Collaborative Research and Movement Building: Lessons From the Urban Research-Based Action Network

• In Event: 63.034 - Research for Justice: Challenging Discriminatory Policing, School Closures, and Youth Unemployment

Abstract

This paper uses participant observation to reflect on the formation of the Urban Research Based Action Network (URBAN) as a national network prioritizing issues of racial justice and working to create a truly diverse space for activist scholars unlike typical white dominated academic spaces. Years of growing inequality, persistent poverty and racial inequities, increasing environmental challenges and attacks on immigrants demanded a response from academia that was largely missing. The rise of evidence-based practice and big data meant that research and data-based knowledge were more important than ever, yet aggrieved communities typically lacked access to data relevant to advocating for their policy objectives. Meanwhile, a new generation of scholars, often led by scholars of color and women, came to graduate studies because of their deep passion to contribute to social justice, yet found the academy pushed them towards traditional, detached research agendas that seemed irrelevant to the pressing demands of urban communities. Many scholars nevertheless pursued community-engaged research but they did so isolated in their own silos – in their institutions, disciplines, localities or policy areas. This paper traces the 2010-2018 period of the formation of the network and its expansion from a small group of nationally prominent activist scholars to more than 1500 researchers, activists, educators, and community leaders working together in geographic and inter/disciplinary nodes on locally defined issues.
Although concerned with combating inequality and oppression in all its forms, URBAN placed a special emphasis on combating racism because it is a central form of oppression in urban communities and one that the academy is often unwilling to address explicitly or structurally. URBAN connects activist scholars across their silos and creates a space for an exchange of ideas, analyses and best practices. It supports early career and graduate student engaged scholars, and strives to open space in the academy for activist scholarship. URBAN members challenge the hierarchy of knowledge production and power which places academics and experts above communities struggling for change.
URBAN secured funding to host field building national invitational conferences, develop a website and communication structure, support the development of three special issues of educational research journals, and seed deeper discussions of collaborative community based action research within the national professional organizations of educational researchers, sociologists, urban planners, community psychologists, and others. With active local nodes now in Boston, New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Hartford/Springfield, Denver/Boulder, and Minneapolis, and nodes emerging in Salt Lake City, Atlanta and Santa Cruz CA, URBAN’s reach has become truly national.
URBAN’s new public university institutional home demonstrates how research can be answerable to the well being of aggrieved communities. URBAN’s hybrid organization works deeply and critically within, and widely and dynamically across, communities and disciplines. Its members’ place based research and activism rooted in, e.g., local struggles around charter school expansion, immigration rights and education, gentrification and school closings, and teacher development, also engage the contact zones of cross-city, cross-discipline provocations and discussions focused on the often fraught research dynamics between universities and communities, social policy and organizing.

Author

• Mark R. Warren, University of Massachusetts - Boston