Resurgent “culture wars” and American partisan politics have once again put higher education on the hot seat. Stoked by attacks from the Right, colleges and universities find themselves on the defensive, having to fend off charges of elitism, liberal bias, and irrelevance. And to some degree, the onslaught is working. According to the Pew Research Center, only half of Americans, regardless of party leaning, believe colleges and universities have a positive impact on how things are going in the country.
One way higher ed institutions have clapped back has been to reassert their public missions and demonstrate their value and validity beyond the academy. Community-engaged research (CER), a movement that has been gathering steam since the 1990s, has become increasingly common on today’s campuses as part of this counter-campaign (Beaulieu, Breton, and Brousselle 2018). Broadly defined, community-engaged scholarship refers to “beneficial partnerships between universities and communities designed with the intention to collaboratively develop and apply knowledge to address consequential public issues” (Gordon da Cruz 2018). And increasingly, the calls for campus-community partnerships have also expanded to more deeply involve undergraduates as a way not only to boost civic engagement, but also increase student retention and career readiness. The surging interest in community engagement can be seen in the birth and growth of the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification, a voluntary designation reflecting an institution’s commitment to community engagement, which since 2006 has grown rapidly to 359 colleges and universities.
While welcoming broader interest in community engagement, we have also heard calls from many long-term practitioners of CER regarding the importance of adhering to its core principles and ensuring that it remains “critical”—that is, it goes beyond the simple “inclusion” of students/community organizations in an attempt to address weakly-defined notions of “the public issues” (Gordon da Cruz 2017). Instead, explicitly critical CER involves the following: a recognition of power differences and the active centering of those most marginalized and/or most impacted; the acknowledgement of and building upon multiple forms of knowledge; choosing research projects that pursue justice and help dismantle systemic inequalities; and authentic participation of community and members of marginalized groups in all aspects of research for the coproduction of new knowledge (Fine and Torre 2019).
In this essay, I outline our attempts at the University of California-Santa Cruz to develop such a critical CER model, and share reflections from our community and undergraduate partners.
Community-Initiated Student-Engaged Research
Over the last eight years, my coresearchers and I have embarked on a series of engaged research projects using an approach we call Community Initiated Student Engaged Research (CISER), with the explicit goals of forging more durable and meaningful partnerships between the university and the surrounding community, and addressing key local concerns. Together, we’ve tackled issues such as the rise of low-wage and precarious labor (Working for Dignity), the affordable housing crisis for tenants (No Place Like Home), and exclusions faced by immigrant and mixed-status families (We Belong).
Community Initiated
We use the term “community initiated” to emphasize a core belief and practice: that critical CER should not simply be “community-engaged,” but must be “community-driven.” We also acknowledge the power differentials among those we bring together, and actively center the perspectives of those most impacted by systemic inequities. Commitment to community engagement means commitment to long-term partnerships, vision-sharing, and collective planning to ensure strength, trust, and flexibility among all partners. So a CISER project begins with first listening to our local partners, who hail from marginalized communities and are steeped in the daily work of fighting injustice. We begin by asking two fundamental questions: “What do you know (based on experience) but cannot prove?” and “What do you need to know to do your work better?” Only when university-based researchers respect the expertise of community partners can we truly set a collaborative action research agenda.
For example, our partnership with the Community Action Board of Santa Cruz County (CAB) is threaded through each of our three CISER projects over the last eight years. When asked at a public forum why our partnership has been so durable, CAB Director MariaElena de la Garza noted: “This is critically important for other universities or institutes of higher education that are looking for strategies for connecting with folks like us … we have to be aligned with our values, and aligned with a clear understanding of the mission of our work. We exist to eliminate poverty and create social change. You exist to promote social justice and educate your students and connect them to the community. And that’s why our collaboration works. Without that alignment—a commitment to service, a commitment to equity, a commitment to social justice—without that alignment … this partnership wouldn’t work.”
Collectively, we also understand that these are strategic partnerships, or “participatory contact zones,” where each contributes different forms of expertise and knowledge. Our community partners come to us because they often face a dearth of data, particularly on the precarious populations with whom they work. The marginalized are—almost by definition—“hard to reach” by conventional research strategies, and thus too often unheard, ignored, and underserved. Another long-term partner, Paulina Moreno of the Thriving Immigrants Collaborative, explained: “We served 4,500 families [with emergency COVID assistance] … I always think that’s 4,500 data points that we previously did not have about the impact of COVID in our community … So when I consistently think about the opportunity to partner with universities, and institutions of higher education, it is to think about the possibilities of that data and that storytelling that often, as smaller nonprofits, we lack the capacity to do on our own … exploring and cocreating questions that we know we need the data for but lack the capacity to collect.”
Student Engaged
The deep partnerships of critical CER must often operate on a relatively small scale, involving just a small group of researchers and community members due to chronic deficits of time, personnel, and resources (for example, Collins, Jensen, and Auyero 2017). However, CISER has evolved in part to respond to community partner requests for larger-scale projects and data of the kinds that Moreno alludes to above. A key way we have been able to scale-up our research is by involving our undergraduates and expanding our pedagogy. Crucially, however, we extend our critical partnership approach to our students, recognizing their unique expertise and knowledge, centering the marginalized, and involving them equally in all aspects of the research enterprise.
