Abstract

 
 
 This article aims to rethink the positionality of community in community-based research collaboration and advocate the need for community members to facilitate CBR processes to counter power imbalances in community-university engagement. I reflect on my lived experience as a community-based facilitator through a feminist post-structural lens focused on the interplay between concepts such as subjectivity, margin-centre and performativity. I argue that, despite the community-engaged scholarship egalitarian ideal, university-community engagement still echoes the old researcher-researched binary in which academics remain the hegemonic pole. In addition, as a medium of power/knowledge, the university fabricates the community and its marginality. Thus, a margin-centre relationship is established, in which community groups must claim their marginality to receive a share of the centre (the university), such as research skills and information. In these margin-centre dynamics, university and community can be understood as identities and subject positions to be taken up by individuals. In essence, these positions are expressions of regulatory power that normalises subjectivities, a condition in which individuals exist as subjects in the social space. Insights from the work of Judith Butler lead to the understanding that, in order to conceive community members as CBR facilitators, normalised and stabilised binary identities (university-community) should be unsettled. This entails individuals who are subjected as ‘the community’ to escape subjection by moving towards recognition of a subjectivity that is not prescribed or is still marginalised within the discourse. In escaping subjection, community groups may exercise power in order to establish new power relations in which CBR becomes more community-led, yet still collaborative.
 
 
Highlights
This article aims to explore the idea of university-community partnerships by rethinking the community’s positionality in community-based research (CBR) beyond a place of marginality
This article aims to rethink the positionality of community in community-based research collaboration and advocate the need for community members to facilitate CBR processes to counter power imbalances in community-university engagement
I reflect on my lived experience as a community-based facilitator through a feminist post-structural lens focused on the interplay between concepts such as subjectivity, margin-centre and performativity
Summary
This article aims to explore the idea of university-community partnerships by rethinking the community’s positionality in community-based research (CBR) beyond a place of marginality. It demonstrates the necessity to rescue the southern critical tradition of CBR by reimagining the community members as facilitators, and able to mobilise their people and produce knowledge that is action-oriented and grounded in people’s lived experience Flaws like those revealed by Ross and Stoecker (2017) make sceptical scholars point out that CBR does not deliver what it proposes. Spivak’s idea is important because, ideally, CBR scholars are concerned with equipping the community with research skills as a way for them to transform their own reality (Hall 1993; Park 1993) This equipping process involves deepening the relationship between academics and the community through university-based and non-formal education training (Strand et al 2003; Tandon et al 2016), as well as through the research process (Strand et al 2003). Taylor’s statement sounds somewhat pessimistic, she encourages people to become aware of how they are enabled and constrained, as well as figure out strategies to resist subjection and explore different ways of being in the social space
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