Resisting Bureaucracies: Reflections on Community Engagement and Digital Technology

Community-based research can be tricky; this piece offers practical recommendations for a complicated process

In social movement research, community-based and participatory collaborations are necessary for coproducing knowledge that can contribute to social change, as well as for facilitating processes of redistributing resources and expertise. Ideally, these partnerships are mutually generative. In practice, these partnerships can be tricky to navigate and can reproduce harmful dynamics given the complex, contentious, and often extractive relationships that universities and nonprofit research institutions have with activists, grassroots organizations, and political collectives.

This essay outlines some challenges and recommendations for researchers within academic institutions and research centers conducting community-based research in digital environments. Community-based research is a participatory process that brings together members of a self-defined community and/or representative organization to coproduce a research design and process, mutually share expertise, and cocreate useful outcomes and tools. In addition to community organizing using different digital tools (e.g., social media and crowdfunding platforms), research collaboration also relies on digital applications, including video conferencing, group communication and messaging platforms, email, and cloud storage systems.

The recommendations presented here reflect the ways that individual researchers may often move between and work across different political collectives and groups and participate politically beyond their institutional affiliation. These lessons emerge primarily from working in collaboration with small independent political groups, organizations, and collectives, such as mutual aid networks and worker collectives and cooperatives.

"We're messy on purpose"

Organizing is messy work, so Rachel Kuo and Lorelei Lee creating this toolkit, a set of best practices to address common challenges found in community organizing. They draw on interviews with organizers in collectives like the BIPOC Adult Industry Collective, Lysistrata, Red Canary Song, Whose Corner Is It Anyway, California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, and Street Vendors Project.

Academic understandings of resilience must shift away from individualized ideas toward community resilience, particularly when it comes to caregiving and caregivers

Crises, whether society-wide or personal, are endemic to the human condition. Yet academia and its associated institutions persist in having insufficient scaffolding to support its members during periods of crisis. No one knows this more acutely than academic caregivers of children, elders, disabled adults, and other loved ones with special needs. Academic caregivers are disproportionately women, and the COVID-19 pandemic brought to light our precarious position and the lack of structural and institutional responses to cope with crises. Academia is decades behind other sectors in family leave and accommodation policies, and caregivers are suffering the consequences. In this article, we outline recommendations for shifting away from individual approaches to resilience, instead building organizational and community resilience in academia. Our focus is on caregivers in academic teaching and research roles; however, these recommendations will help everyone in academia, especially institutions, withstand future crises and are critical for academia’s sustainability.