Context: Communities, funding agencies, and institutions are increasingly involving community stakeholders as partners in research. Community stakeholders can provide firsthand knowledge and insight, ...thereby increasing research relevance and feasibility. Despite the greater emphasis and use of community-academic partnerships (CAP) across multiple disciplines, definitions of partnerships and methodologies vary greatly, and no systematic reviews consolidating this literature have been published. The purpose of this article, then, is to facilitate the continued growth of this field by examining the characteristics of CAPs and the current state of the science, identifying the facilitating and hindering influences on the collaborative process, and developing a common term and conceptual definition for use across disciplines. Methods: Our systematic search of 6 major literature databases generated 1,332 unique articles, 50 of which met our criteria for inclusion and provided data on 54 unique CAPs. We then analyzed studies to describe CAP characteristics and to identify the terms and methods used, as well as the common influences on the CAP process and distal outcomes. Findings: CAP research spans disciplines, involves a variety of community stakeholders, and focuses on a large range of study topics. CAP research articles, however, rarely report characteristics such as membership numbers or duration. Most studies involved case studies using qualitative methods to collect data on the collaborative process. Although various terms were used to describe collaborative partnerships, few studies provided conceptual definitions. Twenty-three facilitating and hindering factors influencing the CAP collaboration process emerged from the literature. Outcomes from the CAPs most often included developing or refining tangible products. Conclusions: Based on our systematic review, we recommend using a single term, community-academic partnership, as well as a conceptual definition to unite multiple research disciplines. In addition, CAP characteristics and methods should be reported more systematically to advance the field (eg, to develop CAP evaluation tools). We have identified the most common influences that facilitate and hinder CAPs, which in turn should guide their development and sustainment.
Participatory Action Research (PAR) approaches and methods have seen an explosion of recent interest in the social and environmental sciences. PAR involves collaborative research, education and ...action which is oriented towards social change, representing a major epistemological challenge to mainstream research traditions. It has recently been the subject of heated critique and debate and rapid theoretical and methodological development.
This book captures these developments, exploring the justification, theorisation, practice and implications of PAR. It offers a critical introduction to understanding and working with PAR in different social, spatial and institutional contexts. The authors engage with PAR’s radical potential, while maintaining a critical awareness of its challenges and dangers. The book is divided into three parts. The first part explores the intellectual, ethical and pragmatic contexts of PAR; the development and diversity of approaches to PAR; recent poststructuralist perspectives on PAR as a form of power; the ethic of participation; and issues of safety and well-being. Part two is a critical exploration of the politics, places and practices of PAR. Contributors draw on diverse research experiences with differently situated groups and issues including environmentally sustainable practices, family livelihoods, sexual health, gendered experiences of employment, and specific communities such as people with disabilities, migrant groups, and young people. The principles, dilemmas and strategies associated with participatory approaches and methods including diagramming, cartographies, art, theatre, photovoice, video and geographical information systems are also discussed. Part three reflects on how effective PAR is, including the analysis of its products and processes, participatory learning, representation and dissemination, institutional benefits and challenges, and working between research, action, activism and change.
The authors find that a spatial perspective and an attention to scale offer helpful means of negotiating the potentials and paradoxes of PAR. This approach responds to critiques of PAR by highlighting how the spatial politics of practising participation can be mobilised to create more effective and just research processes and outcomes. The book adds significant weight to the recent critical reappraisal of PAR, suggesting why, when, where and how we might take forward PAR’s commitment to enabling collaborative social transformation. It will be particularly useful to researchers and students of Human Geography, Development Studies and Sociology.
