Academic-Community Collaboration Mini-Conference Recap via Boston Civic Media
In January 2016, Boston Civic Media gathered 65 researchers and practitioners from over 24 different universities, community organizations, and government agencies in the Boston area to discuss the barriers, opportunities, and affordances of academic-community collaboration. During the 3-hour event we offered a variety of talks and case studies as well as interactive exercises and discussions for problem solving. We addressed themes of language, accessibility, creating mutually-beneficial terms of collaborations, data literacy, and capacity-building with an eye toward envisioning new models of support. Upon considering overarching themes in this domain, we shared case studies to understand the diversity of ways that academic-community collaboration manifests. The audience heard from the student-led design studio Scout at Northeastern University, a public health youth media program called Start Strong, and Boston’s municipal innovation office-MONUM. After a delicious coffee break, the focus shifted toward deep dives into the promises and problems of collaborations and sourcing solutions to these issues.
Documentation, and especially participant-contributed documentation, is crucial to making the work known and usable to those who did not have the privilege of being physically present at events like this one. Academic-Community Collaborations was documented with photo and video, as well as with collaborative notes on Hackpad. Below is a summary of events.
Welcome Message by Susan Owusu
What is Boston Civic Media?
Community Lightning Talks
The first series of lightning round talks introduced some of the existing shortcomings of academic-community collaborations as well as tangible approaches and tools.
The Community IRB Project, Liat Racin
Liat Racin is a Research Coordinator for the first Boston Civic Media project about finding mutual benefits for community-academic partnerships. Liat briefly introduced the historical context of the IRB process where researchers apply for approval from the Institutional Review Board, an ethical committee, prior to beginning a project in order to prove the rationale and significance of their study in light of legal and ethical liabilities. The IRB was created to provide a set of physical and mental protections against legal and ethical liability in research. However, the IRB has primarily been used in scientific studies, and the needs of social science research differ. In Boston, community-based organizations are heavily studied and rarely asked for input. There are also differences between the cultures and priorities of organizations and academics.
More mutually beneficial research guidelines could improve the collaboration process to better address community needs, build trust, and ensure more direct representation of communities. Liat shared examples of progressive Community IRB’s such as the Bronx Research Review Board and the Mohawk Nation Community IRB. The Boston Civic Media Consortium is striving to build the first community IRB in order to allow organizations to operate from a more secure position to negotiate needs during research. Liat is hosting discussion groups in February 2016. To join or learn more, please email her atliat@elab.emerson.edu
Boston Data Library, Dan O’Brien (Northeastern University)
Next, Dan O’brien, the Research Director with Boston Area Research Initiativeshared two data-driven resources related to BARI’s central question of how to leverage the flood of big data to make the most use of it.The first shared project,Dataverse, is a catalog of local datasets and articles on topics like geography and the census. While the Boston Research Map is a robust, interactive tool that allows for filtering across a number of demographic characteristics and categories to understand the city. For example, looking at a dataset of “broken windows” as a key indicator and overlaying that data with neighborhood boundary data could potentially be layered with economic data to understand if “broken windows” in the Boston area are a key indicator of economic distress.
BARI works to support information produced by the community by sharing metrics and looking to work with community-based organizations to partner with. Recently, BARI received a grant to do community-based trainings on how to use the tool in their own projects, advocacy efforts as well as in the classrooms and for research. If your organization is interested in learning more about community-based trainings in the Boston Data Library, please reach out to Dan O’Brien(d.obrien@neu.edu) or Project Manager Chelsea Farrell(farrell.che@husky.neu.edu).
Data Therapy with Communities Rahul Bhargava (MIT)
Data Therapy is an approach to building capacity among community organizations to creatively tell their stories with data. Rahul Bhargava, a Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Civic Media, shared his experiences using artistic approaches to engage people with data and discover the stories within it. He’s assisted groups of various sizes, such as a school that created a data mural in Brazil, to turn their story about the importance of the school into a visual design. Rahul emphasized the benefits of this approach including buy-in, network-building, real-world relevance, and inclusivity. Through this work, he’s come to realize that collaboration on everything is not necessarily the goal, rather that shared priorities and mutual respect produce greater, long-lasting impacts.
