Council on Undergraduate Research 2008 conference plenary lecture …

Council on Undergraduate Research 2008 conference plenary lecture
"Community-Based Research and the Public Work of Democracy"
Paul Apostolidis, Assoc. Prof. and Judge & Mrs. T. Paul Chair of Political
Science, Whitman College
St. Joseph, Minnesota , June 24, 2008


The question I want to consider today is this: What does it take, for
undergraduate community-based research to help strengthen democracy?

· The answer to this question might seem simple and straightforward.
Community-based research, or CBR, is a species of service learning. It
involves serving a local organization by meeting its needs for research and
knowledge, and thereby giving students a practical context for their
intellectual development and teaching them new research skills.

· Service learning in the form of CBR thus is all about fostering civic
engagement by young people. And robust civic engagement, especially by
those young enough to make it a lifelong habit and something they pass on
to later generations, is a crucial ingredient in any vibrant democratic culture.

· Well, in my comments this morning I want to interrogate this line of logic
more closely and critically. I'm going to suggest that the trajectory I've just
articulated glosses over some key questions concerning the way community
involvement gets translated into political action. It also leaves the core
concept of "democracy" in need of sharper definition: with respect to
democracy's methods, its goals, and its socio-geographic ambit.
       · I'm going to argue that simply sending students to do research off
          campus, or even partnering them with a local organization, by
          itself does not necessarily enrich democratic life
       · You need to take additional, positive steps to generate democratic
          action, if you have a sufficiently differentiated sense of the WORK
          that democracy demands, and if you acknowledge the fundamental
          roles of class, race, and gender domination in our society
       · First I'm going to reflect on what these extra steps are, in
          theoretical, conceptual terms
       · And then, to make things concrete, I'll tell you some things about
          the way we've sought to do democratic public work in our
          program on The State of the State for Washington Latinos, at
          Whitman College

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In my own experiments with CBR over the past six years, I've taken
theoretical inspiration from Harry C. Boyte and James Farr. About ten years
ago Boyte and Farr published a fairly well known essay where they
formulate the notion of service learning as something they call "public
work."

· They write: "Public work is the expenditure of visible efforts by ordinary
citizens whose collective labors produce things or create processes of lasting
civic value. Public work is work by ordinary citizens who build and sustain
our basic public goods and resources. It solves community problems and
creates common things.... It is also work done `in' public ­ in places that are
visible and open to inspection. And it is the cooperative work of `a' public: a
mix of people whose interests, backgrounds, and resources may be quite
different."

· What I want to do right now is to think through carefully what it might
mean to make undergraduate research a PUBLIC endeavor in the distinctive
sense that they imply; and also what it might mean to view labor, and the
objects produced through labor, as central to democracy and to CBR that
aims to kindle democratic commitment.

· There are several guiding ideas that I draw from Boyte and Farr, reading
them somewhat provocatively but I think faithfully against the backdrop of
Karl Marx's critique of alienated labor in capitalist society:
      · One key notion here is that the basic action constituting democratic
          life is work, in the form of productive labor
      · From this perspective, the goal of CBR is to produce a "common
          thing," or what they elsewhere call a "civic product"
      · This object is the fruit of human labor, and it is something that the
          producers RECOGNIZE as the unique effect of their work in
          cooperation with one another
      · So rather than the act of production alienating the worker from the
          thing produced, in the manner that the early Marx theorized when
          analyzing estranged labor under capitalism, this "public work"
          cements a bond between worker and product
      · It does this because the thing is a concrete, physically sensible
          entity that reflects back to the workers their own identities as


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        producers and their mutual relations as CO-producers, as they
        bring it into being and then use it in concert
      · That is, they can see and feel themselves in this object, as able
        creators and collaborators
      · And one key reason why this "civic product" can have these
        effects, instantiating human self-actualization rather than
        alienation, is quite simply because it does not become private
        property ­ it's a "common thing" in the sense of being a thing
        that's there for communal use

