Complicating Community-Engaged Research: Envisioning a Community-Driven Research Model

• In Event: 46.085 - Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: 46.085-11 - The Social Justice Discourse and Social Justice Activists

Abstract

Research that is described as “community-engaged” assumes a fair distribution of power in theory, but in practice can reduce the contributions of community-based organizations to mere observers and recruiters of research participants. The purpose of this paper is to describe a different vision of community-engaged research where traditional, academic research-based institutions play a support role to the primary role of community-based organizations who take the lead in the research process. We address how the “Black Children’s Development Network", an African-centered family education center in St. Paul, MN, is attempting to disrupt the traditional perceptions of research by asserting our own claims to the generation of theory based on relational ways of being within local Twin Cities’ communities of African descent.

Authors

• Brian Lozenski, Macalester College

• Gevonee Eugene Ford, Network for the Development of Children of African Descent