Preconditions for collaborative Research.doc
PROBLEM CHART - ANTICIPATING THE PROBLEMS AT EACH DEVELOPMENTAL PHASES OF COMMUNITY-UNIVERSITY PARTNERSHIPS
ASSESSMENTS / EVALUATION RESEARCH/ CASE STUDIES / TRANSLATIONAL
RESEARCH / PARADIGM
CRITIQUE/
RECONSTRUCTION
FUNDING
TEACHING
SERVICE PROVISION
RESEARCH/
PUBLISHING
ACADEMIC RECOGNITION
RECREATING CYCLES OF DIALOG, ACTION AND REFLECTION:
DEFINING LEARNING / DIRECT SERVICECLINICAL SERVICE / NEEDS
ASSESSMENTS / EVALUATION RESEARCH/ CASE STUDIES / TRANSLATIONAL
RESEARCH / PARADIGM
CRITIQUE/
RECONSTRUCTION
STUDENTS
COMMUNITY
FACULTY
PUBLISHING / DIRECT SERVICE
CLINICAL SERVICE / NEEDS
ASSESSMENTS / EVALUATION RESEARCH/ CASE STUDIES / TRANSLATIONAL
RESEARCH / PARADIGM
CRITIQUE/
RECONSTRUCTION
I’ve only begun to insert articles in the scholarly literature because I vowed twenty years ago that I would only ‘go academic’ when the organizations for whom I worked had
1) already gotten payback from my research because I translated it into useful modules/models.
2) asked for the research either to understand their own situation better or to disseminate and validate their experiences for broader audiences.
3) agreed to the research on semi-blind faith because I/we (MRAP) had a twenty-year track record of being true to our word; when we promise that our research will be beneficial it has been.
I attach my resume so you can see some of the other stuff I’ve done.
I have a book on media and movement building co-authored by the best feminist organizer I’ve every worked with –Karen Jeffreys. A draft of the book has been in the hands of the social movement organization for which and with whom it was written for two years now. Other crises have caused the project to be shelved temporarily and ‘partnership’ means that I’m waiting impatiently, reminding them that time’s awasting even as I recognize their predicaments.
We’re so accustomed t o social movement scholars downplaying the need for working relationships between scholars and activists—not just referral networks or personal friendships, but mutually beneficial working relationships that are goal-oriented, project-centered and subject to evaluation—that we forget that the relationships, once established, are as complex and problematic as any human relationships.
Preconditions for collaborative research
What do scholars do?
Scholars are researchers trained to identify and study problems , to synthesize existing knowledge and distill new understandings and insights. Additionally, scholars are responsible for maintaining the social institutions that produce knowledge and for training the next generation of knowledge producers.
Scholars have three regular avenues for disseminating theoretical and methodological innovations[1] within their academic disciplines. They publish their work in peer reviewed journals and academic presses, they present findings at professional associations, and they hold specialty conferences at which scholars working on a related theme or methodology can cross-fertilize. Often scholars produce an edited volume building on the proceedings of the conference. These practices combine to form a knowledge producing system. Reinforcing this system as the official system of knowledge production are the professional associations of each discipline, the graduate programs which control credentialization for each specialty and, perhaps most importantly the tenure and retention committees at each academic workplace.
Established scholars take seriously their role and responsibility to train the next generation of scholars, whose merit will be determined largely by the their ability to perform well in the venues named above. “Publish or perish” therefore is not a scare tactic….it is the mantra of an institutionalized system to protect quality control of intellectual work. It is the password to the gates of the academy.
In recent decades, some scholars have begun to question the insular, self-referential tendencies of the academic system of credentialization as it is constructed. Particularly as funding for academic research has tightened, established scholars and their protégés can end up placing a lockhold on a field rather than providing needed quality control/discipline. The financial crisis in academic publication exacerbates the issue.
The development of collaborative research could not come at a better—or a worse—time.
How to be true to one’s work in the best and worst of times is what I address below.
How does this research system apply to community-university partnerships? The answer will differ dramatically by specialty area. It is striking, however, scholars in my specialty field, sociology, and sub-specialty, communications, and sub-sub specialty communications in social movements, primarily advance by using the traditional research paradigm described above. Community-university, scholar-activist partnerships, while appreciated and acknowledged as essential to fulfilling service criteria for tenure, have not necessarily been seen as essential elements of forwarding social movement scholarship conceptually.
This conference is innovative in that it extends that knowledge-producing paradigm, conferences as a vehicle to inserting ideas into the academy, on the community-university partnership.
Scholar-activist collaborations: developing research-centered, movement-driven relationships
Most social movement scholars are also activists. University structures, however, create pressure for traditional scholarship. In response, many activist-oriented scholars, live compartmentalized lives with scholarship and activism as separate fields of endeavor--like work and family. Dick Flacks and David Croteau write about this. For social movement scholars, this means that success in scholarship doesn't depend on building mutually beneficial long-term working relationships with social movement organizations in which the social movement organizations have some level of determinant power. Success is defined by one’s ability to navigate the terrain of academic social movement scholarship.
