The Public Science Project’s 4th Annual Summer Institutes on Critical Participatory Action Research are designed to introduce the theory, methods, and ethics of critical PAR to graduate students, faculty, and members of community-based organizations AND provide an environment of collective learning and development. Participants are strongly encouraged to bring their Read more…
On Tuesday, November 26th, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY GC) will host an event in honor of the life and work of Marilyn Jacobs Gittell, a Political Scientist from New York City whose work, grounded in participatory action research (PAR), focused on cities, urban politics, public policy, and social justice. The event will bring together Professor Gittell’s colleagues and partners in this work, students she trained, as well as students currently studying the “Ocean-Hill Brownsville controversy” – a Brooklyn-based social movement, one of the most controversial of its time, that moved governance of neighborhood schools to the African American communities whom the schools purported to serve. This evening of celebration will also serve as the official unveiling of the Marilyn Jacobs Gittell Archive and the launch of a new hub at CUNY GC. (more…)
This article tells a story of practice, a story of theory, and how each informs and transforms the other through a two-way flow of people and knowledge from a city to a campus and back again. By reflecting with fellow participants on the events and outcomes of a sustained city-campus partnership, the author introduces a theory of engagement from and for practice, and strategies such as investing in human relationships and using instruments-for-action. (more…)
MIT@Lawrence is a sustained, multi-faceted partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the City of Lawrence, MA, a small, ethnically diverse city 30 miles northwest of Boston. Over the partnership’s 10-year history, faculty and students from many MIT programs have worked together with Lawrence residents, civic institutions and community-based organizations to address problems facing the city. Projects have addressed abandoned and foreclosed property management, neighborhood revitalization, and “cleaning and transforming” polluted canals and alleyways. (more…)
The MIT@Lawrence Story Project was a culminating product of nearly ten years of collaboration that examined the partnership through dozens of interviews with participants. The project was motivated in part by a need to report the outcomes of a multi-year HUD Community Outreach Partnership Center grant. But Lawrence residents were interested in the project as a way to develop new narrative about their city, to tell a story that celebrated diversity, resilience and collective action. A small group of MIT students worked closely with Dr. Hoyt to conduct interviews, which were video-recorded, and edit them into a 15-minute film. (more…)
In this essay, Activist Scholar Lorlene Hoyt uncovers the importance of universities and communities collaborating to solve modern urban problems. Hoyt calls for activist scholars to boldly explore alternative forms of scholarship. (more…)
This course provides an introduction to the theory of participatory action research and more generally to competing ideas about the uses of social research to promote social change. Students will explore the epistemological foundation for action research, knowledge generation in action research, the role of the “friendly outsider,” action science and organizational learning, participatory evaluation and arguments for and against phronetic social science. (more…)
My survival in higher education has its roots in the connections between my lived experience as the immigrant son of farm worker parents and the lessons learned in overcoming systemic obstacles as a community organizer and intellectual activist. Whenever the road in academia got rough I had to face another hurdle, I always remembered the difficulties that my immigrant farm worker family had to face. In this way, the problems I encountered in academia appeared smaller and more manageable. My struggles with learning English and growing up in a poor immigrant farm worker family became the foundations of language, labor, and immigration issues that I passionately took up in my organizing, teaching, and research as an activist intellectual in academia. (more…)
Activism and organizing can be a fertile subject matter for young people to study. This article presents a case study of a summer seminar in which urban high school students examined the historical struggle for educational justice in their communities. Adopting a “communities of practice” approach to learning, the article documents the changing participation of seminar participants and the changing identities and skills that this entailed. During the seminar, students took on identities as “critical researchers”— skilled investigators who produce and share knowledge relevant to social change. In the process, seminar participants developed and deployed high-level academic skills in language arts, social studies, and mathematics. (more…)
Anniversaries of major historical events, such as the 50th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, provide social studies teachers with the opportunity to connect their classroom study to broader public conversations about the event and its significance. This article reports on the one such effort – an intensive five week summer seminar in which urban high school students produced original historical research on the legacy of Brown in greater Los Angeles. (more…)