Working collaboratively towards socially just change requires extensive social, financial and intellectual commitments. There is often inadequate time for participants in these complex initiatives to reflect on the efficacy of their praxis. As a result, we have insufficient knowledge of the precise ways that our collective efforts contribute to processes of social transformation, as well as the political-economic relations surrounding the production and use of knowledge in non-academic settings. Mapping the Influences of Engaged Scholarship asks:
1. What are the actual things people do as part of collective efforts to solve complex social problems?
2. How do the things people do actually shape the social changes that they are trying to make?
3. How do social, institutional, political, and economic relations shape this work and influence how processes of social transformation unfold?
4. How do we bring these complex social and political processes into view so that we can all learn to do the work more effectively?
To address these research questions, the research team is working collaborative with people who participate in collective social change initiatives to produce a series of case studies, which seek to bring into visibility the relationship between knowledge, collective work and social-political change. We situate people’s knowledge and experiences of their work against extensive textual analysis – mapping the organizational, economic, institutional, and policy contexts that background and shape people’s collective work to make change.
Two-year (2016-2018) Insight Development Project
Contact: Naomi Nichols, PhD
