Campus-Community Organizing and Reckoning With Higher Education's Town and Gown Divide

• In Event: Theorizing Higher Education as an Essential Site for the Design of Knowledge Production

Abstract

The higher education literature on community engagement, service-learning, and campus-community partnerships (Boyer, 1996; Bringle & Hatcher, 2002; Enos & Morton, 2003) proffers an understanding of campus-community relations predicated upon longstanding power asymmetries between postsecondary institutions and the communities within which they are situated. In particular, Enos and Morton (2003) note that attempts at meaningful and authentic partnerships are often undermined in the transactional nature of many campus-community initiatives, which Yappa (1999) further conceptualizes as an institutional framing of communities as the domain of problems and the university as the domain of solutions. Epistemologically, these domains re-inscribe the symbolic boundaries of institutions to distinguish and categorize itself as separate and apart from rather than in relationship with local communities. By and large such framing has guided how institutions have been traditionally involved with neighboring communities in ways that have primarily been extractive and exploitative. However, Bringle and Hatcher (2002) have suggested conceiving campus-community partnerships as relational presents an opportunity to flatten hierarchies and develop mutually- beneficial arrangements that better center community needs. Similarly, Ganz (2010) theorizes effective movement organizing as also rooted in relationships, especially in the absence of formalized structure. Without formal structure, which is often the case in the early stages of movement building, campus-community engagement requires an alternative set of power-conscious relations in which conjoining parties mutually share interests and exchange resources (Ganz, 2010). These relationships link individuals, networks, and organizations together while also laying the groundwork upon which subsequent formalized structure can be built.
As both campus-community partnerships and movement organizing are considered effective when conceived relationally, their conceptual consistency provides clarity to how campus-community organizing may offer instructive insight to reconciling asymmetrical power relations between urban postsecondary institutions and the communities from which they extract and accumulate resources. This paper, therefore, explores how campus-community organizing is a mechanism for negotiating political concerns with overlapping interests and sharing resources in ways that are deferential to extra-institutional stakeholders. More specifically, this paper offers a framing of campus-community relationships that resist structural determinism, thereby disregarding or diminishing the potential of pre-existing hierarchical formations and symbolic boundaries to shape imbalanced partnerships. Altogether, this paper conceptualizes campus-community organizing to signify the borderless set of relational associations between and among university affiliates (i.e., students, staff, and faculty) and local communities, specifically in the context of their collaborative work to facilitate mobilization, cultivate public legitimacy, build political power, and navigate opportunities and threats to achieve their sociopolitical goals.

Author

• Charles H.F. Davis, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author