· But now let's look even more closely at what Boyte and Farr are saying,
and think about it still more carefully: exactly how does a thing produced via
public work become available for common use? And what kinds of qualities
should this thing have, if all or at least most people are to be able to use it?
       · Let's take that latter question first. It seems to me that a civic
          product needs to be a "common" thing in another sense ­ that is, it
          ought to be an ordinary, not very special thing; the kind of thing
          you don't have to be an expert to use; the kind of thing you're
          accustomed to seeing around, and that you know how to use
          because of your habits of familiarity with it
       · And this thing gets to be that way, both because of who produces it
          and how it is produced
       · This is where it's important to underscore Boyte and Farr's note
          that public work should be the work of a socially and culturally
          diverse group of people
       · In other words: you're not doing public work unless you're
          engaged in collaboration that crosses lines of class, race, and other
          forms of social difference and hierarchy; because if you're not
          doing this, then you won't come up with a product that lots of
          people will know how to use
       · Furthermore, what's vital in making this collective of people into
          "a public" is not only who these people are, in terms of their
          sociological characteristics ­ it's also what they DO
       · And part of producing something of civic value, Boyte and Farr
          argue in a part of the text, is "deliberating"
       · When people do public work, the authors explain, they "work
          together in and through deliberation to specify and then try to solve
          problems" that affect them in common, and hence that demand
          solutions from which all will benefit


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      · When Boyte and Farr speak about deliberation, I think they are
        calling upon ideas inherited from the Enlightenment about what it
        means to engage in the "public use of reason," to use Kant's phrase
      · That is, they are talking about people exchanging their ideas,
        justifying those ideas to one another, and listening with an
        openness to having their minds changed by somebody else
      · What they don't say, but what critical democratic theorists like Iris
        Marion Young have pointed out, is that privileges of class, race,
        and gender deeply influence who gets the cultural training in what
        are usually considered to be the acceptable ways of deliberating
      · So if this common thing that public work creates, in a sense,
        embodies a communicative process, then it can't just reflect this
        one, dominant way of communicating ­ it's going to be a hybrid;
        it's going to show traces of how the different people who produced
        it struggled over not just what to say but how to say it; and that
        means it might be kind of messy

· And now let's consider one last, key idea that I want to draw from Boyte
and Farr ­ this is the notion that public work is done not only by "a" public,
an internally diverse group of people, but also "in" public, or as they put it,
"in places that are visible and open to inspection"
       · What they are saying is that participants in CBR need to think
          carefully about the locations where they perform public work
       · And I think we can go beyond their brief formulation here and
          specify that CBR practitioners need to reflect critically on the
          social and political dynamics of the places where they do this labor
       · It isn't just that the work should be visible to the public at large,
          although the capacity of the public to perceive what's going on is
          obviously crucial to the product's ability to be a "common thing"
       · But people engaged in CBR should also construct spaces for their
          endeavors that encourage the active involvement of various groups
          of people from across lines of social difference and domination
       · In a spirit akin to what we find in Boyte and Farr, political theorist
          Hannah Arendt writes of the need for public life to be centered
          around some kind of common object, or what she describes as the
          "objective," "physical," or "worldly in-between"
       · Arendt writes: "To live together in the world means essentially that
          a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a



                                       4
          table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like
          every in-between, relates and separates at the same time."
      ·   In turn, in his sympathetically critical response to Arendt,
          democratic theorist Romand Coles observes the plurality and
          mutability of this "worldly in-between," and he argues that
          democratic action therefore must mean not just giving everyone "a
          seat at THE table," as the cliché puts it, but something more
          demanding
      ·   For Coles, democracy means literally moving the table around
          which deliberation happens into a bunch of different, varying
          locations ­ locations where there may be wildly varying
          assumptions about who gets respect, about how to express yourself
          appropriately with words and gestures, who sits where, what you
          wear, even what the whole point of meeting and discussion is
      ·   So the upshot of this for CBR as public work is this: the fabrication
          of this civic product, this table, this objective thing that becomes
          the focal point of concerted action, should take place in a range of
          self-consciously chosen locations
      ·   So there is a mobile quality to this public work, which is an
          essential feature of its common or communal character
      ·   AND, once the product is out there, public workers need to go
          "tabling": they need to try it out as the "worldly in-between" in all
          sorts of racially and class-defined spaces, and re-fashion it with the
          help of the people who call those places their own so that it keeps
          becoming more "common," in the richest sense

