Community-Engaged Scholarship: Creating Participative Spaces for Transformative Politics

Abstract

We are pleased to offer this special issue on community-engaged scholarship. As scholar-activists working for social justice alongside youth of color (Pat) and critical arts activists engaging with stigmatized communities (Ester), we began this project with the intent of gathering a collection of essays operating against the traditional colonizing methodologies that have been the hallmarks of social/science research for centuries (Smith, 1999). In organization studies, this tradition includes Kurt Lewin’s 20th century research studies that laid the groundwork for participatory approaches to system change, but which offered no critique or analysis of the broader societal structures of power that embed such change (Adelman, 1993). For this special issue, we called for essays that would attend to issues of power in the participative research process, and with a conscious aim toward decolonizing research that exposes and challenges inequalities in the production, outcomes, and sharing of research content. Also, our intent was to collect essays that would highlight the ways scholars are grappling with some of the “prickly” issues (to use the apt term provided by of one of the contributions to this special issue, Schaefer & Rivera) in community-engaged scholarship—issues that emerge at the intersection between the political and the theoretical and which are at the forefront of conversations both inside and outside the traditional boundaries of academe.