Who are we? Strategic Introspection for Community Engagement
In community engagement literature, there is a considerable effort and attention paid to defining the communities that universities seek to engage. While beneficial, I believe turning the question into ‘Who are we?’ is a powerful reminder that universities are both within and outside the communities it seeks to engage with.
In the broadest notion of ‘community' it is anyone outside of the university community- the ‘lay people’ (Farner, 2019). With globalisation and rapid technology changes, that community has expanded across continents and into the digital world. This simple binary between ‘them and us’ positions the ‘other’ as monolithic entities (Louis, Bryant-Scott and Donatto, 2022). Therefore, attention is paid to prioritising who in this community ‘gets to’ have a relationship with the university by separating out these communities geographically, by income, or by need. Separating the community by need has been problematised in the last decade as reinforcing a deficit based view of the community (Payne et al., 2024). Externally analysing the needs of the community that one has never met for your own philanthropic gain is exploitative, and thus alternative ways of identifying community partners has come from focusing on the immediate neighbourhoods of a university. This can be a part of a civic commitment or it is the communities that students from marginalised backgrounds come from to enhance participation in Education.
Although this attention to defining the communities you intend to work with has its strategic advantage in a resource-tight political and economic climate, the lack of time spent defining the university positions itself as inherently neutral (Yapa, 2009). But research is not neutral, it either upholds hierarchies of power or disrupts them (Reason and Bradbury, 2001). And what constitutes knowledge, or expertise, is political. A university that considers themselves the solution, or even just the nonproblem in community engagement, is not critically engaging with the systemic ways in which they are complicit both historically, and now.
In critical service learning, an established practice to avoid reinforcing these problematic hierarchies between the university and its partners is reflexivity, the continual reflection on one's own practice (Mitchell, 2008; Clark- Taylor, 2017; Barnes, Steele and Coffey, 2022) . However, what I want to advocate here is a strategic introspection rather than individual reflexivity of dedicated community engagement professionals and their students. When co-designing a project with a potential partner, the following guiding questions can illuminate past wounds and current failings:
Who have we been historically to this community?
Are you the gentrifier? The Ivory Tower? The gatekeepers? The exploiters or extractors?
Who are we now?
Are you the promise breaker? The elite? The rowdy and anti-social neighbours? The strangers?
Who do we want to be?
The saviours? The listeners? The resource people? The experts? The ‘it-depends’ academics? The helpers? Crusaders?
By dedicating the same time that we spend understanding our communities and listening to their stories before enacting partnership, we must too listen to ourselves. Where are we contradicting ourselves? Where are we making assumptions about ourselves and our abilities? Through this introspection, we can start breaking down the binary between ‘them’ and ‘us’ and instead understand that both the university and the community are thousands of different individuals, each with their own lived experience (Heney and Poleykett, 2022). This diffusion then allows you to see more clearly where the two groups overlap and are similar or in conflict with each other, and ultimately uniquely diverse. Like only holding a prism up to the light can reveal its unique colours, strategic introspection reveals the true rainbow of possibilities that only community engagement can bring.
References
Barnes, M.E., Steele, L. and Coffey, H. (2022) ‘Focusing on Faculty Reflection: How University Students Are Positioned in Service-Learning Courses’, Journal of Community Engagement and Higher Education, 14(1), pp. 24–40.
Farner, K. (2019) ‘Institutionalizing Community Engagement in Higher Education: A Case Study of Processes toward Engagement’, Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 23(2), pp. 147–152.
Heney, V., & Poleykett, B. (2022). The impossibility of engaged research: complicity and accountability between researchers,‘publics’ and institutions. Sociology of Health & Illness, 44, 179-194.
Louis, D.A., Bryant-Scott, K. and Donatto, T.J. (2022) ‘Voices of Black Leadership: Town-Gown Relationships and the Black Community’, Journal of Community Engagement and Higher Education, 14(4), pp. 63–76.
Mitchell, T.D., 2008. Traditional vs. critical service-learning: Engaging the literature to differentiate two models. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 14(2), pp.50-65.
Payne, A. et al. (2024) ‘Fluid Practices of University-Community Engagement Boundary Spanners at a Land-Grant University’, Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 28(3), pp. 113–126.
Reason, P. and Bradbury, H. (2001) Handbook of action research: participative inquiry and practice. London: Sage.
Yapa, L. (2009) ‘Transforming the University through Community Engagement’, Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 13(3), pp. 131–146.
Emily Bastable is a PhD Student from the University of Southampton and uses participatory action research methods to understand how Knowledge Exchange and Enterprise can be integrated into the undergraduate curriculum. She also works as a strategic consultant for the international charity Professors without Borders, and is engaged in national community engagement groups such as the National Centre for Coordinating Public Engagement (NCCPE).