Intention, Desire, and Power in a New Community Partnership

• In Event: Processes of Partnering: Local Development of Methods to Democratize Knowledge Production in Research on Learning

Abstract

Objective
In this paper, we reflect on the values, theories, and practices that influenced the development of a new community partnership focused on youth education.

Perspectives
University relations with non-dominant communities often take a neo-colonial form that reinscribes rather than challenges imperialistic power relations (Zavala, 2013) . Limited attention to the sociocultural and historical contexts in which partnerships take shape and to the agency of community members in contributing to their agenda has led to the proliferation of problematic relationships (Siddle Walker, 1999).

Methods and Data Sources
Our reflection centers on narratives of “damage” and “desire” in non-dominant communities (Tuck & Yang, 2014), the notion of place-making as dynamic, and practices of designing with versus for communities. We draw on social practice perspectives on learning (Nasir, 2011) and theories informed by critical race theory, particularly “community cultural wealth” (Yosso, 2005) to inform our analysis.
Our data sources include interviews with community members, observations and participant observations in schools, libraries, and community centers. We use documents (e.g., organization websites, city and state-level reports) to contextualize our other qualitative data sources.

Results
We developed three strategies to trouble normative hierarchies of power in our emerging partnership. The first regards our team’s composition. Each of us is committed to organizing for greater justice through education. We are also all members of groups that have been historically or more recently racialized as “other” in the U.S -- two of us identify as Black and one as Indian-American -- and this was a consideration in composing our team and our project. Although we do not generalize to say that this creates immediate solidarity with non-dominant communities, we acknowledge that our positionalities - race, gender, social class, experiences, and commitment to education - matter for organizing partnerships with non-dominant communities (Vakil, McKinney de Royston, Nasir, & Kirshner, 2016).
The second strategy relates to hearing and seeing desire. Racialized narratives that focus on “damage” often mediate university partnership work in non-dominant communities. To counter this, we have strived to organize conversations and observations that foreground communities’ successful forms of resistance and action.
The third strategy involves taking a slow and open-ended approach to developing relationships. For example, we began our exploratory partnership work by engaging in broad ethnographic research on relevant neighborhoods. The deliberate slowness of our approach is aligned with Patel's (2016) discussion of "pausing" as a way to reflect critically on our goals and methods so as to avoid practices including the commodification of community knowledge. Critical to our decolonizing perspective is that we are also genuinely committed to the right of the communities to say they do not want to partner with us.

Significance
By sharing these preliminary findings, we hope to open up the process through which we are organizing equity-oriented community partnerships. This type of analysis has the potential to make visible problematic relations and possibilities for transformation.

Authors

• A. Susan Jurow, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Terrenda Corisa White, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Brian A Lightfoot, University of Colorado - Boulder