Slow Research and Mutual Benefit: Twitter Chat Highlights

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How might academics and community organizations partner to create social change? This was the central question of the Engagement Lab’s recent Boston Civic Media Twitter chat on February 23rd 2017.

Over 68 people from over a dozen organizations, including groups like the social innovation firm Continuum to Imagine Boston 2030 to BU’s Initiative on Cities, special guest tweeters from Kim Lucas (Mayor’s Office New Urban Mechanics) to Cara Berg Powers (Transformative Culture Project) to Brittany Thomas (Zumix), and even an undergraduate course at MIT called Networked Social Movements joined the hour-long chat to share their stories, tips, and questions for ethical cross-sector collaboration.

As participants shared their stories of challenges and successes, three central themes emerged: reciprocity, intentional language, and community initiative. Below are highlights and summaries of the themes that developed during the chat. For a more in-depth analysis, you can read the full Twitter chat transcript here.

Reciprocity and Going Offline

Academics must acknowledge the value of expertise and knowledge that lives beyond the ivory tower. Twitter chat participants shared negative stereotypes that academics must overcome if they are genuinely committed to community-based partnerships. As academics’ funding and research interests fluctuate, some of the worse stereotypes include: “parachuting into places” (Priyanka deSouza) or being “agents of colonialism” (Sasha Costanza-Chock). However, through fostering meaningful relationships, staying curious, and building trust, academics can make serious progress toward mutually-beneficial collaborations. While they are time and resource intensive, stronger cross-sector partnerships pay off in the long run. As Cara Berg Powers reminded us of the African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go farther, go together.” More participants echoed these efforts from the framework of mutual learning:

Reciprocity comes into play from the very beginning of collaborations. It may be most relevant in articulating the obvious: taking stock of what both sides have to offer as well as their aspirations for collaborations. For instance, academic institutions often have access to tools, meeting spaces, and grant-giving networks. Likewise community organizations often have strong local networks and local knowledge.

Academics can better prepare for collaborations by applying anti-oppression frameworks, interrogating implicit biases (Cara Berg Powers) and seeking multi-lingual support where needed.

Next, partners must acknowledge the power differences which can permeate even the most mundane tasks. For instance, even a quick chat with between academics and community partners can be extractive, as multiple participants voiced:

The investment in co-producing data among partners increases buy-in for the outcomes. Co-production necessitates shared agreements on data ownership, accessibility, and intellectual property concerns. It further prepares all partners for publically presenting and speaking about the research data. Reciprocity can be fostered in communications work by co-presenting where possible and repackaging the content based on the communication channel (i.e. preparing an academic paper or writing an article for a community newspaper). Internally, co-production necessitates that all collaborators share the similar expectations for project scoping, management, and timelines and that the appropriate accountability mechanisms as well as feedback loops are in place.

Overall, participants agreed that the most important skills for reciprocity are listening and patience which improve project facilitation and consensus-building. Humor helps, as does:

The Language We Use Matters

The language we use informs the quality of our interactions. From reducing jargon, to re-conceiving of partnership roles, academics can increase equity in their collaborations. For instance, instead of referring to partners as “research subjects” they can be referred to as “collaborators” or “co-researchers”. Sasha Costanza-Chock reminded us that power is shared when the team is more flattened:

When people are treated as subjects with instrumental values attached to them, it can be easier to deal with them mechanically- whereas participation in prolonged engagements tends to be more fluid, evolving, and as Eric Gordon writes, “meaningfully inefficient.” Similarly, subtle but powerful differences occur through shifting the narrative from “helping” community partners as if they are victims to working with them as empowered agents.

One of the most tangible ways to reduce jargon is in editing internal working documents. Most scientific studies are monitored by institutional review boards (or IRB’s) to ensure that they are complying by ethical standards. IRB forms are often full of academic jargon.

The Engagement Lab’s Community Approach to Research Partnerships strives to address this gap of inclusiveness in the design and execution of research with an MOU template document for establishing more equitable collaborations. This template is a living document, so please use it and let us know how it goes by tweeting to @EngageLab or emailing info@elab.emerson.edu!

Community-Driven Research

Similar to other forms of inequity, research inequity can be structural and thus can appear as early as in the conceptualizations of a project. Twitter chat participants urged each other to stay curious during initial research explorations instead of dictating a project’s focus. To further ensure that research is in service of community needs, academics can make space for community organizations to define the research questions themselves. This allows for asset-based community development to emerge so that existing community resources can be leveraged.

In traditional academic research, sharing the final data and outcomes can be considered the most powerful and impactful moment of the research process. However, in a community-driven approach, there can be power in the research process itself. With empowerment coming from the research process (rather than the research outcomes) not only might the original research questions shift but the methods themselves can also differ:

There are many examples of mutually-beneficial community-based research projects that range from citizen science monitoring (ex: surfers testing coastal indicators) to crowd-sourced information on wiki’s. Here are some fantastic projects shared by the chat participants:

• Race Forward (a racial justice innovation think tank)
• Who Pays (a report on the true cost of incarceration)
• Turkopticon (a crowdsourced accountability mechanism of Amazon Mechanical Turk employers)
• Off/Page by Youth Speaks (a multimedia platform for youth journalism on stigmatized issues)
• Digital Matutus (collaborative mobile mapping of transportation systems)
• The Atlanta Community Engagement Playbook (a toolkit for residents, community, city staff and service providers to plan community engagements),
• OpenReblock (collaborative urban planning with a focus on climate resilience for slums).

Tweeters also shared a range of exciting cross-sector partnerships that are local to Boston. The non-profit City Life/Vida Urbana partnered with Harvard Law and the Latino community in East Boston to resist displacement. The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society collaborated with local youth radio station Zumix to make a playlist on careers. Many local academics have even partnered with the city directly to improve its infrastructure. Catherine D’Ignazio’s Civic Art and Design Studio collected pedestrian traffic data that informed a decision to prolong stoplight times (see the Boston Globe article here). Boston’s Civic Research Director shared another impactful project as well:

Provocations and Continuations

Our chat ended with aspirations for the future of academic and community collaborations, but it also included cautious reflections. Several participants felt that university partners should be aware of their gentrification effects.

And similarly on ethical representation:

Our chat ended with reflections on opportunities for growth and open-ended questions:

• In the context of relationships built over longer periods of time, how might you know when a project is over?
• How might you make data not just public but accessible?
• How might art and storytelling be leveraged in research
• How might you scale a successful local project?
• How can community-based research be considered more toward tenure promotions?
• Can we shift the culture by introducing concepts of “slow research”?

We hope you keep these conversations online and in-person!

• Tweet with #BostonCivicMedia to address our extended network
• Join either our bi-weekly listserv or our quarterly newsletter to learn more
• RSVP to our next events! Teaching Climate, Inspiring Action and the Data Rescue Boston hackathon back-to-back on March 24th!