Case Studies Lightning Talks
The second series of lightning talks dived into deeper explorations of project-specific examples of academic-community collaborations.
SCOUT Labs, Margarita Barrios Ponce (Northeastern)
Margarita Barrios Ponce is the Director of Plural, a communications firm for mission-driven organizations as well as a part-time faculty for Northeastern’s Art + Design department. To highlight students’ social-impact design work, Margarita created Cause Inform– a growing collection of visual campaigns for advocacy.
As a faculty advisor for SCOUT Margarita facilitates interdisciplinary connections for student entrepreneurship, design education, innovative approaches for solving social problems, and community-building among students and local partners. You can tweet to SCOUT here- @neuscout. Margarita is particularly interested in exploring more sustainable approaches to collaborations and continuity for SCOUT projects.
The eLEEP Collaboration, Nicole Daley (Boston Public Health Commission)
Nicole Daley is the Start Strong Program Director where she works with youth on campaigns related to teen dating violence prevention, healthy break-ups, media literacy and more. The program’s primary prevention approach is to help youth become savvy consumers of media to change the discourse and culture around relationship violence. For example, The Halls Webseries is a youth-created series about engaging in healthy relationships. Nicole focused on eLEEP a collaborative program with Emerson College that provides a platform to develop media literacy among youth by growing their media production skills. Some of the benefits of this partnership included access to technical resources, exposure to normally limited spaces, and bridging gaps between the ivory towers of academia and local residents. Some of the encountered challenges have included logistical barriers, communicating about the program to the broader college community, and closer alignment between research and and youth development goals.
The Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, Nigel Jacob
Nigel Jacob is a co-founder of the New Urban Mechanics where he guides projects that invent the future of city services. His team works across departments to connect the city with community needs to experiment collaboratively. The team strives to add more value for constituents through an iterative design approach. Nigel shared a few key lessons from MONUM’s work:
- Build things people want. While this may sound intuitive, Nigel explained “government often builds what they can”. For instance, Discover BPS evolved from redesigning the way school information is disseminated and transforming it into a visual map more like Hotel.com.
- Collaborate to innovate. Traditionally, government is used to more top-down approaches, however this has often resulted in confrontation. Using games and supplementary online components can help bring together a greater diversity of voices and encourage playful mental states.
- Encourage and enable civic behavior. Creating a more human experience in interacting with government encourages working together with citizens to improve our public spaces. For instance, the Citizen’s Connect (311 app) now incorporates photos of city workers doing public service to humanize this process.
Learn more about New Urban Mechanics through reading their site and tweeting to them @newurbanmechs.
Group Brainstorming about Problems and Promises of Academic-Community Collaboration
After the introductory talks about the approaches to academic-community collaborations and specific case studies, the participants broke out into groups. The first portion of group work focused on promises and problems with academic-community collaborations, while the second focused on problem-solving.
Below are some of the emergent ideas clustered around group themes:
Continuity
How might we provide meaningful partnerships among changing variables such as limited resources, different calendar terms, etc.?
Several challenges discussed included: a lack of trust between communities and institutions that do not have pre-established connections, a loss of institutional memory due to staff turnover, a lack of discussions about what happens after a project is complete (as it pertains to sustainability and future conversations).
A growth possibility lies in creating a network of community connectors, that serve as neutral third parties, who can help provide a shared discourse between collaborators. One group identified this bridge builder type of role as a necessity that could help provide resources for scaling as well as sustainability.
Student Participation
How might we work with student limitations when partnering with communities?
