Higher Education and Community-Based Research

Creating a Global Vision

R. Munck, L. McIlrath, B. Hall, R. Tandon, R. Munck, L. McIlrath, B. Hall, R. Tandon

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137385284
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

A unique, comparative survey of community-based research within a higher education context, featuring some of the top scholars in the field, this book brings together a global range of experiences with community-based research and engages the leaders in the field worldwide to set out visions for future directions, practices, and developments.

CHAPTER 1

Main Issues and Perspectives: An Introduction

Ronaldo Munck, Lorraine McIlrath, Budd Hall, and Rajesh Tandon

Community-based research (CBR) has become an integral element of the contemporary university’s repertoire of activities. It may take different forms and respond to different priorities but it is no longer a marginal activity. It now joins community-based learning—which has a much longer history—as a key component of what is becoming known as the engaged university. We could say, then, that community-based learning and research has been mainstreamed, normalized, or brought into the field. CBR can even be seen as an activity that grants a competitive advantage to those institutions that promote it. It may serve to develop interdisciplinary research skills, provide students with “real world” experiential learning, promote the “public purpose” of the university, and even attract funding from philanthropic donors. These very real issues—especially salient in a period of economic and philosophical crisis—add a note of urgency to current attempts to generate local, national, and transnational platforms for community-based research as part of the broader engagement mission.

There is also an alternative community-based learning and research modality going back to the origins of adult education and a radical 1960s grassroots, bottom-up, or contestatory tradition. Here, education is seen not as an end in itself, but as a means of achieving individual and social transformation. A critical analysis of the world around us and an understanding of the structures of oppression are central to this alternative pedagogy. From this rich melting pot sprung interest in action research and participatory research in the 1960s, primarily in the global South, but which was also reflected in the imperialist heartlands as anticolonialism, antisexism, and antiracism came to the fore. Ever since, there has been what might be called a minority movement within the academy, whereby community links were fostered and social knowledge was valorized. Often on the fringes of the organization, these initiatives nevertheless kept alive a community-oriented teaching and research tradition. Sometimes this work is even recognized and promoted by a new generation of higher education managers and educational policy planners.

Rather than counterpose a mainstream and radical CBR theory and practice, we would be better served by acknowledging CBR’s complexity. Against all forms of positivism, complexity recognizes that there are no linear laws or simple answers, and no inevitable outcome to social processes. Against all forms of structuralism, it also recognizes the importance of agency and the ability of human action to change things. So, a process such as community-based research is enormously variable as complexity would advise us, but we also need to recognize contextuality (e.g., knowledge is historically and geographically specific) and contingency (against teleological explanations, we accept the impact of conscious human agents). The university itself is also, of course, subject to complexity, contextuality, and contingency and cannot just have a linear teleological plan. If this complex university opens its research (and teaching) to the wider community, it will gain in legitimacy but also its integrity and impartiality as an institution are more likely to be recognized.

In Chapter 2, of Section I, Ronaldo Munck provides us with a wideranging genealogy of the term “community-based research” and some preliminary ideas around its possible prospects. He explores the Southern origins of the participatory research approach and the later manifestations of it in the very different context of the more affluent North. He argues that community-based research brings to the fore basic epistemological debates around the status of knowledge in the way it values experiential and grounded knowledge over abstract or universal knowledge. It thus feeds into a Southern perspective or epistemological standpoint that prioritizes subaltern knowledge. In the North we can see CBR as part of a response to the commercialization of the university and commodification of knowledge. Community-based research (and learning) poses another logic for staff and students alike, and they may become champions for a more socially robust form of knowledge fit for purpose in the complex world we live in. The overall message of this chapter is that “another knowledge” is possible and another university is possible.

In Chapter 3, Vanessa Liston discusses the way in which community-based research has dealt with the problematic of participation, particularly providing us with a strong definition of community-based research in which the researcher does not produce knowledge but, rather, helps participants to produce knowledge about themselves. Participatory rural appraisal and the iconic work of Robert Chambers are systematically explored to generate new learnings. This is not an uncritical reading, however, and participatory methodologies can, arguably, be seen as ineffective for empowerment and sustainability. Her conclusion is that participation as such is indeterminate in terms of its effects. Indeed, given that complexity is an inescapable condition of this type of research, we are more likely to see both advances and retreats, with learning and innovation always a precarious gain. If a health system, for example, can be seen as a complex adaptive system, then research might be seen as a form of complex adaptive participation.

Jennifer Mullett in Chapter 4 deals with the ways in which community-based research enhances community practices. This chapter is set in the context of the complex Canadian health system and social services but its lessons are more general. Community health requires, more or less inevitably, community and participatory forms of health promotion. There is no one agreed “cookbook” for participatory health research; rather, we tend to see flexible approaches driven by community priorities and not by outside experts. When the values of empowerment are to the fore, capacity-building interventions can have a tangible and sometimes durable impact on the community. Community-based research should promote collective well-being guided by a vision of a more just world. These approaches within the broad community health tradition can be attractive to government funders simply because they deliver results. At the same time, perhaps in a contradictory fashion, they also provide the opportunity for participants to make connections, develop a greater sense of self-worth, and make a contribution to their community. CBR, we are beginning to see, comes in different guises.

