Engaged Scholarship

Society and democracy are ever threatened by the fall of fact. Rigorous analysis of facts, the hard boundary between truth and opinion, and fidelity to reputable sources of factual information are all in alarming decline. A 2018 report published by the RAND Corporation labeled this problem "truth decay" and Andrew J. Hoffman lays the challenge of fixing it at the door of the academy. But, as he points out, academia is prevented from carrying this out due to its own existential crisis—a crisis of relevance. Scholarship rarely moves very far beyond the walls of the academy and is certainly not accessing the primarily civic spaces it needs to reach in order to mitigate truth corruption. In this brief but compelling book, Hoffman draws upon existing literature and personal experience to bring attention to the problem of academic insularity—where it comes from and where, if left to grow unchecked, it will go—and argues for the emergence of a more publicly and politically engaged scholar. This book is a call to make that path toward public engagement more acceptable and legitimate for those who do it; to enlarge the tent to be inclusive of multiple ways that one enacts the role of academic scholar in today's world.

A guide for organizational and social research in business studies and the social sciences, providing a clear framework for research design and methodology. It will be an invaluable tool for academics, researchers, and graduate students across the social sciences concerned with rigorous and relevant research in the contemporary world.

This open access book explores creative and collaborative forms of research praxis within the social sustainability sciences. The term co-creativity is used in reference to both individual methods and overarching research approaches. Supported by a series of in-depth examples, the edited collection critically reviews the potential of co-creative research praxis to nurture just and transformative processes of change. Included amongst the individual chapters are first-hand accounts of such as: militant research strategies and guerrilla narrative, decolonial participative approaches, appreciative inquiry and care-ethics, deep-mapping, photo-voice, community-arts, digital participatory mapping, creative workshops and living labs. The collection considers how, through socially inclusive forms of action and reflection, such co-creative methods can be used to stimulate alternative understandings of why and how things are, and how they could be. It provides illustrations of (and problematizes) the use of co-creative methods as overtly disruptive interventions in their own right, and as a means of enriching the transformative potential of transdisciplinary and more traditional forms of social science research inquiry. The positionality of the researcher, together with the emotional and embodied dimensions of engaged scholarship, are threads which run throughout the book. So too does the question of how to communicate sustainability science research in a meaningful way.

"Towards a New Ethnohistory" engages respectfully in cross-cultural dialogue and interdisciplinary methods to co-create with Indigenous people a new, decolonized ethnohistory. This new ethnohistory reflects Indigenous ways of knowing and is a direct response to critiques of scholars who have for too long foisted their own research agendas onto Indigenous communities. Community-engaged scholarship invites members of the Indigenous community themselves to identify the research questions, host the researchers while they conduct the research, and participate meaningfully in the analysis of the researchers’ findings. The historical research topics chosen by the Stó:lō community leaders and knowledge keepers for the contributors to this collection range from the intimate and personal, to the broad and collective. But what principally distinguishes the analyses is the way settler colonialism is positioned as something that unfolds in sometimes unexpected ways within Stó:lō history, as opposed to the other way around. This collection presents the best work to come out of the world’s only graduate-level humanities-based ethnohistory field school. The blending of methodologies and approaches from the humanities and social sciences is a model of twenty-first century interdisciplinarity.

In the preface to the Handbook of Engaged Scholarship, Hiram Fitzgerald observes that the Kellogg Commission's challenge to higher education to engage with communities was a significant catalyst for action. At Michigan State University, the response was the development of "engaged scholarship," a distinctive, scholarly approach to campus-community partnerships. Volume Two contains essays on such topics as current typologies, measuring effectiveness and accreditation, community-campus partnership development, national organizational models, and the future landscape.

This volume brings together diverse theoretical reflections and practices of community engaged scholarship in order to stimulate critical discussion, deepen theory, and invite critical practice. It is an international trend that higher education institutions and agencies are encouraging and promoting community engagement. At the same time, there is recognition of a lack of consistent definitions and understandings of what it is they are promoting. As a counterweight to the dominance of pragmatic and technical discussions in the literature on engaged scholarship, the chapters in this book shift the discourse to ask foundational questions that emphasize the political nature of engagement. Recognizing that acts of engagement are never neutral, the authors in this book explore how engaged scholarship requires decision-making that is inherently grounded in values, beliefs, and interpretations of what is and what ought to be. Alongside complex global and local social movements rising to address issues, for example climate change or the global financial collapse and the uneven consequences of these globalized problems, we see corresponding concerns expressed about the limited participation by excluded, silenced, and invisibilized people throughout the world. How can engaged scholarship be mobilized and who will it serve within such contexts? With contributions covering such diverse topics as a non-binary approach to engagement; citizenship of knowledge; university contexts and corporatization; stranger pedagogies and anti-foundational approaches to service learning; contemporary revolutionary movements in the Arab world; and transforming higher education through Africanist onto-epistemologies, this volume is poised to open the door to a deeper understanding of engaged scholarship.

This collective volume celebrates that 75 years ago the foundation was laid for the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The contributions to this volume exemplify the evolution of the academic disciplines of anthropology and development studies at Radboud University in the course of its history. Radboud University itself celebrates its centenary in the year 2023. Originally this university was established for the emancipation of the Catholic population in the Netherlands. Emancipation continues to be a distinctive feature of the university’s policy, also of the scholarship as it is conducted in the department of anthropology and development studies. As emancipation and engagement are key concepts in the disciplines of anthropology and development studies at Radboud University, former and current staff members focus their contributions to this anniversary volume on the various meanings of the concepts of emancipation and engagement in their academic practices. They reflect on changes in the meaning of engaged scholarship in their own work, especially in relation to emancipatory issues. The outcome is a rich variety of contributions centering on the shifting tension between engagement and scholarship in the disciplines of anthropology and development studies. Thus, they not only exemplify the evolution of these academic disciplines at Radboud University, but also offer a topical and innovative perspective on a highly dynamic field.

Story and auto-ethnography are study methods based on decolonizing and liberating research perspectives. Stories, auto-ethnographies, and other qualitative methodologies enable the researcher/educator to be both a research instrument and an object in their study. Stories allow for the examination of personal growth, its effect on practice, and their impact on community. The researcher/educator is able to witness her/his own life as they collaborate with participants. Through the use of story, auto-ethnography, and other qualitative methodologies, researchers/educators can link the history of self within their community/activist work to its present conditions as they map their collective community’s future. Ecologies of Engaged Scholarship explores the use of story and auto-ethnography as a tool to know ‘self’ and ‘other’ in relationship to capacity building, pedagogical processes, and activist scholarship. It highlights activist-scholarship to better understand the epistemology and landscape of activist research. Contributors to the book self-identify as activist-scholars or scholar-activists, and in their unique chapters they consider the values informing their work, the origins and nature of their work, and how they make meaning of their work. They also consider how family and/or community has been involved, how previous schooling experiences have affected their trajectory, and how particular relationships have worked to influence their philosophical understanding. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.