1. Introduction: Connecting People, Participation and Place Part 1: Reflection 2. Participatory Action Research: Origins, Approaches and Methods 3. Participation as a Form of Power: Retheorising Empowerment and Spatialising Participatory Action Research 4. Participatory Action Research: Making a Difference to Theory, Practice and Action 5. Toward a Participatory Ethics 6. Participatory Action Research and Researcher Safety Part 2: Action 7. Environment and Development: (Re)Connecting Community and Commons in New England Fisheries, USA 8. Working Towards and beyond Collaborative Resource Management: Parks, People and Participation in the Peruvian Amazon 9. Researching Sexual Health: Two Participatory Action Research Projects in Zimbabwe 10. Gender and Employment: Participatory Social Auditing in Kenya 11. Inclusive Methodologies: Including Disabled People in Participatory Action Research in Scotland and Canada 12. Working with Migrant Communities: Collaborating with the Kalayaan Centre in Vancouver, Canada 13. Peer Research with Youth: Negotiating (Sub)Cultural Capital, Place and Participation in Aotearoa/New Zealand 14. Participatory Diagramming: A Critical View from North East England 15. Participatory Cartographies: Reflections from Research Performances in Fiji and Tanzania 16. Participatory Art: Capturing Spatial Vocabularies in a Collaborative Visual Methodology 17. Participatory Theatre: ‘Creating a Source for Staging an Example’ in the USA 18. Photovoice: Insights into Marginalisation through a ‘Community Lens’ in Saskatchewan, Canada 19. Uniting People with Place Using Participatory Video in Aotearoa/New Zealand: A Ngati Hauiti Journey 20. Participatory GIS: The Humboldt/West Humboldt Park Community GIS Project, Chicago, USA Part 3: Reflection 21. Participatory Data Analysis 22. Participatory Learning: Opportunities and Challenges 23. Beyond the Journal Article: Representations, Audience and the Presentation of Participatory Action Research 24. Linking Participatory Research to Action: Institutional Challenges 25. Relating Action to Activism: Theoretical and Methodological Reflections. Conclusion 26. Conclusion: The Space(s) and Scale(s) of Participatory Action Research: Constructing Empowering Geographies?
Sara Kindon is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography and Development Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Her research interests focus on participation, visuality and cross-cultural research. She has worked in Costa Rica, Indonesia and in rural and urban contexts in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Rachel Pain is a social geographer at Durham University in the UK. Her research interests include fear, well-being and social justice. She is currently conducting PAR with young asylum seekers, refugees and locally born young people in north east England.
Mike Kesby is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK. His research interests include participatory methods, HIV education programs, gender relations and children’s geographies. He works predominately in rural Zimbabwe.
The relationship between on-line communities and on-line brands is investigated by examining how on-line brand community's characteristics affect community commitment and brand loyalty-in particular, ...how the hosting type of an on-line brand community affects the relationships between characteristics and community commitment. A survey of 250 respondents revealed that their community commitment was significantly influenced by their community interaction and the rewards for their activities, but not by information quality and system quality. The analysis shows that the hosting type of a community has a significant moderating effect and that community commitment increases brand loyalty. Interpretations and implications of the findings, as well as future research directions, are discussed.
Funds of knowledge Gonzalez, Norma; Moll, Luis C; Amanti, Cathy
2005, 20060421, 2006-04-21, 2005-12-31
eBook, Book
The concept of "funds of knowledge" is based on a simple premise: people are competent and have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge. The claim in this book is that ...first-hand research experiences with families allow one to document this competence and knowledge, and that such engagement provides many possibilities for positive pedagogical actions. Drawing from both Vygotskian and neo-sociocultural perspectives in designing a methodology that views the everyday practices of language and action as constructing knowledge, the funds of knowledge approach facilitates a systematic and powerful way to represent communities in terms of the resources they possess and how to harness them for classroom teaching. This book accomplishes three objectives: It gives readers the basic methodology and techniques followed in the contributors' funds of knowledge research; it extends the boundaries of what these researchers have done; and it explores the applications to classroom practice that can result from teachers knowing the communities in which they work. In a time when national educational discourses focus on system reform and wholesale replicability across school sites, this book offers a counter-perspective stating that instruction must be linked to students' lives, and that details of effective pedagogy should be linked to local histories and community contexts. This approach should not be confused with parent participation programs, although that is often a fortuitous consequence of the work described. It is also not an attempt to teach parents "how to do school" although that could certainly be an outcome if the parents so desired. Instead, the funds of knowledge approach attempts to accomplish something that may be even more challenging: to alter the perceptions of working-class or poor communities by viewing their households primarily in terms of their strengths and resources, their defining pedagogical characteristi
This open access book deals with community-based attempts on the part of Aboriginal communities and groups in Australia to address harms arising from alcohol misuse. Alcohol-related harms are viewed ...as both a product of colonisation and dispossession and a contributor to ongoing social, economic and health-related disadvantage, both in Australia and in other countries with colonised Indigenous populations, such as Canada, the US and New Zealand. This book contributes to an evidence-base by bringing together a selection of existing Australian documents considered by the editors to have continuing relevance to all those concerned with dealing with alcohol-related harms among Aboriginal peoples, These are contextualised in original chapters that recount key events, ideas, and programs. The book is a practical resource for all people and groups concerned with addressing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander alcohol-related harms, both at the community level and at the level of policy-making and administration.
