The Politics of Knowledge: Challenges and Opportunities for Social Justice Work in Higher Education Institutions

Abstract

Social justice is a topic that few in higher education oppose, but university faculty members and academic professionals face structural challenges in their efforts to engage with social justice issues. By exploring four dimensions of the university—institutional mission, academic scholarship, professional identity, and pedagogical approaches—the author argues for a rethinking of how faculty and academic professionals approach these dimensions of their work. The author also identifies other fields of scholarship and practice that can help to address pressing public problems in which social justice issues are of central importance.

Ground Truths: Community-Engaged Research for Environmental Justice

“…For example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Cooperative Extension, created in 1914 and run through the nation's land grant universities, co-developed research and educational programming with local farming communities (see chapter 10). In its early years, the program reflected rural reformers' views that farming communities, not just academics, could contribute important local knowledge, and that agricultural modernization depended in part on strengthening local democracy and civic life (Shaffer 2017). Sociologists such as those associated with the Chicago School in the 1920s used ethnographic methods to draw on local knowledge, producing social science that aimed to intervene in, not simply describe, social problems of urbanization and industrialization (Munck 2014).…”