Abstract
From opposite sides of the world, scholars in two universities have produced books that reflect on the adult learning involved when universities undertake community-based research. Each book combines case studies of actual projects with some reflection on the nature of this work as a distinct field of research practice within universities of the Global North. In Australia, the researchers were located in the rural city of Toowoomba, on a campus of the University of Southern Queensland, while in Canada, the host institution was the University of Victoria in British Colombia. The editors of both collections argue strongly for the importance of community-based research, and they locate their initiatives in a global trend toward greater engagement between universities and the specific geographical locations in which they are situated.
The Australian collection focuses more on a series of specific projects, in which university-based scholars worked with nongovernmental organizations and local government to undertake and evaluate programs designed to address perceived social issues in the region, while the Canadian collection is less about specific projects and more about the learning and teaching that occurs when such projects are undertaken. The Australian collection includes seven case study chapters, of which three reflect on different aspects of a community program in which marginalized youth and older community members worked together, initially at the initiative of nongovernmental organizations, but eventually supported by a local Department of Education public school and by the local government authority, as well as by the university itself. While this work does not break any new theoretical ground, or present programs that are significantly different from others existing in other places both with and without university support, they form useful case studies that could be used with students in social work and community education courses. They also provide evidence for university administrators and research managers that community-based research can generate measurable research outputs, in the form of books and articles, and improved relationships with local communities and local institutions. The case study chapters are framed by a set of introductory chapters reviewing the literature of university–community engagement and outlining the specific regional and local context in which the research occurred. It concludes with four chapters that discuss in more general terms some of the issues that the case studies have helped identify.
The Canadian collection, on the other hand, addresses a slightly different audience, namely, academics and administrators who wish to undertake and support community-based research, especially by graduate students, and wish to know about the complexities and pitfalls, as much as about the benefits. It does include several case studies, but it also includes a large number of chapters that are reflections based on longer periods of undertaking this work. In this regard, it is much more a book about research philosophy and research method, and less about the projects themselves. Perhaps because of this difference in focus, the Canadian authors engage in a much more self-critical account, one that connects to the long tradition of critical and participatory action research and its connection with popular education in the Global South, while the Australian collection occupies the less-confronting ground of university–community engagement sponsored by the PASCAL International Observatory on Higher Education.
As an Australian myself, I found these differences not nearly so disturbing as the total absence in the University of Southern Queensland collection of ANY reference to the Aboriginal peoples of the region in which they undertook their work. Although the local government and the university itself acknowledge on their websites that they exist on the traditional lands of the Giabal and Jarowair peoples, the continuing and unfinished story of colonial occupation and dispossession in Toowoomba does not surface anywhere in this book, not even in the chapter that outlines the history and political economy of the region. By comparison, the University of Victoria collection begins by acknowledging the traditional ownership of the Coast and Straits Salish peoples of the land on which the work was undertaken. Moreover, it includes several chapters written and cowritten by Aboriginal authors, and the authors of every chapter reference the settler nature of the society in which they work. One is forced to ask, why is this so? Part of the answer may lie in the fundamental difference between a country where treaties, however inadequate, acknowledge the prior occupation and sovereignty of some Indigenous peoples, and one that does not even mention Indigenous peoples in its founding Constitution.
Overall, I found the Canadian collection to be much more useful, in terms of extending the reader’s understanding of the nature of community-based research and the theory behind it. It is much more “post”-postmodern, in the way it valorizes other forms of knowledge, especially Indigenous knowledges, and other ways of communicating research findings, including through poetry and the arts. At a practical level, from the first chapter, it also confronts in more detail some of the harsh reality of actually doing this kind of work, such as the conflicts that can arise both with communities and with the university, and the risks of encouraging students into this field without proper preparation.
That said, both collections remain largely within the progressive or social democratic tradition of adult education, which historically has sought to bridge the gap between the institutions of higher education and the so-called disadvantaged populations that exist outside their walls, or as might be more accurate a description these days, behind the pay-walls of their learning management systems. The common focus, in both books, on projects that would have once been called social work, or community development work, should remind us that community engagement is not a new phenomenon at all in adult education. It was already a feature of our field in the 19th century Settlement houses where social work students went to work among the poor, and in the classes of the Workers Education Association, which embodied Oxford University’s turn toward the working class. The lack of this longer historical perspective helps obscure the confronting conclusion that the prospects of success in such an endeavor, in terms of any real redistribution of power and resources, are not good; since, apart from a brief period following World War 2, social inequality at both national and global levels has remained stable or increased, and the increase has accelerated in both Canada and Australia since the advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s.
Adult educators familiar with the writings of Paulo Freire, Antonio Gramsci, or Karl Marx, or with the more recent work of Paula Allman or Sharzad Mojab should know why this is so, why well-intentioned liberal adult education does not change the balance of power in society through a process as neutral as “community engagement.” The disadvantaged, as Freire wrote, do not exist outside society or marginal to it; rather, they are an integral part of it, and their “disadvantage” is the reverse side of the advantage of others, university staff and students included. Both are products of the same processes of social reproduction, which can only be interrupted by major movements for social change. This is why the radicals of the Plebs League and the independent working class education movement of the late 19th and early 20th century movement called the Workers Education Association a “gigantic conspiracy of benevolence”; and why the South African antiapartheid scholar Basil Moore rejected the term disadvantaged, because, unlike exploitation, it renders invisible those who are doing the disadvantaging, and encourages “do-goodism.”
By all means, then, let adult education continue to struggle within the university to allow academics and students to do “engaged” research. But let us not delude ourselves, that this represents anything other than “an abbreviated experience of transformation,” in Allman’s phrase, even at its best. The gap between universities and the majority world is due to the fact that both are products of an imperial order now in decline, one to which the only significant threat is the ever-growing “movement of movements.” In the decades to come, it is likely that more and more university-trained researchers and student researchers in northern universities will see the need to work alongside and inside these social movements, just as they did in the eruptions of 1968, and in the Free University movement of that period, which provided the original inspiration for the modern academic turn to “the community.” To the extent that this occurs, we can expect that the “liberal middle” of community-engaged research supported by university managements will slowly disappear, and the most useful outcomes of our research will be to inform, not academic book chapters and collections, but serious practical programs aimed at major political and social transformation.