Several challenges include: students’ perceptions of their expertise, students are often limited in how much time they can contribute to a project with timeline constraints, there is not always financial backing to collaborations with students, potential competing interests and incentives can be at play. They also are often un-involved with communities that a project may be collaborating with which could cause conflicts in project implementation.
Several growth possibilities include: focusing on smaller scale projects and “lightweight engagements” between students and community members, leveraging academic institutions and infrastructure to protect partnerships, not overestimating the value of humility and respect when there is a lot of interest and less resources, learn to appreciate where expertise lies with others, understand power differentials on various scales when working across interest groups, incentivize sustain partnerships within universities, and ensure frequent communication with collaborators.
Community Agreements
How might we better engage upfront when creating IRB’s while partnering with community groups? How can the terms of collaboration be more clear?
Several challenges discussed included: balancing institutional needs with those of the partners, maintaining communication between busy stakeholders, understanding each other across communities, facilitating the divide between volunteers and professionals who are compensated differently, and conveying that student participation is a privilege.
Several growth possibilities include: codify the partnership process to prevent redundancy, work to establish self-sustaining structures that exist beyond turnover, decentralize institutionalized knowledge, attain support and buy-in from non-administrators, elevate word-of-mouth- as sources of support, emphasize and work-toward long-term relationships, make room for the partners to ideate (instead of academics driving this part of the process)
Relationships and Privilege
What are some of the associated baggage of academic-community collaborations and how can we navigate it (in regards to things like the legitimization that academic partners can bring)?Good intentions are not enough.
Several challenges discussed included: the perspective of a community as an “object” of research, transparency about research goals, fiscal and academic calendar limitations, translating academic measures into terms that communities could understand, navigating academic jargon, aligning objectives among different stakeholders, privilege as a barrier to trust, distance as a challenge to iteration
Several growth possibilities include: understanding how research can lead to policy change, equitable credit for work and a distribution of benefits, leveraging academic privilege to feature the community, academics as conduit-points for the communities to be key actors, clear and humble statements of expectations, deeply listening in order to define reciprocal arrangements, academics have the responsibility to translate data with communities, share transparency in regards to fundings, ensure access to the data for advocacy purposes and beyond, efforts of connecting to media in order to scale impact
Promises of working with confronting relationships and privilege: communities taking on the ability to innovate and think more creatively, lasting relationships, rethinking challenging theories, giving meaning back to this type of work, adopting a new framework that privileges relationships over projects, academics supporting community partners through legitimation (a flipside of academic privilege)
Authentic Relationships and Project Scope Definition
How might we develop transparent and meaningful relationships in collaborations? How do we approach project scoping to ensure a mutually beneficial process among collaborators?
Several challenges discussed included: group size, how meaningful the collaboration becomes for students, time constraints,dealing with sensitivities around partners’ “turfs”, differing definitions of project values, differing time schedules and pressures, how to maintain data infrastructure and integrity, documentation ethics, multilingual needs, working with youth often requires special skills and mentorship, and not understanding how to define the end of a project.
Several growth possibilities include: planning projects together to ensure equal footing, building in feedback loops, identifying whether the the collaborators have more of a partnership or client-based relationship, reviewing project progress together in a way that invites critique and consensus, finding overlapping concerns and mutual benefits, supporting community capacity for adopting new technologies, documentation of local work, outreach, academic outputs and narrative construction that can assist with fundraising, overlay of multiple networks to address problems, foster multiple partnerships with other institutions to ensure continuity (beyond the limitations of semesters), clearly identifying project needs and problems in the beginning, and listing valuable assets.
Other discussions touched upon the topics of using accessible language and managing expectations and working toward reciprocity. Another intervention proposed toward bridging many of the aforementioned gaps in resources, institutional memory, and differing cultural contexts was to create a network of community connectors that would serve as liaisons and mentors for ensuring equitable collaborations.
Thank you for participating and reading. Please sign up for our newsletter here to stay updated on the latest community highlights and get in touch with Becky with any additional questions- becky@elab.emerson.edu.
