community members who engage with us — that a community partnership can be reduced to a line of marketing copy, or that the marketing value can be seen internally as more important than the partnership itself.
Universities are indeed well positioned to act as very helpful and productive neighbours. They are powerful convenors of community and have a great capacity to encourage the mutual sharing of knowledge. They have a wealth of resources, a wide network, and they have faculty, staff, administrators, and students who care about their impact. However, the inaccessibility and self-promotional aspects of the language of community engagement highlight the power differential between institutions and the people outside of them. At best, these buzzwords shield institutions from the responsibility of clearly explaining their public work to their respective publics. At worst, they provide enough ambiguous ‘buzz’ that institutions are able to avoid actually doing any of that work in earnest, while still garnering attention and funding.
As long as funding bodies are setting the tone and the terms of university-community engagement, it is hard to picture institutions rejecting this sort of insular ‘umbrella term’ rhetoric. While universities may feel it is a necessity to align their language with powerful organizations like SSHRC, using jargon-heavy, surface-level discourse with members of the public can come off as inauthentic or pedantic. Communities and universities should have a common understanding of their collaborative work and why it is important. This is a challenge I set to myself and my colleagues who are doing this work inside institutions, to help build that understanding. Specific, transparent, and buzz-defying language for our public work could help narrow the gap between institutions and people — and allow for more equitable partnerships going forward.
Part II - Valuing community knowledge
The modern university or college acknowledges its own agency and impact on its surrounding community. Over the course of the President’s Dream Colloquium on Making Knowledge Public at SFU, I’ve been privileged to hear and read work from local and international scholars who have been strengthening the case for the public’s right to know7. As producers and conveyors of information, higher education institutions have a duty to uphold that right, but if we focus too much on the outputs of academia, we risk losing out on what knowledge the community has to offer.
Research attempts to answer pressing questions and solve problems for the betterment of communities. It can empower political advocates to lobby for evidence-based policymaking or make a life-changing difference to how we treat medical conditions. Academia and higher education are powerful vehicles for progress and social change, but the systems and dynamics that govern them are complex and flawed. This piece is concerned with questions of who sets those questions or identifies those problems — but also, ‘better for whom?’ Community voices need to be taken into consideration to ensure that this research is better informed, and directed in ways will truly serve the public good.
Being on the inside of an academic institution gives you access to databases, resources, and people that you might not have otherwise. It is a privileged position to be in. There are barriers to academia — like high tuition costs, or paywalls that limit access to research — that create and perpetuate systemic social and economic inequalities. The resulting exclusion means that certain people are underrepresented in the system that seeks to solve society’s most pressing concerns.
At the heart of the issue, I see an inequitable approach to how we discriminate between different forms of knowledge and which sources of information are deemed credible by decision-makers. Critical perspectives are often left out when it comes to setting and carrying out research agendas, meaning people with lived experience of social and environmental issues are not given the same opportunity to dictate their own needs.
While the systemic imbalances at large persist, we also have reason to be hopeful. Community members, whether they are supported by an institution or not, have been stepping up to do the work of knowledge production themselves. Shannon Dosemagen gave a talk on citizen (or community) science as part of the President’s Dream Colloquium. As the executive director of Public Lab in New Orleans, her work aims to empower people to pursue their own questions related to the wellbeing and environmental health of their community.
Community science8 can be defined by its deep engagement with members of the public, where non-academics are helping shape the scientific questions and driving the research.
Dosemagen explained that it does not typically result in a research paper, but rather is aimed at bringing issues in front of decision-makers at various levels of governance. She shared examples of how researchers can work alongside community members to crowdsource scientific data collection, and cases where people took matters into their own hands to investigate their environments.
When BP spilled approximately 3.19 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, regulations restricting flights overhead limited the amount of public information coming from the site of the spill. Dosemagen and her co-founders of Public Lab went about the work of documenting the spill with DIY community satellites in the absence of media coverage. The volunteers involved in the effort captured images of the shoreline before, during, and after the spill, telling the story of its impact from a community perspective.9
Artist and theorist Patricia Reed gave a talk at SFU this fall “On Horizonless Futures,” where she made the argument that knowledge alone is not enough to compel people to change their behaviour. Reed applies this to her understanding of the inadequate collective response to climate change, saying “it’s one thing to know of this impending catastrophe, [. . .] we haven’t quite figured out how to live with the ramifications of that knowing.”10 In other words, without lived experience of an issue, people are disconnected from it in a way that limits their motivation to solve it. Stories like Dosemagen’s show how the ones most impacted by problems can mobilize to gather their own scientific evidence, raising awareness and helping outsiders make a connection to the issue.
