Abstract
Community–university partnerships that purport to promote the public good are often fraught with institutional and cultural challenges that can contribute to the injustices they seek to address. This paper describes how one partnership has been navigating these tensions through a critical approach to power. The Co-Education/Co-Research (CORE) partnership has been built over the last decade between Tufts University and Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, a community organizing and planning group in Boston. We have been co-producing knowledge and action to further community control over development, and we have found that institutional shifts, such as co-governance and the equitable sharing of funding, are leading to longer term impacts for the community partner and breaking down the boundaries between university and community. However, using a relational view of power, we have also found that some of our everyday practices can subtly maintain and reinforce inequities, such as valuing academic knowledge over that of community residents and practitioners. Addressing these cultural and ideological challenges requires critical and reflexive practice. It is messy relational work that requires a lot of communication and trust and, most of all, time and long-term commitment.
Highlights
She worked as a teaching assistant for and wrote her thesis about Teaching Democracy, interned with another CORE community partner, and was a primary researcher for the program assessment of CORE presented in this paper
We found that there were about a dozen partners that had been collaborating with Urban & Environmental Policy & Planning (UEP) in multiple ways for two to three decades
We have described our experience in CORE, a multi-year Community–university partnerships1 (CUPs) between Tufts UEP and Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI)
Summary
Some are explicit about addressing societal injustices and even aspire to co-produce knowledge and action. These collaborations are fraught with challenges, tensions, and contradictions. Some are more deeply embedded culturally and ideologically, such as university elitism, devaluation of community knowledge, and lack of a critical approach to challenging power relations and systemic oppressions such as racism. Together, these challenges reinforce the separations between universities and marginalized communities, and make co-production more difficult
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