As demonstrated by this special issue of Footnotes, there is a growing and welcome recognition in sociology and allied disciplines of the value of community-engaged research (CER) and of its potentially transformative benefits for community partners, students, universities, and scholarship in the field. This has long been my experience with CER, most recently with the approach my collaborators and I have used at the University of California-Santa Cruz: Community-Initiated Student Engaged Research (CISER). These benefits have much to do with the explicitly critical orientation of our CISER work, as colleague Steve McKay discusses in his piece for this issue. Echoing Michael Burawoy’s invitation to organic public sociology, critical CER moves beyond entering the public realm to collaborating with “counterpublics,” whose voices are often excluded from it. Drawing on the kindred field of critical participatory action research (Fine and Torre), this approach also moves beyond inclusion of these publics to address broader power imbalances, center subaltern epistemologies, and envision alternatives to systemic inequalities.
Thus, not surprisingly, doing CER can be challenging—and increasingly so during these contentious times. Now more than ever, projects that aim to address and redress power imbalance, including in communities surrounding our universities, may be met with some friction, if not resistance. This was the case with the CISER project I was involved in for several years called No Place Like Home, which addressed the affordable housing crisis in Santa Cruz County, CA. The power of the project, as well as the friction it caused, was rooted in what we might call, following Stuart Hall, the historical, political, and place-based conjuncture in which it emerged—one that made our research topic, the affordable housing crisis, both extremely timely and divisive.
Yet, reflecting on other CER projects in this issue and elsewhere, it strikes me that our experience was not isolated. At a time of growing divides across lines of race and class—both between and within red and blue cities and states, and in a moment when educational institutions are increasingly embattled—what we mean by “community” is increasingly in question, as is the role of universities in engaging in them. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, we can anticipate CER growing more relevant and more contentious, as local community and town-and-gown dynamics grow more contentious themselves. In what follows, I provide a bit of background on our experience, followed by some reflection that may be useful more broadly.
Studying a Housing Crisis that is Not a Crisis for All
No Place Like Home, (NPLH) is a CISER project on renters’ experiences of the affordable housing crisis in Santa Cruz County that began in 2015. Remarkably, this small, progressive metropolitan region is among the least affordable in California, in the U.S., and globally, as measured in terms of disparity of average rents and median income. Community partners, including some of the region’s largest antipoverty and legal aid organizations, approached us to understand the extent of this crisis as well its array of impacts on the populations they served and tenants more broadly.
As we documented in a subsequent assessment, NPLH was an exemplary CISER project that generated a cascade of benefits. The more than 250 students we worked with over three years gained confidence as researchers and contributed unique assets, too-often framed as deficits, including Spanish-language skills and personal experience with housing precarity. In turn, they gathered far better data from notoriously hard-to-reach tenant populations than we otherwise would have had access to—including from those living illegally in garages, tripled up in small apartments, and/or averse to speaking to census takers due to their legal status. For our community partners, our combination of interviews and survey data, as well as historical and policy analysis, was integral to understanding, targeting, and disseminating their own work. And for our public university, the project provided opportunities to create bridges between town and gown and demonstrate its commitment to generating policy-relevant knowledge that is of use to multiple publics in their own backyard.
This policy relevance increased over the course of the project, as proposed legislation to address the housing crisis advanced at the city, county, and state levels prior to the 2018 midterm elections. This included Prop 10, a proposed repeal of a state preemption law that blocked localities from introducing or extending meaningful rent control. Its passage would have made new rent control laws more feasible and powerful, and motivated tenants across California, including in Santa Cruz. It also caused what I call elsewhere a “progressive disjuncture” for otherwise left-leaning homeowners and small landlords across this blue state, who, as members of the asset class, joined with the real estate lobby in staunch opposition to Prop 10 repeal or any new rent regulations. For these community members, the fact rents were rising 15 percent annually was a boon rather than a crisis—whether they owned hundreds of properties or depended on rental income from a single backyard unit for their retirement. This was true despite crushing rent burden, overcrowding, and displacement for other community members, in some cases their own tenants.
This was the context in which a number of NPLH student researchers, beset with the same housing struggles as those they were interviewing, organized the group Students United with Renters (SUR) and helped gather the 10,000 signatures necessary to get a rent control and just cause eviction measure on the 2018 ballot for the City of Santa Cruz, called Meaure M. They drew upon NPLH data and policy research that challenged conventional opposition to rent control. Meanwhile, NPLH hosted large public events in which research findings were shared and rent regulations debated, along with other policy solutions on the ballot.