In Chapter 5, Rajesh Tandon and Budd Hall explore the majority world foundation of community-based research and challenge the Eurocentric bias of much contemporary scholarship in this area. Their point of departure is thus a historical corrective of the dominant discourse, which sees CBR emerging in the United States circa 1980. Both in India and in Africa, the engagement of research with communities has a longer and more complex history, which the authors trace and recover for current practitioners of CBR. From this rich experience they follow their own subsequent collaboration and creation of the first international networks to promote community-based research. They pose their long-term engagement with community-based research in terms of the relationship of knowledge to a more equitable world. The democratization of knowledge and knowledge democracy thus come to the fore in a debate that is often posed as a purely academic one. Clearly we can now move forward with community-based research that is oriented toward cognitive justice as a strand of activity within academia and beyond.

In Section II, we move toward more detailed case studies to exemplify the broad array of community-based research theory and practice.

The European science shops as mechanisms of community knowledge exchange are the focus of Norbert Steinhaus in Chapter 6. They represent a radical attempt post-1968 to “bring science to the people” in a practical way. The story of their evolution is of general interest because we can detect there the pressures from government, funders, and university administrators that CBR initiatives came under. The science shop movement—and that is what it was, and is still to some extent—showed the promise of an engagement by the community with the university. There was not, of course, one single model of the science shop that was slavishly followed but, rather, several variants around the same mission. Today the science shops are part of the European Union research funding strategy, but for some, they have lost their radical edge. Be that as it may, they are a required case study for any comparative international study of community-based research. Not least, they throw up the problem of scale: whether it is essential to have a locally embedded CBR initiative or whether it can be “scaled up” to city or, why not, a national level.

The United Kingdom (UK) experience of research engagement by universities is the focus of Sophie Duncan and Paul Manners in Chapter 7. While the UK has had many historical experiences of CBR reaching back to the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) and the Open University (OU), today we can discern a “tipping point” where societal engagement is about to become a major component in the strategy of universities in that jurisdiction. The authors are key drivers of the Beacons for Public Engagement initiative and thus well placed to situate this experience in its policy context and carry out their own reflexive analysis of its successes and contradictions. They establish a clear differentiation, as do other chapters, between “grassroots” or bottom-up CBR initiatives and those that are “top-down,” reflecting the priorities of funders and policy-makers. In the UK it is now well established that engagement is, or should be, a core value for the university. How this might square with increasing moves toward commercialization, and even privatization, of the university remains to be seen.

Lorraine McIlrath, and colleagues, explores the distinctive Irish researchcommunity interfaces in Chapter 8. What we see is a wide diversity of CBR philosophies and implementation practices. In Ireland, there has been an early replication of the European science shop model, but there is also a considerable influence of the US tradition of service learning and research. What is probably most noticeable is the development by the Irish government some years ago of a community engagement strategy. This has legitimized previous bottom-up initiatives to promote community-based learning and research. These activities benefit from the presence of a national civic engagement platform in the shape of Campus Engage, which is funded by the Higher Education Authority. The challenges faced by CBR in Ireland are many, as elsewhere, leading one to pose questions such as the following: Do the values of civic engagement conflict with current moves toward a more commercialized university? Will there be “buy-in” from an increasingly pressurized academic staff? Will cooperation overcome competition among CBR practitioners? Ireland is an interesting case study, falling as it does between the European and US “models,” with a significant influence from Australia as well.

In Chapter 9, Michael Cuthill examines Australian university strategy and practice in regard to community-based research. As do other chapters, this one sets itself in the terrain of the Mode 2 knowledge paradigm (Gibbon et al., 1994) in understanding that the university is but one player today in a vastly expanded knowledge production process. This Australian case study is particularly valuable because it shows that the course of CBR does not always run smoothly. There is often a lack of collaboration skills or even of motivation, and what starts promisingly can grind to a halt. In other cases, especially where relationship development in diverse communities was a core focus, success was more likely. So CBR is not easy, but it is possible and immensely rewarding when got right. There are still many challenges—such as the fundamental question of whether academics are ready to work collectively and share power—but we have the technology and we can make CBR work, especially if we learn from international experience.

Organizing culture change through community-based research is the theme of Scott Peters and Maria Avila in Chapter 10, based mainly on US experiences, where there is a long history of CBR going back to the nineteenth-century land grant university. The authors recount two individual experiences, the first based on a land grant extension service program and the second based on community organizing and CBR practice, in Los Angeles. It is clear from these cases that CBR has the potential to facilitate learning and/or co-learning, solve some social problems, and advance knowledge. The challenge for the practitioners of CBR, and for those who seek to learn from, and theorize from, that practice, is to achieve the full potential of community-based research. An extremely interesting lesson that emerges from these dense studies is whether it is actually wise to blur the distinction between community and academic knowledge. Can CBR—in what we might call a populist mode—actually downgrade the properly applied intellectual knowledge of the experienced academic?

