We tell stories to make sense of our lives. The stories we tell shape the ways we see ourselves and interact with others. What stories are we telling each other and ourselves about the nature of university-community partnerships?
This is a question I think about as a community-based research coordinator who also does philosophical research on narrative construction. Narrative theories suggest that our collective stories can uphold or unsettle the status quo. Examining the stories we tell about university-community partnerships challenges us to develop better practices to foster solidarity towards equity.
Universities are increasingly looking for community impact in research and student learning. However, history has taught us that community engagement can cause harm. In the university context, “community engagement” is a broad term referring to the various ways in which universities seek to work with local communities for specific goals through research and learning. Such effort, while well-intended, can nevertheless lead to harm due to coercion, overpromising, and sapping resources.
For the past few decades, universities have been working to foster mutually beneficial relationships with community partners, whether they are local community organizations or members. This is in part due to pressure from communities, including demands for appropriate compensation and stopping with academic entitlement to respect community expertise.
I applaud this effort, but there remain critical questions about how we can and should think about these relationships in a way that rejects traditional top-down approaches to engagement that are driven from the university. To explore a new path forward, I look to the concept of “counterstory,” developed by philosopher Hilde Lindemann.
As Lindemann argues, “counterstories” aim to resist dominant social norms that are oppressive in nature. An example of a counterstory in the university-community partnership context is that communities know best about what they need and how things work on the ground; by contrast, universities should respect community knowledge and expertise. This idea stands in contrast to earlier models of university-led practice that did not assume community expertise. In the context of community engagement, such a counterstory challenges the power inequality in a university-community partnership. It holds universities accountable for confronting who is often seen (or not seen) as an expert and why.
While counterstories can potentially transform social norms and structures, Lindemann also cautions about the challenges of a counterstory approach. As she rightfully points out, dominant social norms can be “so deeply rooted in our psyches, and so smooth and slippery that the counterstory mostly just bounces off and rolls away harmlessly.” It is important to parse out challenges for counterstory creation in university-community partnerships so that university-community partnerships genuinely address existing power dynamics rather than perpetuating them.
Challenges for counterstory creation
While “community” often generates a sense of harmony and belonging, community in practice is a complex place with diverse voices and backgrounds. Disagreements and conflicts are common regarding what a community needs with respect to issues including development and policing.
This is unsurprising given how communities are situated within a complex social and political system. However, such conflicts and disagreements may not always be apparent, especially to outgroup members. This is partly because certain voices can be marginalized or suppressed by members of communities for strategic reasons.
Often, university faculty, staff, and students reach out to “community representatives” with the hope of understanding how a community works and what it needs. This approach has been increasingly called into question. Depending on how the community representatives are chosen, such outreach may only gain access to the dominant or institution-friendly perspectives in the communities.
The danger of this is not simply that universities’ understanding of community needs become skewed, but also that institutional complacency can come into play. Once, I questioned why a university-community partnership took a particular direction without any consultation with an Indigenous group that had done a similar project in the past. The reply from the project lead was: “The community told us to take this direction, and they will let us know if that group needs to be consulted.”
It was clear that the community that had been consulted for the project represented some community voices, but not all. However, under the “communities know best” assumption, which is a common counterstory in the university-community partnership context, the university group felt there was no need for further outreach or inquiry into community dynamics.
With institutional complacency of this sort, the word “community” can become what political scientist Murray Edelman calls a condensation symbol used to evoke certain ideals or feelings for institutional or political purposes. While “respecting community” may seem like an act to address power inequality between universities and communities, it can also become a way to silence critical perspectives within universities.
The silencing of critical perspectives is sadly not uncommon in universities. For example, Indigenous scholar and educator Shauneen Pete suggests that there is a logic of assimilation in the academy, such that Racialized and Indigenous faculty, students, and staff are expected to “behave at the table” even when they are assigned to do equity work. Furthermore, particular ways of doing community engagement can alienate scholars of colour or risk erasing their intellectual contributions. They can also discount the community services already undertaken by students of colour outside the structures of universities.
Just like a community is not homogenous, university members are not equally privileged. It is important to foster spaces for deep understandings of community dynamics and healthy contestation on ways of partnerships.
How a counterstory approach can succeed
For a counterstory approach to succeed, it requires making space for diverse voices and experiences, including different understandings of “community.” To this end, university practitioners need to “go beyond the usual suspects” when conducting outreach. They should reach out to people not because they are easier to work with or the most well-known, but because they provide unique perspectives on what it means to work in certain communities.
Such work is not easy. It pushes university members to step out of their comfort zones and let go of the structure and control they are used to. It demands them to consider: How can I support community organizers’ work so that they can support mine if they would like to? What internal work do I need to do to deconstruct what is considered professional or polite to hold space for meaningful interactions? How do I go beyond consensus building to invite critical disagreements? How do I compensate people for their expertise and emotional labour? Do I prepare food for gatherings? What about childcare and transportation subsidies?
Additionally, I ask: what does it truly mean to respect community knowledge? A mentor once reminded me that respecting someone does not mean unquestioning acceptance. That is called people pleasing, which is not the same as respect. Similarly, respecting community knowledge should not mean forgoing critical thinking to accept everything that is said and done in communities. But it does mean being sensitive to one’s positionality and considering how that contributes to one’s worldview, power, and privilege.
Despite challenges, I remain hopeful about this work because I believe university-community partnerships—when done well—can foster an environment where different lived experiences nourish one another so that we build solidarity towards a more equitable society. Counterstories are meant to uplift marginalized voices and fight against structural injustice. Let’s make sure that we as university partitioners honor this goal when working with communities.
Katherine Cheng is a Community-Based Research Coordinator at the University of British Columbia. She has a PhD in philosophy and a background in health sciences.