· And so, when we spell out this theory of CBR as public work, the question
of how to harvest effects of democratization from CBR invites answers that
are hardly as plain and self-evident as we might have initially supposed
      · To put it strongly: a more robust, active, creative, self-aware, self-
          critical, and inclusive democratic culture in no sense follows
          automatically from the simple enterprise of having a student do
          research in partnership with a local organization
      · For this truly to be a form of public work, the product of this
          venture must be a common thing
      · It must result from collaborative work that transgresses boundaries
          of class, race, and other forms of social difference and domination




                                       5
      · It must issue from communicative work that recognizes how these
        boundaries often define what are considered "normal" practices of
        deliberation, and that intentionally defies those conventions
      · It must be the type of object that as many people as possible,
        regardless of these inequalities, can skillfully use
      · It must be available for all to use, rather than being privately
        appropriated
      · And it must be MADE accessible for all to use by being placed
        within multiple and various social locations, and by letting itself be
        altered in the process


Now my thesis, you may recall, is that having undergraduate research take
the form of community-based research, as such, does not guarantee that your
students and their partners will be doing public work

· Rather, performing public work involves both taking a distinctive approach
to the conduct of undergraduate research, AND doing some special things
with this research once it's been completed

· And I'm going to offer you one vision of these extra measures by telling
you some more about our project at Whitman on Washington State Latinos,
and the ways that we are trying to make this project fulfill the demands of
"public work"

· Three years ago I started coordinating a major undergraduate research
project called The State of the State for Washington Latinos. Students do this
research as their main endeavor in a 400-level seminar that I teach called
"Racism & Latinos in WA State."
      · Latinos are right now the largest and fastest growing minority
          population in state of Washington, mainly because of recent and
          rapidly rising immigration from Mexico
      · But Latinos face a dramatic, wide-ranging, and interrelated set of
          social and political inequalities and disadvantages.
      · And addressing those problems, whether through public policy or
          the actions of private or nonprofit organizations, has been
          hampered by the fact that until we started producing this report,
          there had been no systematic analysis of the problems and potential
          solutions


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· So the project responds to several different, urgent needs:
       · First, there is the need for research that can inform both public
          policy decisions and actions to increase Latino political power and
          representation
       · Second, there are the interests of local organizations that grapple
          with the social and political inequalities facing Latinos in the
          course of their daily efforts to do what they do; these organizations
          are looking for more public recognition and understanding of the
          problems they are facing; and they're also searching for more
          thoughtful, well-researched proposals for how to solve them
              o I'm talking about, for instance, the public schools that see
                 their numbers of Latino students escalating while Latino
                 graduation rates lag far behind
              o Or the community health clinics that are trying to identify
                 the best ways to spread health information among the Latino
                 population, when this group is dramatically under-insured
                 relative to other groups
       · And third, there are the interests of my students, in terms of their
          intellectual and personal development and the ways that doing
          CBR motivates them and spurs them to do their work with what
          are simply astonishing levels of sophistication, maturity,
          confidence, and excellence


Now I want to talk about this project specifically in terms of our theory of
CBR as public work

· The "civic products" that this project generates are, most directly, a series
of periodic reports on social and political conditions for Latinos in
Washington State

· Indirectly, of course, we hope that a bunch of other "common things" come
from out of our work
       · Probably the most eye-catching example would be a new, reformed
           electoral system in the town of Sunnyside, Washington.
       · Sunnyside voluntarily shifted from an at-large structure of city
           council elections, to a partially districted system, when one of my



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          students analyzed the lack of Latino representation there and found
          that these at-large elections violated the federal Voting Rights Act

· But most directly, the civic product of our project is the research, itself

· Is each of these reports a "common thing"?