Even university-based social movement scholars who work extensively “in the field” do not easily escape the impact of academic practices. Criteria for tenureand promotion stress publications in university presses and peer-reviewed journals, most of which do not concern themselves with community or movement relevance and accessibility. Professional associations set conference themes and descend on major cities; usually activists have not been invited at the agenda-setting stage, and their token participation is requested at the last minute. Even if invited often and early—when , for instance, a reformer takes the helm of a professional association for a year—social scientists have not worked consistently enough with activists to develop common conceptual language and the resulting presentations tend to miss each other.[2]
To complicate matters, social movement organizations are only beginning to learn how to integrate research goals as components of strategic planning. Social movement scholars need to dialog with their partner organizations to identify research projects that social movement organizers can harness for their organization's short and long term benefit. It takes years to develop the resulting mutually agreed upon research agenda. Moreover, the fit is often imperfect; a particular social movement and the field of social movement scholarship do not have the same bosses, time tables, competitors, opponents, resource and infrastructure demands; why should we expect them to see eye-to-eye?
Is it service, research? Is it GOOD research?
My most developed work is with the Rhode Island Coalition against Domestic Violence.
Here the research has three levels. Research projects only begin when the group has asked for it, or when I've convinced the group that the research will help. It's gotten easier as they've seen rewards from published work.
Usually it starts with the most applied requests. Groups will ask for a needs assessment (air quality, after school programs), a document analysis (review of Lawrence budget) , or a direct service (summer program, interns to serve in a staff capacity). At this level, the university is not necessarily seen as a partner but as a source of resources. Partnership language is often used, but the partnership is not articulated. It is a polite and flattering way to refer to a benefactor..
Many community-university partnerships remain in this phase for years. There is mutual benefit even at this stage. The university returns resources to the communities in which it is housed. Students receive training. Communities receive services.
The slighted partner at this stage, however, is the faculty member. To conduct a document analysis, to prepare students as interns and support students as they reflect on intern experience, to design needs assessments, to write grants to fund the above—all this work is labor-intensive, but does not necessarily produce new knowledge for the field. And even at this level there are institutional disjuncts: the 15 week semester on which students operate does not coincide with the community work rhythm; state legislative, city council hearings, and community meetings work on their own institutional rhythm independent of academia. The scholars’ summer—the time for writing—may be the time of most activity for a youth program.
Foundation funding cycles represent yet another problem. It often takes five to seven years for a very solid field experiment to demonstrate its efficacy. In sharp contrast to science funding which often comes in five-year cycles, sources funding for community work and research often provide only annual funding, at best three year. [ADD from Soc Prob}
in my case as a media and social movements scholar, "How can we get better media coverage for our issue?" A public relations consultant knows intuitively what media scholars like Gans, McChesney, but scholarly research can explain more precisely how an organizational field, like mass media, operates. Groups for instance find Bourdieu’s concept of field and habitus helpful when applied to journalistic practices. No, they do not hate you. This is how journalists’ worlds operate.
Translational research
So this first level is translational research—taking the insights of broad sociological scholarship and translating these so that their ramifications for social movement organizations are clear. This requires more than a review of the literature.
- First, the scholar must introduce herself to the organization and listen intently to identify possibilities for catalytic interventions; those critical but problematic situations facing the social movement organization where the scholar thinks she can be of some use, and where that effort might be mutually beneficial. (more on mutual benefit later).
s. In essence, before the scholar can .begin to do research they must map the social reality of the organization with whom they’re promising to partner. You can’t pick a life partner that you don’t know, and you can’t decide whether you complement each other without a period of intensive listening.
The second level is needs assessment or evaluation research of a simple or elaborate form.
- for which social movement theorists have developed concepts or summarized experiences that can be of use.
For instance, MRAP has worked for fifteen years to translate framing into a useful analytical concept and movement building tool for social movement organizations. Political opportunity structure could be translated into a concept of everyday utility for social movements. Indeed, scholar-activists have asked explicitly for this.[3] But the concept remains, in fact, under-theorized, e.g., it is too poorly specified to be applied to a living experiment.
The scholar knows—based on her knowledge of what’s been done in social movement scholarship—reviews social movement literature to identify which developed concepts are applicable to the specific conjuncture faced by the social movement organization..
Char Ryan
Sociology Dept
978-934-4310
or
617-727-9820 EXT 4310
1
[1]Everett Rodgers, Diffusion of Innovation
[2] This happened at a conference that MRAP planned despite our best efforts. We invited our closest, most long-lived activist partners to the Hope and History Conference to discuss bridging the academic-activist divide with social movement scholars. The questions the scholars found compelling were not those most pressing for the activists, the styles of presentation and the purposes of presentations were divergent. We encouraged, for instance, activists to talk about the problems in the activist/academic relationship. They, living increasingly in a foundation-driven movement culture, hesitated to name problems in our working relationships. MRAP, more than other scholars, had been of help to them. Why should they criticize us publicly? Would it not be held against us and them when grants were up for renewal? Moreover, only one prepared a presentation. For the rest, it would have wasted very precious time—they had no plans to publish. They had MRAP and did not arrive seeking to open relations with other scholars. They had done us a favor and honor by coming. That was the long and short of it.
To move beyond this situation, we at MRAP would have had to have opened a dialog with our activist partners around these issues sooner, and sustained that dialog until we had defined common issues and common language.
[3] The Grassroots Policy Project, a national organization providing broad training in worldview, framing, strategy and infrastructure development for social movement organizations routinely asks scholars whether political opportunity as a theoretical construct is yet operationalized for use in social movements’ strategic planning.