I am a public sociologist and have been working as an engaged scholar for more than 25 years. I have found this to be some of the most satisfying and rewarding work I have done as a sociologist—helping communities solve problems they identify as needing input from the discipline. Of course, community-engaged research is nothing new. Sociologists have been doing this for a very long time. And we have been discussing the strategies, pitfalls, advantages, and challenges for more than 100 years.
Early American sociology provides classic exemplars of this work, perhaps emancipatory sociology in nature, as captured by American Sociological Association President Aldon Morris’s call to action at the ASA 2021 Annual Meeting and embodied in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Jane Addams, and many others. Yet, we still examine this work as novel, as it unfortunately and continuously, rubs against the expectations of sociologists working within the academy.
My early work in community-engaged research was based in southeastern North Carolina, tackling persistent problems that emerged from economic restructuring of textile manufacturing in the region. This work was expansive and covered a 10-year period, developing from displaced worker research that yielded a presentation to the Congressional Rural Caucus on job loss, focused on economic sector development in the region and socially disadvantaged farmers, and the creation of a regional food system. It was vast, and epic, and messy, and meaningful, and arduous, and immensely gratifying.
Another project that was equally rewarding was one a few years ago in the Mississippi Delta town of Mound Bayou on food insecurity in a high-poverty, low-food-access county. Working with the community, we sought to resurrect a successful project created in the 1960s in Mound Bayou, which is the oldest historically black town in the U.S. This original project was the first Federally Qualified Health Center that operated a Healthy Food Rx program, in which fruits and vegetables were prescribed to patients to promote health. The program’s founders—Dr. Robert Smith, Dr. Count Gibson, and Dr. Jack Geiger—believed that “health centers could serve as important instruments to social change.” Mound Bayou residents today believe this too, and in 2018 organized to create the North Bolivar Good Food Revolution, training youth in research and program development to address food insecurity in their hometown. To be part of a group devoted to addressing health equity in their community, revitalizing a project that had worked 60 years prior in their own town, and observing its ongoing success is one of the most gratifying opportunities I have had in my career.
Being intentional is an important strategy for academics immersing themselves in, and working with, community. I have found that one really must be in it for the long haul. Short-term results are not always attainable. Thinking about the long-term is critical because emancipatory sociology provides not only hope and a promise of change, but actual “setting in motion of transformation” of the social world, as Morris describes. And that setting in motion is sometimes the long game, over the long haul. And therein lies the rub—doing this work in the context of the academy is, quite simply, difficult. In my experience, there are three key barriers to doing this work within the academy, and those are the academic concept of expertise, the element of time, and the reality of tenure and promotion.
On the Challenge of Expertise
One thing I learned early on is that this work must be understood as working in and with community. I focus on this distinction because, as scholars, we sometimes approach communities with a “truth” that our discipline espouses. This is a tricky element because in the academy we believe we hold the truth … not always a truth. Community input and partnership are as integral to any project as that of the researcher. Trust and reciprocity emerge when, over time, partners—including academics and partnering organizations—recognize that they are part of something bigger, and that there are many skill sets that are needed to create meaningful social change.
It is important to note that community-engaged research is neither a top-down approach, nor a bottom-up approach. It is a combined approach of working across partnerships, bringing a set of skills to a project, community issue, or social problem, and then recognizing and being very attuned to the multiple truths that come together to address a common goal, thus working in and with community. And when I think back on the projects that had true emancipatory elements—of driving change in the social world, social order—the common elements in all of these were the roles of research, trust building, and community input. These initiatives include neighborhood, community, county-level initiatives, and social movements that draw from inclusive representation and provide opportunity and space for social action. The key, I think in all this work, and in emancipatory sociology, is providing social space for public debate on critical issues that may not have direct impact on policy in the short term, but that possibly provides an avenue to change the conversations that are important to policy development in the long run.