· Let's go back to our theory of public work; and I want to point out first that
the WAY this object gets produced does indeed reflect the processes of
public action, or work by "A" public, that Boyte and Farr discuss
       · Each student who takes the course works in collaboration with a
          person whom I call their "community-professional partner"
       · These partners do work that centrally concerns Latinos, usually on
          the staffs of local organizations or public agencies, and mainly in
          the Walla Walla area where Whitman is located
       · Among our partners there have been, for example:
             o Diana Erickson, the bilingual education coordinator of the
                 Walla Walla Public Schools; Diana and her husband Bill
                 also are the advisors to Club Latino at Walla Walla High
                 School
             o Mario Paredes, the executive director of CONSEJO, the
                 leading provider of mental health, substance abuse, and
                 domestic violence response and prevention services to
                 Latinas in the state
             o Also Joaquin Avila, an attorney who has litigated some of
                 the most historic, influential Mexican American voting
                 rights cases in this country
             o And there have been lots of other people and organizations
       · Each of these partners gets involved because they have a specific
          need for research that the students can help meet, so that they can
          carry out their organization's business more effectively and
          thereby increase the social wellbeing of Latinos whom they serve

· According to the model, one key way that the students and their partners
SHOULD be engaging in public work is when they determine the agenda for
research collaboratively and in deliberation with one another ­ this would
seem to be a great opportunity to do what Boyte and Farr call the effort "to
specify and then to solve common problems"



                                        8
· But from my experience, this is a tricky process; and most of the
  time, it doesn't work in the way that the model indicates that it
  should
· I've seen some students come into the project with pre-set ideas
  about what question they wanted to investigate, and not be
  responsive enough to the partner's interests and concerns
· I've also seen students feel like they haven't had enough creative
  input into the research design
· Most often, I've seen cases where partners have fairly vague
  though promising ideas about what sorts of research would be most
  helpful to them; and they're very busy; and so the track the student
  starts pursuing ends up being fine with them as long as it doesn't
  seem completely off base or misleading
· In these cases, which I'd say probably are the majority, you don't
  really formulate the research design through a process of
  deliberation, much less communication that challenges entrenched
  protocols of deliberation that disadvantage people of certain class,
  racial, or gender backgrounds
· You DO have, however, a kind of extended engendering of
  deliberation that happens over the course of the research, as the
  student gets a basic direction from the partner, then develops a
  much more specific approach to the question than the partner
  would have conceived on his or her own, and ultimately comes up
  with a provisional answer to it that is now open for further debate
· So for instance, take the student whose partner was CONSEJO:
  this organization said they were especially interested in developing
  programs to prevent domestic violence among Latinos, because the
  great majority of their efforts were geared toward interventions
  with people who had already become victims of domestic violence
· The student then took the question, read about domestic violence
  prevention programs, and ended up comparatively evaluating
  school domestic violence awareness programs targeted specifically
  at young teenagers, and recommending that certain kinds of
  programs be prioritized over others
· Now a whole bunch of new questions come up for debate: How do
  schools get the resources to do this? At what age should these
  programs begin? How do you provide culturally specific outreach
  with diverse student populations?



                               9
      · So the partner didn't really argue and debate with the student about
        moving her research in these specific directions, but he was
        delighted that she did so, and that she opened up all these other
        questions for further consideration
      · Now, at the same time, students sometimes come up with findings
        that their partners find discomfiting, or to which they even take
        offense
      · This happened, for instance, when one of my students concluded
        that juvenile detention officers were following routine procedures
        that resulted in racially differential, harsher treatment for Latino
        kids in the system, despite these officers' best intentions
      · She gave her report the bold and confrontational title, "And Gringo
        Justice for All?"; and her partner, who was one of these officers,
        thought this was quite unfair

· You have two different examples here: one where the student specified and
analyzed the partner's question in a way the partner welcomed, the other
where the student's research posed a very uncomfortable challenge to the
partner about his participation in what her report clearly showed to be a
racist system

· But both of these examples point out something crucial, which is that if the
CBR experience ends when the research is completed, then most probably
the PUBLIC aspect of this work will have only just begun
       · In concrete terms: you have to create opportunities for the
          conversation about the research to continue, new forums to debate
          how it frames the problem to be solved and how well it argues for
          its proposed solutions


And this is what I want to emphasize most strongly here in the time I have
remaining: it's what you do AFTER the research is done that has the greatest
potential to make CBR into public work, in a rigorous sense