In moments of crisis, when people with that lived experience are calling out for the things they need, how are they perceived? In evidence-based policymaking, do their experiences get counted as evidence, or are they only legitimized when an academic authority recognizes their significance? Researchers carry the weight and credibility of their institutions with them, but independent people and interest groups have to fight so much harder, not just to be heard, but to be taken seriously.
My work at SFU introduced me to Illicit, a community-engaged research project made up of community members who were brought together by their experiences with harm reduction and the drug-related deaths. The members of Illicit are peer workers and many are frontline responders at overdose prevention sites in the Downtown Eastside. With funding from the Community Arts Council of Vancouver as well as the Canada Council for the Arts, the group embarked on a participatory research process in 2016 that developed into a performance piece, where they shared stories from the frontlines and called for specific changes in Canada’s drug policy, including the legalization of all illicit drugs to prevent further overdose deaths.11
This project exemplified for me the significance of community members coming together to advocate for change based on firsthand accounts of a public health crisis. The partnership between the group and my office also modelled for me how a university-community relationship can look where a partner has access to university resources and support while developing the work in a community-driven process. It has also helped me to better understand the connections between research, advocacy, and artistic expression.
Art can be such a powerful and effective means of communicating knowledge, building understanding, and reducing stigma. As Dosemagen mentioned in her lecture, the final product of a community-led research project does not need to conform to academic formats, and artistic media are accessible to the wider public in ways that formal research papers are not.
This kind of work is exciting to me. Through meaningful relationship-building and unconventional forms of knowledge transmission, we can work towards restoring the balance of power between academia and the people who are typically excluded from it. It shows me a possibility for those of us lucky enough to be on the inside to leverage the resources and symbolic capital of the university to benefit our communities, and that universities do not only have a lot to teach, but a lot to learn from people outside their walls.
Part III - Community engagement in practice
For this last instalment, I explore what university-community engagement looks like in practice, sharing some of my own learnings from doing this kind of work within a university setting. Working in an department that focuses on community partnerships and public programming, my insights stem from my experience in collaborating with internal and external partners to produce public events that engage audiences on social, political, and environmental issues through art and dialogue.
When university bodies enter into partnerships with community members or NGOs, it is important to be mindful of the ways in which universities can be better positioned to dictate the terms of these relationships. The inner workings of large institutions are often difficult to navigate. Red tape and bureaucracy are discouraging and even alienating for who aren’t used to operating within that type of environment.
When a researcher or artist from a post-secondary institution wants to involve people in their academic work, that project is subject to an ethics review process.12 Community partners may be required to sign a hefty-looking contract to formalize the relationship. I consider it a part of my work to reduce these systemic barriers wherever possible for the people we work with.
What concerns me is that the often clunky systems we are obligated to move through are enforced to protect the university’s interests — to manage risk. Even something as simple as giving consent to be photographed requires a somewhat daunting media release form, granting SFU the “absolute and irrevocable right and unrestricted permission to use, reuse, publish, and republish in any format, location or medium at any time[. . .]”
Universities need to be held equally accountable to the people who engage with them — perhaps even more so, in the spirit of equity. Over six weeks in the spring of 2018, a group of Downtown Eastside residents and SFU PhD student Scott Neufeld met weekly to discuss research and cultural production in the neighbourhood. This process resulted in the draft document of Research 101: A Manifesto for Ethical Research in the Downtown Eastside,13 a community resource for researchers and participants that will be launched in early 2019.
I was sad, but unsurprised, to see that the first workshop came up with more drawbacks than potential benefits. The manifesto reads, “Research can increase inequality, contribute to stigma, exploit peoples’ pain, exhaust community members and typically benefits researchers much more than it benefits the DTES.” To address these concerns, the group generated a series of guiding questions for anyone involved in a research or cultural production project, all rooted in the principles of informed consent and reciprocity.
The Research 101 project bodes well for the future of university-community connections and the co-production of knowledge. I hope for a future where community partners can come to the table empowered to advocate for themselves, and where faculty, staff, and students have a model to look to for cultivating equitable and respectful collaborations.
