Facilitators: Anita Cheng, Aurash Khawarzad, and Jaime Jover.

Participants: Elizabeth Cooper, Bianca Mona, Silvia Rivera Alfaro, Anushay Said, and Joseph Torres-González.

Our second iteration of the Just Research Workshop—following last year’s generative and provocative first series of workshops—brought together nine research-activists across CUNY campuses working on a wide range of community-based topics from the Arts, Anthropology, Environmental Psychology, Indigenous Studies, Geography, and Women Studies. During the four sessions over the spring 2022 semester, we worked to create a safe, horizontal environment where participants felt confident to share their views, grappling with tensions and contradictions in community-based research, grounded in specific research, creative, and pedagogical projects that we are not usually paid to tend to. We highlight here our takeaways on key, grounding concepts from our experiences together.

Community and power: we work with and for community development and justice. In many ways, our commitment to “communities” can be taken for granted. Indeed, we discussed how community-based research, social practice art, etc. appear to be “hot” in academic and art worlds, but how we still lack understanding of how implement and actually realize this in substantive ways. For instance, we need to define the community we work with, so how and where do we set the boundaries? Sometimes it is clear-cut because of sociological or geographic reasons, but it also happens that it is difficult to define who belongs to a community and who does not. How does the process of self-identification work? Who commands it? This kind of conversation relates to power relations: as in every group, there are always people who hold power. As engaged scholars, especially with disadvantaged or people in need, we must distinguish who is who. As important as fighting for a community is to be aware of potential inequalities within the community.

Justice and democracy: activist-informed research is about justice in one way or another, but it is not simple to explain. We examined different conceptualizations of justice, especially as linked to honesty and equality, and also to community and democracy. But, who defines these conceptualizations? When does democratic validity lead to justice? One problem comes back to the previous point, i.e., who holds power within a community, a society? Suppose those claiming justice are not represented in the system. In that case, if they are not successful, they could rarely identify themselves with that system, and it should not surprise us if they position themselves outside of it, as non-belonging. Or in other words, if democracy does not comprise its full extension, meaning power does not reside on the people, and those on top are not accountable, it is only logical to think that some people on the bottom, the oppressed and side-lined, disassociate. In those cases, justice does not serve honesty and equality; instead, it becomes a tool against part of the community, fostering non-democratic practices like segregation and alienation. A key takeaway was the necessity to reframe justice as a crucial concept in any social formation vis-à-vis democracy, especially concerning the process by which the latter unfolds.

Reform and academia: reframing justice calls for a reformist agenda. We thought about the process, strengths, and challenges of reframing justice within current political institutions, and how most are interwoven with or embedded in notions of the Western nation-state. Reforms can be implemented at other scales of politic-economic power and outside the West, as decolonial and postcolonial theory and practice shows, in Bolivia or Chile as recent examples. Nevertheless, we wondered: do we believe in reform? Going back to the act of research, questions about positionality arose here because, as academics, we are part of institutions and within the system. Is it possible to work within a system that we do not entirely agree with and that is often unjust and unequal (to us, and especially to the communities we work with)? Are we legitimizing the system by doing so? We did not reach any consensus beyond the importance of self-awareness, uneven relations of power, and the necessity to implement community-based research methodologies that give voice to the communities in setting their agendas and goals.

Resistance: to achieve more just and equal societies we need plans that encompass both direct actions and softer reforms. How does that translate into daily practices? What does resistance look like? The communities we work with keep reframing their strategies and tactics, adjusting to their (also evolving) goals. In our discussions, it seemed helpful to distinguish the everyday emancipatory strategies we have observed as being used by BIPOC communities in the US, from the long-term, repertoires of resistance and alternative institution-building, for example, by the Zapatistas in Chiapas. Again, we could not reach a general conclusion beyond the diversities and richness of every struggle, our necessity as researchers to plug into them by active listening, putting their interest in front instead of ours.

When combined, our most fundamental learning is that our definitions of justice, democracy, and community are linked, and that many global, institutional, and personal transitions can be re-defined, re-contextualized, and understood in endless ways. These definitions are constantly changing. Thus, we must be aware of these ongoing processes and understand that the ways to research them are not fixed, but evolve together with the struggles. Through our academic activity, we are not only helping the community but also transforming their reality, for example, the ways in which they see themselves. That is to say: we need to be mindful of our impacts as academics, striving to reduce these while co-producing knowledge (theoretical and empirical) that helps the goals of the people we serve. Because it is ultimately them and the public good more broadly, and not our institutions, the reasons why we carry out research in the first place. Overall, the workshop was a helpful opportunity to share personal and professional experiences as engaged scholars, reflect on the principles that drive our activity as scholars and activists, engage in conversations about research methods, ethics, and practices, and exchange information to keep our ambitions alive for social change.