· And even further: if we go back to the theory of public work, we'll see that
these follow-up activities address numerous other elements that I've
identified as core components of what public work is all about
       · That further step I'm recommending is to have students and their
          partners bring their research into multiple, varying public contexts


                                      10
      · When I say "public contexts," here are some examples of what I
        mean, from our experiences with the State of the State project:
          o I mean, for instance, holding a press conference with local
              TV and newspapers, as my students did this past spring
              when they spoke to local reporters for the Yakima Herald
              outside the studio at "Radio Cadena," or radio KDNA,
              where they'd been in the studio to tape a program in Spanish
              about their research findings
          o Or giving a talk at a local Town Hall meeting that you
              convene to share the results of the research, and to spark
              debate and dialogue among people in the local community ­
              this has been one of the most important public educational
              activities of our project, every year that we've done it
          o We have also taken students, along with any community
              partners who can come, to meet with state legislators and the
              governor's policy advisors, to inform them about general
              directions for public policy that the research indicates would
              be appropriate; last February, one student, Kevin McNellis,
              even offered expert testimony at a committee hearing on
              higher education, based on his exploration of the factors
              impeding Latino access to higher education
          o And we've created our own website so that visitors can
              access the research from a vast universe of locations

· Now, simply taking the work and putting it out there in public is itself a
major step
      · I think it's crucial, along these lines, that when we finish a
         semester's work on The State of the State for Washington Latinos,
         we don't just have each student hand their individual report to the
         specific partner
      · We certainly hope and intend that our partners' organizations will
         find the research we give them tangibly useful, in terms of
         developing their programs ­ but we have something else in mind,
         as well
      · So in addition, we compile these individual reports into a unified
         document; we put a colorful, evocative cover on it, and there it is ­
         a "worldly in-between," to use Arendt's evocative phrase, that now
         has horizons for its use extending far beyond these individuals
         toward an unknown and much wider reading audience


                                      11
      · Crucially, too, it's no longer private property, to be used or
        possessed at the discretion of the student and the partner; it's a
        thing that can be held and used in common
      · And, because of the cybernetic and not necessarily tangible quality
        of things in our contemporary public world, we produce another
        version of such a common thing by loading it onto our website,
        www.walatinos.org
      · I would add that in my experience, when students know that their
        work is going to go public, and that it very likely will become the
        subject of scrutiny by the media and public officials, they respond
        by saying essentially: "Oh, no!" ­ they realize that this is not just
        like writing a paper for their professor; and they go a hundred extra
        yards to produce work of the highest quality
      · They have great stories about being hard at work in the library at
        2AM, pausing to look around the room blearily, and seeing only
        their classmates there ­ and they all know why, and they're not
        leaving until it's right

· But of course, making these reports AVAILABLE for all to use, and
making them USABLE by all are two very different things ­ and this is
where attaining the potential of CBR to yield public work becomes really
laborious, but also incredibly exciting
       · Because when these reports first come out, in all their scholarly
          depth and sophistication, they frankly are not "common things" at
          all
       · Students have to examine scholarly literature on their issue
          systematically and critically, isolating key concepts and using them
          analytically
       · They have to devise rigorous methods of primary research,
          whether that means conducting interviews or statistical operations,
          or both
       · And their conclusions and policy recommendations have to speak
          to the proposals that other professional analysts have advanced
       · So these reports are extremely dense and intellectually rich­
          necessarily, because a basic aim here is to use the specialized
          resources of the academy to demonstrate with persuasiveness and
          credibility what the problems are and what reasonable solutions
          would be