As our colleague G. William Domhoff documented in his book on Santa Cruz—The Leftmost City: Power and Progressive Politics in Santa Cruz (Routledge 2008), coauthored with Richard Gendron—since the founding of the UCSC campus in the 1960s, students have constituted the largest single block of renters and voters in Santa Cruz, and have been a force to be reckoned with when organized. Yet, local homeowners and landlords, the traditional power elite in town, have also been formidable opponents—and 30 years earlier held off three consecutive efforts to pass rent control (along with efforts to build more affordable housing). Drawing on this history, and a real estate lobby activated by Prop 10 and Measure M, area homeowners and landlords received more than one million dollars from state and national real estate trade associations and investment trusts to launch the anti-rent-control campaign Santa Cruz Together—which blanketed the town with fliers, signs, and social media, while also targeting SUR. Local landlords went so far as to file university code of conduct complaints against students involved, as well as complaints against Professor McKay and myself. This included one landlord who sought to have the university revoke an award for “outstanding undergraduate research” one of our students received, further stating “[This student’s] research was with Steve McKay and Miriam Greenberg who share a bias against landlords and perhaps private property ownership altogether. I will forward to you past missives I have sent them where I have criticized their research which appears to be California state-funded political propaganda which has no home in a publicly funded institution.”
Interestingly, this landlord, who had powerful backing to defeat rent regulation, invoked the public mission of the university, in this case on behalf of the residential property-owning portion of the local public. As critical CER practitioners, we believe their view is important, yet also aim to highlight the views of counterpublics—including area renters and our students—who have far less by way of power or resources to influence public policy on this issue.
To their credit, our university administration staunchly defended our academic freedom and supported us throughout our project—regardless of the political engagement of our students, or our views on the merits of private property ownership. They, and we, appreciated the lively debate over policy questions that occurred at university fora and as a result of our research. They also objected, and came to our aid, when this debate veered into harassment, including attempts to impugn our research or that of our students. Our student received the award for outstanding undergraduate research, as intended, and was celebrated across the campus. Like many others involved in NPLH, this student has gone on to graduate and conduct nonprofit work in the affordable housing field.
Some Reflections on CER in Contentious Times
I tell this story in part to note that CER, especially of the critical variety, is not for the faint of heart. However critical they may be, academic articles and books tend not to elicit letters to university administrators defaming researchers and their students. A key lesson we learned is that alongside its many cascading benefits, undertaking CER can also generate tensions between the campus and community, with varying impacts for those involved. Thus, prior to undertaking a research project, it’s helpful to consider, as best you can, the conjuncture surrounding it—i.e., to recognize how local history and politics, and the institution at which you’re based, might matter for the process and reception of your research. This leads to some further questions:
- What does the CER issue you’re addressing mean for different local groups, historically and today? The range of critical issues we might imagine—housing and homelessness, immigrant rights, criminal justice reform, etc.—may mean something quite different in different moments and locales, and in institutional and political contexts. It is conceivable that NPLH would have been less controversial in cities with histories of rent regulation, a different landlord-tenant organizing landscape, or less extreme annual rent increases. By the same token, projects on immigrant rights might prove far more contentious in red states on the southern border than here in a sanctuary county like Santa Cruz in deep blue Northern California. This is something we’re experiencing with our current CISER project “We Belong,” on mixed status families, which has proven thus far to be completely uncontroversial. Neither immigration nor housing is inherently contentious, but the conjuncture can make it so. Thus, pick issues that matter, and study their context to prepare for the response, both positive and negative, your research may spark.
- How is the presence of your university felt in the surrounding community, in political, economic, and demographic terms? And how might this affect town-and-gown dynamics, and with this CER projects? As Steve McKay, UCSC undergrad Thao Le, and I explored along with Temple University colleague Barbara Ferman, the confluence between the neoliberalization of the university and of the cities in which they’re based can transcend regional or place-based differences. Both the University of California and Temple have faced steep cuts in the state support needed to cover faculty lines, general operations, and student housing, prompting both campuses to pursue new entrepreneurial means of generating revenue—from increasing tuition to building sports stadia to designing amenities so as to attract students who can afford the rising cost of living. This restructuring can have complex impacts on surrounding communities—from creating economic opportunity to spurring gentrification, displacement, and increased policing—and generate a challenging context in which to conduct CER. In NPLH, this context pushed us to deepen the analysis of the role of our campus and university system in local housing struggles. And it taught us the profound importance of situating one’s own campus in relation to the CER issues in question.
- How much institutional support will there be for you and your colleagues, students, and community partners? How does your university value and reward CER? Should issues arise in terms of the reception of your CER project, a final question to consider is the degree to which your institution will support you legally and professionally, including as you seek to protect research collaborators. Certainly, the political economic pressures facing universities that were just mentioned may affect such response. Depending on the answer to this question, you may make different choices about what elements of the project to pursue within the university vs. outside of your academic work, as well as how and in what roles to include participants with varying degrees of protection, such as junior faculty, students, and community members. Beyond the university, might the American Sociological Association’s ongoing support for CER—e.g., through setting professional standards for tenure review and showcasing best practices—be extended in targeted ways to faculty on less supportive campuses, such as through legal advice and funding? Or might we envision the creation of new institutional networks to combat isolation and build solidarity, including in places and on campuses where CER might be challenging to conduct?
As critical community-engaged sociologists, we hope our research and teaching will illuminate and impact the issues that matter most to the communities with whom we work. At the same time, as our work draws us into new and potentially contentious public spaces, we can be thoughtful about what it may entail for us, our students, and our research partners. This includes thorough conjunctural analysis, as well as building new and supportive communities of our own, on our campuses and beyond.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
