Partnering with Lived Experience: How to Incorporate Justice and Democracy into Your Research Practice

Session Submission Type: Workshop

Description

Fitting the theme of this year’s conference, “putting sociology to work for a more equitable society,” the purpose of this workshop is to teach early career sociologists how to incorporate research justice and democracy into their methodological practices and theoretical frameworks. Research justice and democracy is a collaborative approach that centers a diverse set of voices directly from those impacted in community, whose perspectives have been generally ignored and marginalized. Collaborations between academics and community members serves to remove hierarchies from research and social policy by acknowledging multiple sites of knowledge and various forms of expertise. This workshop particularly calls on researchers to partner in authentic ways with individuals with lived experience of the topic under study. Incorporating their ethnographic work on homelessness in San Diego, California, done in collaboration with individuals with lived experience of homelessness, Drs. Livingstone and Santiago will teach early career scholars how to start and steward partnerships with those who have boots-on-the-ground in order to develop meaningful research that serves the community. By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to: 1) understand the myriad and multidirectional benefits of research justice and democracy, including improved research and social policy; 2) provide strategies on getting started with this model regardless of one’s resources (via participatory action research); and 3) implement best practices that challenge the compartmentalization between book vs street knowledge. Drs. Livingstone and Santiago will review why they got started with research justice and democracy, how they have engaged with this work as both graduate students and PhDs working as center researchers and assistant professors, and how they have learned best practices along the way by dialoging with their research teams, including the importance of acknowledging multiple forms of expertise, centering lived experience at every stage of research design, and providing equitable compensation.

Sub Unit

• Workshops / Policy and Research Workshop

Presenters

• Odilka Sabrina Santiago, University of San Diego

• Jennifer Marie Nations, University of California-San Diego

• Sam Lutzker, University of California-Los Angeles

Session Organizer

• Stacey Livingstone, University of California-San Diego