“Just Research: Study, Struggle, Solidarity” is a short workshop series on conducting public scholarship and democratizing the production of knowledge.

Building on the first Just Research series in the spring of 2021, this workshop takes place over 4 weeks, provides $500 as an honorarium upon completion, and is specifically tailored for adjunct instructors in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.

This workshop series aims to help CUNY Adjuncts to advance research projects (including but not limited to dissertations) that draw upon some aspect of Community-Based Research and related methodologies, such as Participatory Action Research, Collaborative Inquiry, and Practice-Based Research. Such research tackles community problems, with the aim of combining knowledge and action for policy or social change.

The workshop series will focus on

1. skills and strategies for participating effectively in such research,

2. navigating issues of rigor and validity in such work,

3. developing appropriate research strategies and outlines of presentations/ articles/ chapters for dissemination, and

4. building structures of support and room for reflexive work along the way.

Throughout the series, we will also prioritize our meetings as opportunities to broach typically overlooked or sensitive topics, to share concerns or reservations as well as aspirations related to our work, to support one another and make real progress on our respective projects, and to collectively share insights on negotiating academic milestones, disciplinary boundaries, and austerity in collaborative research.

This course aims to facilitate multi-disciplinary dialogues on theories and principles of community-based research (with special attention to race, gender, and class dimensions), the strengths and limitations of such approaches, and guiding practices and case studies/ models for successful research projects. We have designed this series to support and strengthen the significant scholarly, creative, and pedagogical work of adjuncts teaching in the humanities and humanistic social sciences across CUNY.

Eligibility:

CUNY Adjuncts: This workshop is designed for CUNY-affiliated adjuncts/ researchers, who have already formulated at least an idea for a research project. We aim to think through and reflect upon research projects that center on the complexity of real-life sociopolitical contexts and struggles, and implications and impact upon people on the ground (alongside theoretical models and debates in academic literatures). We particularly encourage previous applicants to the CUNY Adjunct Incubator program to apply to participate in this workshop series, regardless of whether their applications were successful and received funding.

For CUNY Students: Before applying, please contact the office of financial aid at your campus to ensure that you are eligible to receive this funding without it adversely impacting your existing financial aid package. In your email to them, please include the fellowship amount, the semester you would receive it, and your EMPL ID, which you can find in CUNYFirst under Student Center.

Application deadline:

11:59 pm on Monday, February 21st, 2022.

Link to application 

Stipend:

At this time, we are able to provide a $500 honorarium for each participant upon completion of the workshop series.

Time commitment:

This workshop series is designed to require 4 hours of participation each week, comprising of roughly 2-3 hours of preparatory work and a 1.5-hour meeting each week.

Schedule: Fridays, 10:30 am -12:00 pm (Dates: 3/11, 3/18, 3/25, and 4/1)

How and why did we develop this workshop series?

This workshop series builds upon last year’s Just Research workshop series, which in turn followed the success of the CUNY Adjunct Incubator, a collaborative effort between the Gittell Collective and Center for the Humanities Mellon Foundation-funded Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research. The Adjunct Incubator project advocates to improve the material conditions of university life and make them more equitable for adjuncts, by supporting the significant scholarly, creative, and pedagogical work of adjuncts teaching in the humanities and humanistic social sciences across CUNY. Providing social, logistical, financial, and professional support for the creation and circulation of knowledge by CUNY adjuncts, this platform promotes the crucial work of part-time faculty across the CUNY community and senior college campuses.

We were struck by the immense interest in urgent, action-oriented public scholarship among adjunct instructors throughout the CUNY campuses. We developed this workshop series after noting the dearth of courses that emphasize (or even mention) participatory methods and methodologies in social research and the public humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center. Of particular importance is the centrality of ethics and the obligations of public university in anti-racist solidarities and public scholarship.

The first workshop series was led by Professor Celina Su (Environmental Psychology and Urban Education, director of the Gittell Collective) and Kendra Sullivan (Associate Director, Center for the Humanities). This year will be led by Jaime Jover (Gittell Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban Studies, Environmental Psychology Program at the Graduate Center), Anita Cheng (Film and Media Department at Hunter College & Art Department at Brooklyn College) and Aurash Khawarzad (Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Graduate Center), who participated last year.