Ahmed Bawa in Chapter 11 takes up the challenge of describing and analyzing the rich experience of community-based research in postapartheid South Africa. Community engagement is posed as a fabric into which we can weave both teaching/learning and research. South Africa has a rich history of university-community engagement, which Bawa draws on to develop a grounded theory of community-based research oriented toward a progressive transformation of both knowledge and society. Community engagement has been “mainstreamed” in South Africa at national and local levels, yet it still has a long way to go in terms of capturing the imagination of most academics. Bawa provides an insider account of why this might be the case and advances some propositions for the future. What emerges is a conception of community engagement not as some rather under-specified “third pillar” alongside teaching and research but, rather, as a site for knowledge production in its own right. Also vital, moving forward, would be to critically address the power relations between universities and communities.

Latin America is widely seen as a region where university-community engagement had early roots, and it has provided global inspiration, not least through the work of Paulo Freire. In Chapter 12, Jutta Gutberlet, Crystal Tremblay, and Carmen Moraes capture some of the complexity and intensity of participatory and action-oriented research, particularly in Brazil. This has contributed significantly to the global construction of a postcolonial critical epistemology and methodology of considerably import. This approach, from the days of Paulo Freire to the present, has always been characterized by a marked political radicalism and cultural creativity. If we examine the CBR literature and practice globally, we will see to what extent participatory research—from rapid rural appraisal to social action-oriented research—has benefited from the work by Latin American theorists and practitioners. Indeed, it is the unity of theory and practice in praxis that is the most marked characteristic of the Latin American tradition on university-community engagement.

In Section III, we move toward a series of reflections or perspectives that take us back to some of the big issues raised in Section I in light of the rich tapestry of experiences outlined in Section II.

We start with Ronald Barnett in Chapter 13 and join him in a close critical engagement with the foundations of both community and research. He quite rightly questions not only the term community but what we mean by “base” in community-based research. Certainly, if we are to explore the meaning of what a community-oriented research practice would look like in a complex and global world, it would be different from CBR as it is most usually deployed in the literature. The very concept of CBR needs to be set in the context of the very complex relationships between universities and the wider society and hinges on the role of the university in terms of knowledge legitimation. These are fluid times and these relationships are constantly changing, but they are crucial in determining the challenges and the prospects for a sound and sustainable CBR practice. What Barnett advocates as a way forward is an “ecological university.” That would represent a university that is directly attuned to its surrounding environment and able to play a key role in sustaining that environment but also, he would hope, improving it. This new type of university would take seriously its interconnection with the world around it and would be an effective home and driver of community-based research.

Mala Singh, in Chapter 14, takes up the underlying issue of the public good in a higher education setting. The current controversy over the future of the university is posed vey much as the new commercialization and privatization agenda against the classic understanding of education as a public good. The current ideological constraints and very real practical difficulties in moving toward a public good regime are outlined. The notion of public good is thus seen to have a very precarious potential in terms of constituting a new foundational basis for rethinking the contemporary university. A paradigm-changing approach would be to resist or remove public “bads” through the launching of more bottom-up public good interventions. Community-based research could be seen as precisely one such initiative that would serve to mediate the public “bads” people face in their everyday lives. It is a path that might guide the CBR practitioner, who moves between aspirations toward the grand narrative of the public good and the pessimism that sets in when we realize the barriers that the corporate university and neoliberal regimes put in our way.

In the final afterword (Chapter 15), the editors present a brief programmatic statement. This is not a statement that all the authors in this publication would necessarily share, but we do believe that most would share the underlying sentiments. We live in troubled times, and our interconnected world faces severe existential challenges. We do not believe that the university can answer all of these but we are convinced—not least by the rich history of engagement described and analyzed by the authors above—that the university has a role in democratizing knowledge, not least through community knowledge exchange. We thus pose a brief charter, manifesto, or statement that we hope might spark debate. Taking forward the tasks therein will be a collective effort. We certainly hope to inspire our readers through the rich tapestry of experiences presented in this volume.

Returning now to our opening remarks about complexity, in what direction does our wide array of contributions point us? Certainly they underscore the complex setting for CBR and diverse responses in different countries and different types of institutions. They all testify to the relevance of community-based research for any transformative educational system. We could go further, though, and argue that the current crisis of the university is also a period of opportunity. There is a funding crisis and a leadership crisis in many, if not most, university systems. Yet a crisis can also be a turning point, the start of something new. We need to reflect on the reasons for the current impasse and the ways in which that might be overcome. The diagnosis from a wide r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1. Main Issues and Perspectives: An Introduction
• Section I: Overview
• Section II: Experiences
• Section III: Perspectives
• Contributor Biographies
• Bibliography
• Index