Critical Community-Engaged Scholarship: Communities and Universities Striving for Racial Justice

Abstract

The goal of this article is to clarify how current dominant understandings of community-engaged scholarship (CES) can be strengthened to incorporate lessons from critical theory and to focus on justice more explicitly. A prior analysis of how CES is defined across multiple disciplinary literatures revealed that scholars define CES as partnerships between universities and communities that collaboratively develop and apply knowledge to address public issues. Six components of CES were frequently recommended for practice within this scholarship as well. However, neither the goal of CES—to support the “public good”—nor the six recommended CES components consistently included an explicit focus on justice and critical theory. By explicitly naming and defining the goal of justice—as opposed to the “public good” —I aim to highlight the importance of conducting routine analyses in CES of whose interests motivate conceptions of the public good and how dominant cultural structures, values, and traditions negatively impact minoritized community members' lives. Thus, this article employs teachings from critical theory—such as race-conscious analyses, asset-based understandings of community, and privileging subaltern experiences—to envision how critical CES could support university and community partnerships in producing knowledge that more effectively dismantles systemic sources of racial and social injustice.

Notes

1 For the purposes of this paper, I will use community broadly to refer to individuals and groups of people outside the university, often predominantly of racial/ethnic minority and lower SES backgrounds, while understanding that the meaning of “community” is both contested and contextual.

2 The terms public issues, social issues, and social problems are used in much of the CES literature, thus I use these terms interchangeably.

3 For a full list, see Table 1 and discussion.

4 For readability and to connect with prior scholarship, I use the term community-engaged scholarship (CES) in the remainder of this piece to refer to CES and related forms of community–university partnerships, while respecting the myriad of other terms diverse practitioners use.

5 I use the term practitioner to refer to all people who “do” CES work (e.g., faculty members, community members, and students).

6 Although critical CES could be used to tackle multiple forms of injustice (e.g., ethnocentrism, sexism, heterosexism, etc.), this paper focuses in particular on racial injustice.

7 Documents were chosen for analysis based on recommendations from two leading sources of information on community- and civic-engagement and campus–community partnerships: (a) Campus Compact, a national coalition of almost 1,200 college and university presidents and (b) Community–Campus Partnerships for Health (CCPH), a nonprofit organization of more than 2,000 individuals, community organizations, and academic institutions promoting health equity and social justice.

8 I chose not to include definitions and recommendations focused on more specific types of community-engaged scholarship, such as participatory action research, because I was aiming to develop a broad-based understanding across the various types of engaged scholarship.

9 For a critique of how these individualized explanations for lower academic achievement downplay the impact of structural obstacles and injustices, see Lewis and Diamond (2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cynthia Gordon da Cruz

Cynthia Gordon da Cruz is on the full-time teaching faculty at Saint Mary's College of California, teaching in the Justice, Community, and Leadership program and at the Kalmanovitz Graduate School of Education. Her research, which focuses on community-engaged scholarship, critical democratic citizenship, antiracism, and community organizing, provides policy recommendations for carrying out inclusive excellence in higher education institutions.