On the Challenge of Time
Community-engaged research, when operating within the academy, is often bounded by a course curriculum and freighted with multiple goals, including training students as well as conducting research that benefits communities. The typical university course delivery operates around a semester. Community life, however, operates year-round—without breaks in the summer and at holidays. This glaring structural reality is something community-engaged scholars struggle with all the time. One successful model I created is a two-semester sequential course, in which students develop a research design with community members in the fall semester and carry out the research in the spring semester. Community partners want year-round input and support on projects. Students who filter in and out make it hard for community members to build trust: Will this person be here next week, next month? Will the project continue with a new set of students? Do we just stop this work in the summer? These are some of the many concerns community partners and residents express when projects are based on a university calendar. Fair questions, to be sure, and concerns that are vexing given the academic calendar.
Earlier, I argued that providing a social space for public debate on critical issues may or may not have a direct impact on policy in the short term but may possibly provide an avenue to change the conversations that are important to policy development in the long run. The irony for those who work in the academy is that we often work and operate in a short-term frame. Changing the structure of a program or curriculum to develop a one-year or two-semester-long project—so that students develop research skills and research design over one semester working on community-informed problems, and then conduct and implement the project with community the second semester—provides the time to develop and nurture trust and reciprocity, which are key factors that support project success and help ensure future work and partnerships. Ensuring that students and community partners disseminate their work, either through presentations to city council or by publishing research with community in undergraduate research journals, are also essential elements for creating space for public debate.
This type of work takes time and requires the development of trust, and continuity, and relationship-building. That trust becomes essential when—as is almost inevitable—timelines shift and pivoting is required as the work deepens, events happen, and the complications of community life intervene.
Everyone doing community-engaged scholarship will say it is hard work, but ultimately very rewarding. Not only do students begin to see the connections between their course work, praxis, and the possibility of social change, but faculty are able to conduct community-engaged scholarship that can be published, disseminated, and incorporated into coursework and teaching workloads in the department, while meeting community needs and problem-solving.
On the Challenge of Tenure and Promotion
In 2004, then ASA President Michael Burawoy focused his presidential platform on public sociology and created a Task Force on Institutionalizing Public Sociologies, of which I was a member. In this work, we identified barriers, put together guidelines and standards for public sociology, and created strategies for personnel action to assist departments in working through tenure and promotion measures and model policies that value and recognize public sociology. These guidelines provide examples of the contributions of scholarly engagement and the standards to consider in assessing research merit in personnel actions, recognizing that the foremost standard is that this work is grounded in rigorous research. These guidelines also help inform colleges and universities about this type of scholarship and its importance for the vitality of student learning and community-university partnerships. This is perhaps one of the greatest concerns for tenure track faculty doing community-engaged scholarship: Does it count? Having a document that outlines and supports this type of work as scholarly engagement is vital to faculty, departments, and administrators.
In my current role as dean, I am able to encourage and incentivize multidisciplinary research and engaged scholarship and praxis through my institution’s land grant mission. Our college has seven departments representing seven disciplines, and nine centers and institutes with a goal of supporting people and communities through research, engagement, and learning. We promote community-based participatory research, and I have created a unit within the college that focuses on engaged scholarship. Finding sources of funding for faculty doing engaged scholarship is also key. Sometimes $500 can feel like $5,000 to a faculty member doing work in the community. Small financial needs can become big barriers to working in and with community, so establishing financial supports for community-based scholarship is important to faculty doing this work.
A recent volume on public sociology provides case studies and experiences from sociologists across the globe addressing the challenges and strategies they use in their research, in their curriculum development, and when working with students and community partners. This insight into their work sheds light on the potential of engaged scholarship, as well as the promise of public sociology for the discipline.
If emancipatory sociology is about changing the social order, the magnitude of problems can be overwhelming, and so intertwined with a social order mired in inequality that one really must keep in mind that the goal is to set in motion change. That in itself is a grand idea, and a long-term project that takes a great deal of tenacity and commitment. Building structures within the academy that break down long-standing barriers to this work—and instead actually facilitate it—will benefit individuals, communities, and institutions.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
