Engaging and Organizing the Process of Community Meditation: Balancing Tensions and Blending Discourses

• In Event: Communication Activism Scholarship: Examples from Emerging Scholars

Abstract

This essay addresses the dialectical tensions that emerge when participating in engaged scholarship. Specifically, exploratory research using ethnographic methods was conducted at a community-focused mediation center in Texas. The theoretical goal of the essay is to understand how this “community of practice” manages competing discourses (e.g., legal, volunteer-training, and business expertise) during the process of mediation, with the engaged goal being to develop a set of “best practices” that can then be used as a framework for future mediator trainings. The essay first addresses the idea of translation and investigates the struggle of managing a common language between researchers and participants. Given that one goal of engaged scholarship is to address practical questions that are co-constructed with research participants, the paper concludes by articulating a set of strategies to foster productive negotiations between scholarly and practical goals.

Author

• Zach Schaefer, Texas A&M University