Abstract
As community-university partnerships have become mainstream, researchers have argued that these approaches have the potential to be transformative, supporting community learning and creating capacity for community development. While this remains the dominant narrative of community research, some researchers have questioned the impacts of community research on frontline community, or peer, researchers who represent partnerships in their communities. These studies complicate the narrative, suggesting that learning and capacity building are not straightforward processes. While on the whole community-university partnerships tend to be empowering for community researchers, research is needed to understand the experiences of community researchers for whom this is not the case. My research examines a Toronto-based community-university participatory action research partnership, asking what community researchers learnt through their participation. I argue that, while community researchers learnt a great deal from their participation, the overall impact was not empowerment, but alienation. They did have their knowledge of community validated, and they built research skills, developed grievances through their conversations with neighbours and interrogated the links between grievances, all of which were important aspects of their participation. However, through the process they developed, or entrenched, a sense of powerlessness and dependence on the university researchers to take up their cause politically. This contradicts the aspirations of community-university partnership models, especially participatory action research, and raises questions about the inevitability of empowering social action stemming from these research projects. I argue that the disempowerment that the community researchers reported points to the need for community research to be embedded within existing social action organisations and infrastructure to provide clearer pathways to action because, without this, peer researchers may become overwhelmed by the scope of the grievances in their neighbourhoods and withdraw from, rather than embrace, the need for collective social action.
Highlights
As community-university partnerships have become mainstream, many have celebrated their success in bridging different communities and building capacity, in underresourced neighbourhoods
Using the case of the Community Learning Collaborative (CLC), a pseudonym for a Canadian community-university partnership committed to addressing poverty through communitybased participatory action research in low-income communities of colour, I examine what community researchers learnt through their participation in a survey of their neighbours
I turn to the types of learning that the community researchers reported, first focusing on those who supported the goals of community-university partnerships and reviewing the learning and alienation that we encountered as community-researchers became overwhelmed with the problems their respondents identified in the communities
Summary
As community-university partnerships have become mainstream, many have celebrated their success in bridging different communities and building capacity, in underresourced neighbourhoods. Many studies report positively on their processes and their findings (Gaventa 1988; Guevara 1996; Hall 1985; Kidd & Byram 1979; Park et al 1993; Tandon 1981), but recently there have been studies that have troubled the waters, especially when examining the impacts on the frontline workers who carry out the community-university research on behalf of their communities (Edwards & Alexander 2011; Greene et al 2009; Kilpatrick et al 2007; Warr, Mann & Tacticos 2010) These studies have highlighted the challenges community researchers, or peer researchers, face, and while they conclude that these projects are on the whole empowering, they question the assumption that these partnerships are inevitably empowering sites of learning. They have the potential to foster strong relationships of mutuality and to produce rigorous, relevant research that can be mobilised in multiple sites
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
More From: Gateways: International Journal of Community Research and Engagement
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.