We are also very mindful, just as critical CER pushes past shallow “consultation” with community organizations, student engagement must similarly go beyond the “lite pedagogies” or “participatory bluffing” of some university service-learning programs that are more attuned to the short-term dictates of semester- or quarter-long courses or a performative PR campaign rather than the deep and sometimes, difficult collaborations for justice.
Our student engagement begins with training across multiple linked courses (both topical and methodological) over multiple quarters, and with opportunities for students to continue through paid intensive summer and academic-year internships. We have designed individual CISER projects as relatively long-term and large-scale: each of our CISER projects have taken approximately three years, and we have engaged between 100 and 250 undergraduates in each project. The large number of undergraduates helped us survey over 1,300 low-wage workers, listen to nearly 2,000 tenants, and conduct in-depth interviews with over 100 members of mixed-status and immigrant families and providers of social services, even during the pandemic.
Another critical element of CISER is who—which students—we engage. We employ an asset-based approach, usually discussed in CER when referring to community relations, across all our groups of coresearchers, particularly undergraduates. UC Santa Cruz is one of the few doctoral universities with very high research activity that is also a Hispanic Serving Institution. A third of our entering classes are community college transfers, 40 percent are first-generation college students, and 30 percent are Latinx. But an even higher percentage of CISER students come from underrepresented backgrounds, with a large majority being first-generation and Latinx. Such students often come to us facing a deficit paradigm—they are seen by the university in terms of the skills and competencies they lack. But CISER flips that script, treating their language skills, cultural capital, and life experiences as key assets: sources of knowledge and insight that help us connect with the hard-to-reach populations our community partners serve, build trust with a community that shares their backgrounds, and ultimately collect higher quality data. And as CISER is organized around cohorts and teams, bilingual students often become leaders among their peers, both in conducting surveys, interviews and focus groups, and in the data analysis phases, when interpreting responses often requires a deep understanding of context that immigrant positionalities and lived experience can provide.
As we’ve found, not only do CISER projects support our community partners’ quest for justice, but student involvement in CISER works toward educational justice. Studies show that engaging students in research and giving them the chance to give back to the community are two of the most effective ways to improve academic outcomes, boost retention, and lift graduate school attendance. As one first-gen immigrant student participating in our affordable housing study reflected: “I feel like most of the research opportunities are only available for STEM majors. I like the combination of academic rigor and at the same time doing something to help UCSC’s immediate community of Santa Cruz County … [usually] I only get to see the wealthy areas and it can be discouraging as a person of color. Interacting with more working-class people of color helped me feel like I wasn’t alone. … [the project] helped me realize that there is a possibility for me to conduct research to contribute to working class people but also contribute to academia … it gave me new perspectives on how academia can be a part of the solution … for the people who need the research to get closer to living better lives.”
Research for Justice
Another way to view the action-orientation of CISER is in the degree to which these projects have helped change the conversation on issues such as low-wage work, affordable housing, and immigrant services among local policy makers, planners, and the public at large. As noted, a critical approach to CER is one that goes beyond merely addressing “public issues,” but emphasizes research that actively supports the pursuit of justice and the dismantling of systemic inequalities. A key element of CISER, then, is to collectively create public platforms for sharing (and vetting) our findings and fomenting public debate. In addition to creating bilingual websites and final reports, we set aside time and resources for the university and community partners in each CISER project to develop events and public fora, which have been widely covered by the local press.
For example, our research on how workers experience low-wage and precarious work documented high incidences of wage theft, nonpayment, and overtime and break violations. Our community partners, California Rural Legal Assistance and the Day Worker Center, brought the findings to the county, and armed with the data, secured funding for monthly wage theft clinics for workers, regardless of their documentation status. In one of the first clinics, our partners won over $9,000 in back wages owed to a local laborer.
Similarly, in our affordable housing crisis study, we found extremely high levels of rent burden, overcrowding, forced moves, and informal evictions among tenants. To foster public discussion, we built a coalitional platform—a bilingual website—to showcase and map the data, and also provide resources for community members, organizations, scholars, and policymakers on issues facing low-income renters. Faculty, students, and community partners also organized three large bilingual public research presentations and art exhibits, which drew crowds of 450-600 attendees, gained formal cosponsorship by the city, and involved over 25 community housing organizations at the events.
While the CISER project helped bring together the city’s affordable housing, tenant, and antipoverty organizations, grassroots political organizing groups seized on affordable housing as a unifying issue. Critically, students who had participated in the project and who faced their own housing challenges began organizing too, joining together with a countywide Movement for Housing Justice. Together, they successfully gathered 10,000 signatures to put “Measure M: Rent Control Charter Amendment” for rent regulation and just cause eviction on the citywide ballot in 2018—the first time in 35 years tenant advocates successfully put the issue before voters. Certainly, many continued to oppose rent control and were outspoken in their opposition, often with the backing of powerful real estate lobbies. But we found that projects such as these, with local universities linking up with multiple community organizations, can create a space in which alternatives and equity-oriented social change are no longer unimaginable or unspeakable.
Conclusion
With interest in community-engaged research swelling, I offer our evolving CISER model as a humble but critical way forward. By bringing together and integrating undergraduates, university researchers and community organizations throughout the research and action cycle, we hope to ensure that our research will be both relevant and meaningful. Such collaborative action research—forged through equitable campus and community partnerships—can help achieve both a university’s research and public missions, producing knowledge for scholarly debate and contributing to an arc toward justice.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