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Syllabus

1st session. March 11, 2022. Unpacking the roots and uses of participation in research 

Overview: the session will cover why is worth using participatory methods, discuss different approaches and how to select and adjust them depending on our research proposal, and how to navigate questions of positionality and ethical dilemmas that may come up. Readings:

1. Cornwall, Andrea. 2008. Unpacking ‘Participation’: Models, Meanings, and Practice. Community Development Journal, 43:3, pp. 269–283.
2. Appadurai, A. 2006. The Right to Research. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 4:2, pp. 167-177. 
3. Pulido, L. FAQs: Frequently (Un)Asked Questions about Being a Scholar Activist, pp. 341-365, in Hale, Charles, ed., Engaging Contradictions.

2nd session. March 18, 2022. Articulating Methodologies: Positionality statements, framework decision making and how identity informs

Overview: How do we go about this? How do we select specific methods that help us to connect relevant theories and research questions to communities on the ground, and what we are ultimately interested in learning about? How do we articulate our positionalities using these methods?

Discussion: Guidelines for Qualitative Research: http://www.qualres.org/HomeGuid-3868.html and http://www.qualres.org/HomeComm-3597.html

1. Stoecker, R. 1999. Are academics irrelevant? Approaches and roles for scholars in Community-Based Participatory Research. American Behavioral Scientist, pp. 840-854.
2. Hale, Charles, ed., Engaging Contradictions. [See pp. 370-394 of Hale PDF.]
3. Cairns, K. 2011. Ethnographic locations, Chapter 3 of dissertation.

3rd session. March 25, 2022. Revolutionary democratic people’s planning – escape routes from the capitalist endgame.   

Overview: This session will explore concepts of justice, sustainability, fulfillment, and more, as they relate to the ability of communities to appropriate, construct, and protect their own real-world environments. Additionally, we will explore methods for grassroots research, planning, and design, and models for partnership between academia and local action-research projects. 

1. Brown, Wendy. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (Pages 24 – 39). July 16, 2019. 
2. Meek, David. “Cracks in the Wall of Capitalism: The Zapatistas and the Struggle to Decolonize Science”. February 26, 2018.

4th session. April 1, 2022. Participants project’s presentation & final discussion

This workshop series is organized and co-sponsored by the Gittell Collective and Center for the Humanities Mellon Foundation-funded Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research.

Join the Center for the Humanities for a showcase of creative and innovative community-based projects and research developed from several different public humanities initiatives by students and scholars at CUNY.

Over two lunchtime sessions, Fellows from Humanities New York, the Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research, and recipients of the CUNY Adjunct Incubator will present their unique projects that combine digital and community engagement with artistic and academic methodologies. Join us Thu, Dec 9th at 12:30 for the second showcase focusing on community education and public learning projects.

Read about each student fellow or scholar, their public humanities projects, and the initiatives they stem from in detail below:

• Tania Avilés Vergara (CUNY Adjunct Incubator recipient, is a PhD candidate in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures, Hispanic Sociolinguistics track, at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and adjunct professor at Lehman College)
  
  
  
  Project: Teaching and Learning Spanish at CUNY: Public Language Education Through Archival Resources advocates for the use of archives as open educational resources in the Spanish language class, in order to ground second language learning within the historical, social and linguistic experiences of CUNY students, and partners with CUNY archival institutions such as the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, the Dominican Studies Institute and the Mexican Studies, promoting their collections and educational programs in the classroom.

• Mariposa Fernandez (CUNY Adjunct Incubator recipient, teaches at the Herbert H. Lehman College in the Women and Gender Studies Program and the Africana Studies Department, as well as the Black Studies Program at The City College of New York)
  
  
  Project: The Be A Buddy (BaB) Multimedia Project: Stories of Strength from the South Bronx aims to document community and neighborhood resilience by gathering stories of strength in the South Bronx (using photography and digital technology to document oral interviews, and offering free creative writing workshops) and explore the impact and effectiveness of THE POINT CDC’s mutual aid projects and the community building efforts of neighbors taking care of each other from 2018 to the present pandemic.

• Kendra Krueger (CUNY Adjunct Incubator recipient, Advanced Science Research Center, The Graduate Center, CUNY)
  
  
  
  Project: The Community Sensor Lab is a space for DIY community science and advocacy which seeks to equip youth and community members with research tools and STEAM skills to better advocate for local policy change on public health and environmental justice.
  
  Kendra Krueger (left) and Ricardo Toledo-Crow (right), co-founders of The Community Sensor Lab, work with CUNY students Samaiyah Morgan (Laguardia Community College) and Peter Christakos (City College of New York) as part of the ASRC’s Community Sensor Lab.
  