                                     12
· But when we take on the challenge of taking this work out into the
community, into the media, and into the halls of the state legislature, we
force ourselves to leave that specialized discourse behind and make the
product of the research more PUBLIC
       · I should mention here that largely because we take these extra
          steps to bring the civic products of our CBR into various public
          contexts, last year we successfully competed for a national grant
          for innovation in CBR from the Community-Based Learning
          Initiative at Princeton University, itself funded through the federal
          Learn & Serve program; and we're very happy and grateful that
          this grant, along with the matching funds we receive from
          Whitman College, now support this ongoing project
       · And what I want to emphasize is that making the fruits of CBR
          public is a major undertaking in its own right, especially if you
          want to do it in a way that is attentive to the power dynamics
          involved in public communication, and in a way that fulfills the
          promise of public work to yield a genuinely "common thing"
       · Very concretely, there are four ways in which the initial product of
          undergraduate community-based research has to become internally
          malleable, if it is really going to further democratic life in a society
          with deep, fundamental relations of class and race subordination:
              o The LANGUAGE expressing the ideas has to change,
                  perhaps morphing into several different vernacular forms
                  and probably also literally going through translation into
                  languages other than English
              o What gets said (and shown) also has to be dramatically
                  altered, in light of a keen consciousness of the TIME limits
                  on what non-specialists can be expected to digest
              o Furthermore, the students, faculty, and community partners
                  involved in the project need to find out what it's like to stage
                  discussions of the research in socially and physically diverse
                  SPACES
              o Lastly, you have to become more self-conscious and creative
                  about the VISUAL AND PHYSICAL aspects of the material
                  that you bring to the public

· First, then, the issue of language: this is kind of maddening, because as
hard as the students have worked to craft precise academic concepts and to
master professional jargon in writing their reports, they now have to re-focus
and design new terms so they can be understood by ordinary people

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      · And obviously, not only in the case of research that is specifically
        about and for Latinos but also for anyone who cares about making
        their work accessible in a multi-linguistic culture, changing the
        language must mean making the research available literally in
        translation, as we have done by translating a number of our
        documents into Spanish
      · But as an example of how language matters, in terms of phrasing
        and word choice, consider this: in his original, full report this past
        semester, one of my students, Nick Dollar, wrote this: "Analysis of
        recent elections demonstrated evidence of racial bloc voting,
        implying a potential violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights
        Act and demanding a change in the system of elections."
      · Now of course, not many people out there know that Section 2 of
        the VRA relates to at-large and district elections, or that "racial
        bloc voting" is the main kind of voting behavior that makes at-
        large elections such imposing barriers to minority representation ­
        or even what "racial bloc voting" is
      · So here's how Nick put things, when he wrote a letter to the editor
        of the Yakima Herald when that paper ran a Sunday lead editorial
        taking issue with our report, claiming that low levels of Latino
        representation in public offices simply reflected voter apathy
        among Latinos ­ basically, that if Latinos weren't running or
        winning campaigns, it was their own fault
      · Nick wrote: "Democracy is about the ability to have your voice
        heard in the decisions that affect your life. We found that Latinos
        often do not have equal access to this opportunity, whether they
        choose to participate or not."
      · Notice a couple key things he's doing here. First, he makes an
        appeal to a "core value," a principle that people generally share
        and that resonates on the levels of heart and mind alike ­ this
        notion of democracy and having one's voice heard
      · Second, Nick describes the problem of what political scientists and
        lawyers call "minority vote dilution" in plain, accessible terms that
        connect with this core value: he talks, simply, about having equal
        access to the opportunity to have one's voice heard

· One big reason why the language has to change when you move the
research into a public context is that now you need to produce text that is
SHORT and to the point, because non-specialists can only be expected to


                                      14
devote very limited time to listening to you, at least initially; however, you
can reach people through multiple, quick-time venues:
      · It might be a five-minute talk for a public meeting
      · Or maybe it's a 150 word letter to the editor, like the response
         Nick wrote
      · Or it might be just two quick sentences ­ "talking points" to
         communicate to a reporter, and through her to the public at large,
         the one paramount point that you want people to know about the
         work you did
      · As an example, take these brief lines that another student, Lisa
         Curtis, put together as part of her preparation for speaking publicly
         about her research on how neighborhood based organizations in
         Walla Walla are really succeeding in motivating civic engagement
         among Latinos
      · Lisa decided to say something roughly like this: "Neighborhood-
         based organizations like Commitment to Community and
         Washington Park Neighbors in Walla Walla are what provide the
         `spark' to Latino civic engagement, as organizer Federico Díaz put
         it."
      · Notice the way this image of the "spark" communicates something
         crucial in a very compact way: not only is the image itself
         immediately evocative of the kind of energy for public
         involvement that she wants listeners to associate with the
         organizations she's talking about
      · And not only does it immediately give her comments personality,
         because the line comes right from one of the interviews she did,
         and she names the person she's quoting
      · In addition, referring to this "spark" puts in a nutshell her one, key
         point, which is that Latinos CAN be mobilized, and don't buy the
         cynical, racist assumptions that are out there, that Latinos don't
         want to participate in public life

