Through my role as the administrator for the research and community-organizing grants of the Sociological Initiatives Foundation, which supports social change by linking research to social action, I have a birds-eye view of community-based research. I get to see participatory practices in all of their messiness and glory.
The foundation funds research on social issues such as wage theft, tenants’ rights, and police reform. The policy “wins” of hard-fought community organizing campaigns, framed with evidence collected by the community, were once my favorite indicator of the power and promise of collaborative research. But as much as I love to learn about the details of how a worker center documents unfair labor practices or how an immigrant rights campaign unfolds, I now pay more attention to how the field of participatory action research is evolving.
Pedagogy: Lost in the Shuffle or Central to the Struggle?
The mission of most collaborative research is to link formal inquiry with community action. It is a familiar form of public sociology—a sociological practice beyond the academy. This process creates a dynamic context for shaping learning and public dialogue among a group of citizens about how they are protagonists in a story of social change. Community organizing is often the lead vehicle for civic action. Unfortunately, researchers and organizers don’t always identify themselves as educators in their collaborative work, yet they have a central role in shaping and supporting public conversations. At its best, community research is work rooted in pedagogy, a theoretical awareness of a particular set of approaches to teaching and learning, yet there seems to be a diffuse commitment to the idea that it is an educational practice. We have to dig deep to find examples of learning objectives, curricula, or teaching methods. Collaborative research is obviously infused with learning and teaching, but we are seldom explicit about where and when it occurs in the process.
This is not surprising. Attention to teaching and learning in a nonformal context can get lost in the shuffle of timelines, deliverables, and gateways required of policy campaigns. The behind-the-scenes work of naming the problem, defining the research questions, collecting data, and analyzing data deserve a closer look. They are all contexts for teaching and learning. It is easy for community groups to fall into the pattern of mobilizing to win a campaign on a specific issue and forget about building broad-based citizen organizations through education and analysis rooted in local leadership and organizing. The greatest strength of community-engaged research lies beyond short-term policy gains, in how it helps community members develop critical awareness of their own collective challenges by reflecting on their lived experiences. Collective inquiry is the heart of community organizing because it helps people find common cause and a sense of collective power—the raw material of social movements.
When we collected case studies for our book, Collaborating for Change: A Participatory Action Casebook (Rutgers University Press 2020), the authors and I captured glimmers of insight about teaching and learning. Still, we could have generated a much richer conversation by asking “How does the research process support political education and help people reshape their understanding of who they are and how they fit into the world?”
Organizations with a culture rooted in popular education may be best able to help answer this question. They view their work as fundamentally educational. Their mission is to help excluded people exercise leadership. They are eager to share their discoveries about teaching and learning in the community because spaces for reflection and action are so rare. They seem to relish creating learning experiences that are very different from didactic instruction and encourage participants to reflect on their own experiences, engage in dialogue, and take action. They tell stories about struggling with intergroup conflict and difference, how leaders emerge unexpectedly, and “aha” moments of political awareness in the community that emerge when things fall into place.
I will always look for shifts in power and decision-making resulting from participatory action research, but my new favorite indicator of success are the stories of joy in discovering how a learning experience created new political identities and forged organizational momentum.
The most common example of this dynamic is among labor organizing. The foundation has funded a lot of worker centers over the years. Whether they are fighting for domestic workers, day laborers, or restaurant workers, good organizers and researchers will always pose the same questions, “Who are you as a worker? Who are we?” Few workers get asked this provocative question, so most eagerly share their identities as individuals with their peers. It can be a cathartic and bonding experience. After a deeper discussion where the group constructs a collective identity, a nearly universal conversation emerges about human dignity, the systemic challenges of the issues they face, and their aspirations for collective action.
Another revealing learning epiphany about participation and power happens when members of the research partnership point out when the process is unintentionally exclusionary or how it perpetuates harmful hierarchies. I am always struck by the way these candid observations about the uncomfortable micropolitics of collaboration become evidence that a community-research partnership, with all of its imperfections, is learning to walk the talk.
Tools that Build Trust and Accountability
As a maturing field, community-based research has a rich body of practice, scholarship, and leadership. I am glad to see more organizations adopt formal practice guidelines. Tools such as memorandums of understanding, codes of conduct, ethical guidelines, and other more formal guidance and accountability documents keep us honest.
Community advisory committees are now regarded as best practice for community-engaged research related to public health and environmental justice. Many indigenous communities, for example, have long had strict rules, guidelines, and protocols that all researchers must follow. The policies emerged to guard against the perennial problem of racist or extractive research. They have since evolved to encourage everyone to ask questions about power and inclusion in the work. I used to collect them to share, but don’t anymore because people told me how creating the tools themselves helped clarify their values and expectations about community-research partnerships. Good community organizers seem to find teachable moments everywhere.
Who Tells the Story Matters
Over the years, the foundation has analyzed how its applicants operationalized collaborative or other forms of community-based research. We found that most of us talk a good game of “bottom-up” practice but fall short in doing it. I always look to see who comes up with the research question and frames the problem as a basic test. Is it really participatory research or consultative research in disguise? It can be hard to tell from a distance. More recently, I have been paying attention to who tells the story.
Collaborative research is all about storytelling. But who gets to tell the story? Are citizens at the center? Take a good look to see who coauthors the report, who stands behind the podium, who gets quoted in the press, and who holds the megaphone at the rally. If I see familiar or expected voices and leaders “hog the mic,” I wonder if it is a sign that they needed to negotiate roles, clarify divisions of labor, and examine their own positionality. Until we can be more self-reflective about the simple stuff, I worry that we will continue to reinforce dominant forms of knowledge production.
Building More Communities of Practice
So where do we talk about these tensions? How do we build reflective spaces for difficult conversations about the challenges of community-based research? The growth in participation in organizations such as URBAN, the Community-Campus Partnerships for Health, or the ASA Section on Public Sociology and Sociological Practice, are a sign that people are eager to connect and push beyond their comfort zones. We need more of them. They may be rooted in academic sensibilities and culture, but even that is changing as they have begun to welcome new voices and leaders. These sorts of communities of practice may be our most valuable strategy for bringing collaborative social science research from the margins to the center.
Of course, the most important spaces for reflective practice are in church basements, union halls, and youth centers. Research and community organizing that puts the philosophical and pedagogical frameworks of reflective practice and community learning at the center of the work may have the most potential to move beyond community-engaged research and embrace community-owned research. Whatever you like to call it, participatory action research, collaborative inquiry, or community-based research, the processes of inquiry, reflection, and action are unique and imaginative social experiments in democracy and self-determination. If we slow down just a little to watch it unfold, we might find that it is richer with possibilities for civic transformation than we have imagined.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
