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This essay reflects on the promise and challenges of community-engaged, critical participatory action research (CPAR) hinged to social policy in times of racialized state violence and massive community resistance. With cautious optimism, we argue for the potential of CPAR to facilitate more just social policy, by enhancing research validity, policy integrity, and organizing capacity. Drawing on a series of CPAR projects, we also raise a series of ethical, political, and power-laden dilemmas we have encountered in this work and offer, with humility, provisional solutions for advancing activist-scholarship linked in struggle with communities under siege.

There is an abundance of social science research confirming the positive outcomes associated with higher education for people who have served time in prison (Chappell in J Correct Educ 55(2): 148-169, 2004; Changing minds: the impact of college in a maximum-security prison, Ronald Ridgeway, New York, 2001;Kelso 2000). Despite the evidence, institutions of higher education continue to ignore the findings, while reinforcing negative stigma and imposing institutional barriers to admission for students with documented criminal records (Rosenthal et al. in Boxed out: criminal history screening and college application attrition, Center for Community, New York, 2015). After analyzing focus groups and interviews from a participatory action research project with college students with documented criminal records, we identified a series of themes, which we have labeled gifts (McKnight and Block in The abundant community: awakening the power of families and neighborhoods, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, 2010; Halkovic et al. in Higher education and reentry: the gifts they bring, John Jay Research, New York, 2013. http://www.johnjayresearch.org/pri/gifts) students with criminal histories bring to their academic communities. These gifts include: deconstructing stigma/teaching the university; the desire to do more and give back; intimate knowledge of how systems work on the ground, and bridging relationships between the academy and underserved communities. Our evidence suggests that students with incarceration experience enhance the academic and civic environment of universities, dispelling the spurious suggestion that they are a risk to campus safety (Drysdale et al. in Campus attacks: targeted violence affecting institutions of higher education, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, DC, 2010.with specific recommendations institutions of higher education should follow to foster greater inclusion in college communities.

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