• Luke Elliott-Negri (Humanities NY Fellow and a PhD student in the Sociology Program at The Graduate Center, CUNY)
  
  
  Project: Human Politics seeks to humanize and demystify politics, politicians, and political decision-making through short interviews (typically just 10 minutes) with individuals who are, broadly defined, politically active.
  
  
  
  
  
• Michelle Gaspari (CUNY Adjunct Incubator recipient, PhD student in Cultural Anthropology at The Graduate Center, CUNY, an Adjunct Lecturer in Sociology, Anthropology, and Women and Gender Studies at Baruch College, and a Co-Organizer at The CUNY Adjunct Project)
  
  Project: The Adjunctification of Higher Education: A Guided Syllabus is a multimedia digital pedagogical toolkit for faculty to teach about adjunct welfare and precarity at CUNY.
  
  
  
  
• Nga Than (Digital Publics Fellow for the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research and doctoral candidate in the Sociology Program at The Graduate Center, CUNY)
  
  
  Project: Voices of the Gig Economy is a podcast created and curated by students of the Sociology of the Gig Economy course at Hunter College, Fall 2020. Students interviewed gig economy workers and asked them about their lived experience during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Through the lens of the workers, students were able to explore complex relationships between work, technology, and society.
  
  
  

About These Initiatives:

Cuny Adjunct Incubator: is a framework for supporting the significant scholarly, creative, and pedagogical work of adjuncts teaching in the humanities and humanistic social sciences across CUNY. Providing social, logistical, financial, and professional support for the creation and circulation of knowledge by CUNY adjuncts, this platform promotes the crucial work of part-time faculty across the CUNY community and senior college campuses. Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Gittell Urban Studies Collective at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research: is an interdisciplinary platform for creative, activist, and scholarly collaboration that supports humanistic research, teaching, and activities with social justice aims. Working with a cohort of faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, and community partners, the project opens up and democratizes knowledge production, supports civic and community engagement, and connects classrooms, CUNY campuses, and the city of New York. ​

Public Humanities Fellowship with Humanities New York: offers advanced humanities graduate students a chance to explore the public application of their scholarly interests, including training in the methods of the public humanities, networking, and professional development. Each Fellow in the cohort of 18 designs and implements a public humanities project in collaboration with a community-based partner.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Gittell Urban Studies Collective at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and Humanities NY.

About this Showcase of Humanities Projects

Interested in virtual reality games on environmental social justice, seed books as mutual aid, community gardens and archives, transforming an estuary into an open-air classroom, exploring climate change through a history of Freon and air conditioning?

Join the Center for the Humanities for a showcase of creative and innovative community-based projects and research developed from several different public humanities initiatives by students and scholars at CUNY.

Over two lunchtime sessions, Fellows from Humanities New York, the Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research, and recipients of the CUNY Adjunct Incubator will present their unique projects that combine digital and community engagement with artistic and academic methodologies. Join us Thu, Nov 18th at 12:30 for the first showcase focusing on environmental justice projects and research.

Click here to Register for this free online event via Zoom.

Read about each student fellow or scholar, their public humanities projects, and the initiatives they stem from in detail below

• Bibi Calderaro (Humanities NY Fellow and a PhD student in the Urban Education program at CUNY’s Graduate Center)
  
  
  Project: C.A.R.E. Program (Collaboratory in Active Regenerative Ecologies) for Environmental Justice is a bioregion-specific and radically innovative project that invites public education teachers to a summer residency in the Hudson River Estuary that focuses on immersive pedagogies.
  
  

Dominika Ksel (CUNY Adjunct Incubator recipient, teaches at New York City College of Technology, CUNY)


Project: Virtual Reality and Environmental Social Justice presents “TrashTalk: A VR Exploratorium” is a student-created a multi-media project that centers on Environmental Social Justice (Urban Climate Justice and Intersectionality) in NYC, including an interactive website with a 360 VR Video and Urban Climate Justice VR game TrashTalk.

Alicia Grullon (CUNY Adjunct Incubator recipient, teaches at at Queens College, CUNY and the School of Visual Arts)


Project: Seed Books is an interdisciplinary art project focused on creating a community seed bank, based on seeds grown in working class IBPOC communities and what that might look like in non-traditional format.

