Examines models of communication, engagement, and knowledge sharing between university researchers and other communities. Applies scholarly research to community-engaged work that incorporates ethical communication and reflection.
Restricted to students with third year standing or above.
Course overview
This course will introduce students to the long and often fraught history of efforts to build meaningful and productive engagement and communication between university researchers and other communities. These efforts have been shaped by historically and culturally situated ideas about what “good” engagement and communication between researchers and “the public” ought to look like, and they have produced many models of public engagement and communication intended to bridge the different worlds of university researchers and other communities. This course will explore and interrogate these efforts — including the extent to which many emerge from colonial, racist, misogynist, or ableist practices and presumptions — and lead students in critical discussion of the kinds of interaction and relationship the models enable between researchers and other communities.
The course will highlight models of engagement and communication that represent “bright spots” in theory and practice: for instance, models that encourage reciprocity between knowledge-makers from different communities, that centre and value different ways of knowing in knowledge sharing work, and that centre the university’s role in and responsibility for fostering reciprocal communication and engagement with other communities.
This course will consist of two parallel streams — one focused on exploring scholarly conversations about research and public engagement; the other focused on completing a hands-on community-engaged learning project. These two parallel streams will ultimately come together in a final paper that asks students to evaluate and situate their hands-on experience with community engagement in the course by drawing on the research literature.
- Scholarly Conversation: The course will take students on a journey through long-standing and ongoing academic debates about different models of communication and engagement — between researchers and other communities — and their consequences and implications. On this journey, students will explore different ways of knowing, different knowledge-making and knowledge sharing practices, and different models of communication and engagement between academic researchers and other communities.
- Hands-On Experience: The course will take students on a parallel journey through the hands-on work of understanding the knowledge sharing needs within a specific researcher-community relationship and doing the work of sharing/transforming knowledge to meet those needs. Students will participate in a local community-engaged communication project that asks them to engage in one type of knowledge sharing work — knowledge translation — to cultivate reciprocal and respectful relationships between university researchers and local communities.
- NOTE: The community-engaged project may vary from term-to-term, but it will always involve knowledge sharing between academic researchers and local communities, where both groups (academic researchers; local communities) are involved in community-based / community-led, or co-led research and where a local community-based partner is working with the course Instructor to solicit help with a knowledge sharing project: either to translate academic research into communicative forms that meet the needs of the community organization, or to translate community knowledge into communicative forms that meet the needs of academic researchers. Some communities and community-based partners may include Indigenous peoples, and, in accordance with UBC’s Indigenous Strategic Plan, this course is committed to moving research forward in ways that “support research initiatives that are reciprocal, community-led, legitimize Indigenous ways of knowing and promote Indigenous peoples’ self-determination” (Goal 3).
This course offers students a unique and exciting opportunity to explore both the research literature on academic-community engagement and communication and the practical, hands-on work of community-engaged knowledge sharing.