Taking Responsibility: Institutional Agents of Color (Re)Imagine Collaboration That Centers Community Stakeholders in University-Community Partnerships

• In Event: Disrupting Hegemonic Ideologies in Community-University Partnerships

Abstract

This paper leverages three separate University-Community Partnership projects with predominantly white institutions, two of which are situated within one Black community, where the university has recently developed a new campus to anchor an education ecosystem. And the other project is affiliated to a university that is seen as an anchor within its city limits. Utilizing individual and collective critical autoethnographic narratives, we discuss our shared motivations for social justice oriented engaged work, as well as illuminate the real opportunities and or challenges in fostering university-community partnerships. We also examine how we integrated equity within the projects, that is, counterexamples of the common discourses of engagement, which we ultimately identify as a necessary resistance to authentically collaborate within communities.

Authors

• L. Trenton S. Marsh, University of Central Florida

• Amanda Wilkerson, University of Central Florida

• Zoe Colon, University of Central Florida