The organization of community events is another method of community engagement — one that I can claim more familiarity with in my role at SFU. SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement aims to make space for community and university to overlap, and to allow them to be in conversation with each other on issues of public concern.
Inviting community voices into university spaces should be a win-win. Community perspectives can be amplified through university platforms, and gain access to other resources contributed in-kind like staffing and venues. In turn, the academy benefits from the knowledge and experience community members bring into the university. At work, we record and archive our public events for public circulation, as well as submit them to the SFU Library so they can become a part of the research repository and be used as an educational tool.
However, I am wary of the capacity for knowledge-sharing events hosted by universities to reproduce structures that lead to exclusion — for community presenters or for people in the audience. I believe that, in part, this stems from when community members are made to conform to academic and by extension colonial ways of communicating or receiving knowledge. Educational institutions can also be triggering for people who have experienced trauma, especially for those who are survivors of residential schools or their descendents.
The conventional formats for university events — public lectures, panel discussions, question and answer periods — don’t work for everyone. They can lead to situations where certain voices who are invited to speak are suppressed by others, or where someone is able to monopolize a microphone to be confrontational or hateful towards others. Making space where all feel welcome to participate in dialogue and knowledge-sharing can be a tough job. It is rewarding but complicated work.
John Borrows, the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Law at the University of Victoria was a valuable addition to the lineup of speakers in the President’s Dream Colloquium. What he shared as a part of his talk, Collaborating with Indigenous Communities in Research, articulated so well the way I often feel about the work of engaging, not just with Indigenous communities, but anyone who has been marginalized or excluded by the institution of academia. He spoke to the importance of taking the time to get it right, urging that people “be open to correction, clarification, and challenge.”14
Borrows’ sentiment serves as a reminder to me to listen deeply to my partners and audiences — and to think critically and often about the work of community engagement. His are poignant words for anyone undertaking the task of making knowledge public in partnership with community.
Maurasse, David J. Beyond the campus: how colleges and universities form partnerships with their communities (1968). This text examines various case studies of U.S. post-secondary institutions and their community partnerships.↩
I am a staff member in SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement at Simon Fraser University, but here I am writing with my ‘student’ hat on. These views are my own and not representative of the Office.↩
A reference entry for “knowledge mobilization” in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Action Research (2014) details a brief history of its usage and describes it as an umbrella term for practices “whose overall objective is to enable those who stand to benefit from research results in the humanities and social sciences—academics, students, policy-makers, business leaders, community groups, educators and the media, among others—to have access to knowledge at a level they can use to advance social, economic, environmental and cultural development.”↩
Provençal, Johanne. Knowledge mobilization of social sciences and humanities research: moving beyond a "zero-sum language game” (2009). Available in SFU’s Summit research repository.↩
“Working In/At Public” (2015), an article by Robin DeRosa, published in Hybrid Pedagogy, an open-access journal of which Robin DeRosa is an editor. She also gave a talk on “The Future of the Public Mission of Universities” as part of the President’s Dream Colloquium on Making Knowledge Public at Simon Fraser University on Nov. 22, 2018. The video from this talk has yet to be uploaded to the SFU Graduate & Postdoctoral Studies Youtube channel.↩
Links to an article in The Globe and Mail by Michelle Stack, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia, “Let’s focus on education, not university rankings.” Stack argues that these rankings encourage a business-like model of attracting students and funding over providing quality education and research.↩
From the President’s Dream Colloquium course readings: The Access Principle: The Case for Open
Access to Research and Scholarship by John Willinsky provides a solid foundation in defining this right.↩
Shannon Dosemagen defines “community science” in her public talk. Listen from 17:26 - 18:43 of the video recording for context.↩
Listen starting at the 12:16 mark of Dosemagen’s talk for the full explanation of this project.↩
For this portion of Patricia Reed’s talk, listen from about 18:00 - 19:10 in the video recording.↩
I was able to interview some of the members of Illicit for the my office’s blog in June of 2018. SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement supported Illicit with the in-kind contribution of rehearsal space.↩
For reference, SFU’s Office of Research Ethics website. Canadian universities follow the guidelines outlined by the federal government in the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (TCPS 2). ↩
This is a pre-print version of the manifesto that is in circulation for community feedback. My office is contributing with the design work and printing of the final product to be distributed at a public event co-hosted with Hives for Humanity in the spring of 2019.↩
For this quote from John Borrows, watch the post-conversation Q&A, at around the 1:16:00 mark in the video recording.↩