Largely overlooked in the theoretical and empirical literature on the crime decline is a long tradition of research in criminology and urban sociology that considers how violence is regulated through ...informal sources of social control arising from residents and organizations internal to communities. In this article, we incorporate the "systemic" model of community life into debates on the U.S. crime drop, and we focus on the role that local nonprofit organizations played in the national decline of violence from the 1990s to the 2010s. Using longitudinal data and a strategy to account for the endogeneity of nonprofit formation, we estimate the causal effect on violent crime of nonprofits focused on reducing violence and building stronger communities. Drawing on a panel of 264 cities spanning more than 20 years, we estimate that every 10 additional organizations focusing on crime and community life in a city with 100,000 residents leads to a 9 percent reduction in the murder rate, a 6 percent reduction in the violent crime rate, and a 4 percent reduction in the property crime rate.
In The Sanctuary City, Domenic Vitiello argues that sanctuary means much more than the limited protections offered by city governments or churches sheltering immigrants from deportation. It is a ...wider set of protections and humanitarian support for vulnerable newcomers. Sanctuary cities are the places where immigrants and their allies create safe spaces to rebuild lives and communities, often through the work of social movements and community organizations or civil society. Philadelphia has been an important center of sanctuary and reflects the growing diversity of American cities in recent decades. One result of this diversity is that sanctuary means different things for different immigrant, refugee, and receiving communities. Vitiello explores the migration, settlement, and local and transnational civil society of Central Americans, Southeast Asians, Liberians, Arabs, Mexicans, and their allies in the region across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Together, their experiences illuminate the diversity of immigrants and refugees in the United States and what is at stake for different people, and for all of us, in our immigration debates.
Advocates for civil rights, environmental justice, and movements promoting social justice require data and may lack trust in public authorities, turning instead to academic scientists to help address ...their questions. Assessing historical exposure to toxic chemicals, especially in situations of a specific industrial source of pollution affecting a community, is critical for informing appropriate public health and policy responses. We describe a community-driven approach to integrate retrospective environmental hazard exposure assessment with community organizing to address concerns about the extent of exposure to toxic metals in a predominantly working-class, Latinx community living near a now-closed lead–acid battery smelter facility. Named the “Truth Fairy Project” by leaders of the community organization East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, this community–university partnership aimed to assess prenatal and early-life exposures to toxic metals through biomarkers of exposure in baby/deciduous teeth. This partnership integrated community mobilization with empirical research, informing residents about toxic metal exposures and improving the community’s capacity to respond to a public health crisis.
Nodes in real-world networks organize into densely linked communities where edges appear with high concentration among the members of the community. Identifying such communities of nodes has proven ...to be a challenging task due to a plethora of definitions of network communities, intractability of methods for detecting them, and the issues with evaluation which stem from the lack of a reliable gold-standard ground-truth. In this paper, we distinguish between
structural
and
functional
definitions of network communities. Structural definitions of communities are based on connectivity patterns, like the density of connections between the community members, while functional definitions are based on (often unobserved) common function or role of the community members in the network. We argue that the goal of network community detection is to extract
functional
communities based on the
connectivity structure
of the nodes in the network. We then identify networks with explicitly labeled functional communities to which we refer as
ground-truth communities
. In particular, we study a set of 230 large real-world social, collaboration, and information networks where nodes explicitly state their community memberships. For example, in social networks, nodes explicitly join various interest-based social groups. We use such social groups to define a reliable and robust notion of ground-truth communities. We then propose a methodology, which allows us to compare and quantitatively evaluate how different structural definitions of communities correspond to ground-truth functional communities. We study 13 commonly used structural definitions of communities and examine their sensitivity, robustness and performance in identifying the ground-truth. We show that the 13 structural definitions are heavily correlated and naturally group into four classes. We find that two of these definitions, Conductance and Triad participation ratio, consistently give the best performance in identifying ground-truth communities. We also investigate a task of detecting communities given a single seed node. We extend the local spectral clustering algorithm into a heuristic parameter-free community detection method that easily scales to networks with more than 100 million nodes. The proposed method achieves 30 % relative improvement over current local clustering methods.
This article examines participants' responses to receiving their results in a study of household exposure to endocrine disrupting compounds and other pollutants. The authors study how the "exposure ...experience"—the embodied, personal experience and understanding of chronic exposure to environmental pollutants—is shaped by community context and the report-back process itself. In addition, the authors investigate an activist, collective form of exposure experience. The authors analyze themes of expectations and learning, trust, and action. The findings reveal that while participants interpret scientific results to affirm lay knowledge of urban industrial toxics, they also absorb new information regarding other pollutant sources. By linking the public understanding of science literature to the illness and exposure experience concepts, this study unravels the complex relationship between lay experience and lay understanding of science. It also shows that to support policy development and/or social change, community-based participatory research efforts must attend to participants' understanding of science.
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