Chapter 6: Beyond “Us” and “Them”: Community-Based Research as a Politics of Engagement

Communities, particularly communities of color, have too often been used as laboratories by outsiders, and have rarely benefitted from the results of research. Community-based engaged scholarship is a response to the exploitative practice of outsiders. As indigenous scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2007) explains: “Research, like schooling, once the tool for colonization and oppression is very gradually coming to be seen as a potential means to reclaim languages, histories and knowledge, to find solutions to the negative impacts of colonialism and to give voice to an alternative way of knowing and of being” (p. 10).

But what does this type of scholarship look like in practice? How can engaged scholarship contribute to decolonization and be accountable to the communities with whom we work? How does research change when it is explicitly developed to be used by the community for their own purposes? How might research contribute to social change movements? In this chapter I share my personal experiences doing community-based participatory action research in Salt Lake City, Utah with a team of high school youth researchers who developed a participatory action research documentary project entitled “Red Flags: Stereotyping & Racism in the Schools” (2006-8). Teasing out the critical issues that engaged scholarship raises, I reflect upon my commitments to community-based participatory action research (PAR).