Eric Dean Wilson (Teaching Fellow for the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research and doctoral student in the English Department at The Graduate Center, CUNY)

Project: Narrating Ecological Crises will be a series of recorded conversations with writers, scholars, and artists about the challenges and strategies of telling the story of global warming to a public audience. The edited conversations on lyrical description, journalistic ethics, and translating scientific concepts can then be used both in writing classrooms and as seminars for the public. The project follows from Wilson’s own attempt to communicate climate science and impact for a general audience, his book After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming and the Terrible Cost of Comfort, which explores climate change through the history and impact of Freon, air conditioning and artificial cooling on the environment.

Image from an except of Eric Dean Wilson’s book “After Cooling” featured in Esquire

Pedro Cabello del Moral (Digital Fellow for the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research and doctoral student in the Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures Department at The Graduate Center, CUNY)


Project: Archives in Common: Migrant Practices/Knowledges/Memory brings together community organizers, members of immigrant communities, and members of the university community to 1) assist in the support and expansion of undocu-immigrant-led initiatives (cooperatives, workshops, and gardens) devised in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and 2) think collectively about how to build an archive of the commons during a crisis. The archive’s form, structure, and contents will emerge out of the collaborative process of thinking, working, creating, and sustaining life together.

Cuny Adjunct Incubator: is a framework for supporting the significant scholarly, creative, and pedagogical work of adjuncts teaching in the humanities and humanistic social sciences across CUNY. Providing social, logistical, financial, and professional support for the creation and circulation of knowledge by CUNY adjuncts, this platform promotes the crucial work of part-time faculty across the CUNY community and senior college campuses. Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Gittell Urban Studies Collective at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research: is an interdisciplinary platform for creative, activist, and scholarly collaboration that supports humanistic research, teaching, and activities with social justice aims. Working with a cohort of faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, and community partners, the project opens up and democratizes knowledge production, supports civic and community engagement, and connects classrooms, CUNY campuses, and the city of New York. ​

Public Humanities Fellowship with Humanities New York: offers advanced humanities graduate students a chance to explore the public application of their scholarly interests, including training in the methods of the public humanities, networking, and professional development. Each Fellow in the cohort of 18 designs and implements a public humanities project in collaboration with a community-based partner.

Click here for more information on public humanities practices.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Gittell Urban Studies Collective at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and Humanities NY.

Click here to RSVP and learn more about our second showcase on Thu, Dec 9th focusing on Community Education and Public Learning Projects.

What is the importance of housing financialization in contemporary capitalism? What differences can we grasp between the Global North and the Global South? Which is the role of public institutions in housing financialization before and during COVID-19? How have social movements responded to financialization? We asked ourselves these questions during the workshop Housing Financialization and the Need for a Global Renters’ Movement hosted by the Gittell Collective. Our goal was to explore the connections between the financialization of the economy, with a focus on housing, and the struggle to assert the latter as a human right. Housing financialization refers to the growth of real estate investment through financial institutions and markets. It requires understanding land and the built environment as assets, therefore housing exchange value surpasses its social value. Housing has thus become a profitable field for investment. Instead of acquiring enterprises’ stakes or investing in manufacturing companies, wealthy people and private institutions have the option to become shareholders in transnational firms that purchase foreclosed homes or blocks of social housing, where vulnerable tenants live. These companies would then speculate with those homes or force evictions by means of rising rents. At the heart of the issue is treating housing as a commodity, which has informed many housing struggles across cities around the globe.

The event was divided into two sessions on February 17 and 24, 2021. The first workshop addressed current trends in housing financialization, the role of public policies such as rent regulations, and ways to raise awareness on evictions and how they are linked with financialization. We invited Professors Raquel Rolnik (University of São Paulo, Brazil), Desiree Fields (University of California at Berkeley, United States) and Tom Slater (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom), and Dr. Erin McElroy (New York University, United States), who is also involved in the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. The second workshop revolved around different urban housing struggles in Africa, Europe, North and South America. We listened to social movements’ mobilization strategies and actions against gentrification and evictions, most of them overlapping with housing financialization dynamics. Participants included Rob Robinson (Right to the City Alliance, New York City, United States), Talita Gonsales (Zero Evictions, São Paulo, Brazil), Mandisa Shandu (Ndifuna Ukwazi, Cape Town, South Africa), Rita Silva (Habita, Lisbon, Portugal), Ricardo Apaolaza (Frente de Organizaciones en Lucha, Buenos Aires, Argentina) and Isaac Rose (Greater Manchester Housing Action, United Kingdom). The Gittell Collective is thankful for their contributions, a summary of which you can find in our YouTube channel, and this text published in Metropolitics. We hope our insights stimulate housing activists and academics to build a larger and stronger right-to-housing and to-the-city movement.