Taking food and agriculture studies to the streets: community engagement, working across disciplines, and community change

Collaborating for community food security: Emerging scholar participation in a community–university partnership

“…Beyond a relative unfamiliarity with such research, the organizational partners on both the community and university sides of the partnership were, more generally speaking, in early stages of development when the work began, having all been founded in 2009. Consistent with findings by Block (2010) regarding sometimes uneven community capacity to engage in research, the fact that each partner's internal protocols were still being established and refined helps explain why defining clear protocols for the partnership did not happen until an overt conflict made it necessary.…”

“…This action orientation is typical of Barker's (2010, p. 130) description of the 'community partnership' model of engaged scholarship, which he notes seeks to address social change and structural transformation and is 'concerned with power, resources, and building social movements'. Much like the cases described by Block (2010) and Knezevic et al (2014), establishing the relationships required to address those issues enabled the partnership to contribute to important social change with respect to food security discourse and practice -most notably through the development of The Seed initiative.…”

“…Those programmes may have initially been more hierarchical and prescriptive than reciprocal and participatory (Flora & Francis, 2000); however, they set the stage for an evolution towards more participatory methods such as those developed by Chambers (1987) in the 1980s. Although this work had a strong focus on agricultural production, Block (2010, p. 521) argues that food systems issues more broadly ‘often lend themselves to research and action involving community partners’ because food is so deeply relevant to people’s everyday lives.…”

“…The strong connection between food systems research and CU partnership is exemplified in a number of studies that address issues related to community food security. In the North American context, notable examples include: analysis by Levkoe (2006) and Levkoe and Wakefield (2011) of the development of the Community Food Centre model, which Levkoe was actively engaged in as both researcher and activist; Block’s (2010) overview of a number of community-engaged food systems research projects; Carney et al.’s (2012) evaluation of a community-based research project designed to support a community garden initiative; Rojas et al.’s (2011) description of a complex CU partnership promoting sustainable food interventions in public schools; and, Knezevic, Hunter, Watt, Williams, and Anderson’s (2014) critical discourse analysis of a participatory food costing project. These cases touch on many common challenges associated with CU work (see below); however, they also demonstrate how effective engaged research can contribute to changing food system discourse and practice and increasing community food security.…”

“…For example, research undertaken by CU partnerships is often subject to critique for insufficient theoretical and methodological rigour (Levin, 2012; Mosavel, Ahmed, Daniels, & Simon, 2011) and limited generalizability (Brydon-Miller et al., 2003). As such, CU projects tend to suffer from a lack of formal credit and recognition within academic institutions, and corresponding difficulties securing funding and resources (Block, 2010; Burawoy, 2014; Jaeger, Sandmann, & Kim, 2011; Mosavel et al., 2011). While these issues can affect even the most senior scholars, they are especially problematic for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and untenured faculty, whose positions within academic institutions are relatively precarious, who do not yet have solid records of scholarly excellence to rely upon, and who are often working with very limited financial resources.…”