· You also need to cultivate a diverse array of racial and class SPACES to
which you bring the research ­ and this is something that is enormously
difficult, because we live in a race and class segregated society, and often
the paths of least resistance run in the direction of making your audiences
homogeneous
       · In my project, we face the particular challenge of making our work
           accessible to those segments of our local Latino communities that


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        only speak Spanish, and that involve a lot of recent immigrants
        who assume that no one really wants to hear what they have to say
        and that they are powerless to change their circumstances as a
        group
      · So when we held our first public meeting about our project work
        this past spring, in Walla Walla, we had a professional interpreter
        come, we gave out headsets for simultaneous translation, and we
        made up batches of advertising materials in Spanish and spent a
        day passing them out at a community festival in the main Mexican
        neighborhood, pasting them on the taco trucks, and giving them to
        the local leaders
      · And something powerful happened at that meeting, perhaps
        because we did that: at one point, a person stood up and made a
        comment in Spanish, and you could just feel the shift of energy in
        the room, like the ship had suddenly tacked in a different direction
      · And then all of a sudden a bunch of other people started speaking
        up in Spanish, obviously feeling now like they were authorized to
        speak in ways they hadn't felt before; the translator had to switch
        directions and yell out the translation into English instead of
        whispering into his microphone in Spanish; and it was a moment
        where this process of "deliberation" that Boyte and Farr refer to
        really started to happen, but in a way that also involved overt
        challenges to the expected protocols for expressing oneself in
        public

· Another, more ambitious way that we went "tabling" with our research, to
return to Romand Coles's evocative formulation, was when we held a
similar public meeting in the town of Toppenish, several days later
       · Latinos make up about 80% of the population in Toppenish,
          whereas they comprise a fifth of the total population in Walla
          Walla ­ so right there, you're already talking about a
          fundamentally different kind of racial space
       · But in addition, it's obvious that holding a public meeting on the
          campus of an elite liberal arts college poses a number of barriers to
          making your research a "common thing" ­ so in Toppenish, we
          opted to do the town meeting at the public middle school
       · And here again, with the help of the students and faculty going on
          air on the local public interest Spanish-language radio station and a
          professional translator, and now with the students' PowerPoint text


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        also having been made bilingual, the discussion got going in
        Spanish as well as English
      · Now, attendance was lighter than we'd hoped, partly because our
        community partner organization is still in the building stages of
        bringing into its network more recent immigrants, especially those
        who are undocumented low-wage workers; partly because we
        needed to get the word out sooner than we did
      · So in sum, making your research a "common thing" by
        transporting into multiple, racially and class diverse public spaces
        is something that can be done, but it is no easy task: you need
        resources, dedication, and planning
      · And most of all, you need to have enough communicative and
        logistical agility to be able to re-work your material differently
        each time, to make it "common" in ways that it hasn't been before

· The fourth and last recommendation I'll make for going public with CBR
is to become deliberate and experimental with your approach to the whole
aesthetic feel and look of that "civic product"!
       · The political culture of late capitalist societies is foremost a visual
          culture; and so text is not enough ­ our students and their partners
          must create a visual context for the text and communicate via
          images in concert with text
       · This means that you give serious, critical thought to the design of
          your website and printed materials you make up: for example, to
          the artwork and photos and video material you include, and how
          you position these images; to what ideas and feelings these visual
          artifacts inspire in the viewer
       · And this also means that when students and partners go in front of
          live audiences, they need to project images ­ and this means
          staring undaunted into the maw of the monster called PowerPoint
       · The point is to help your people learn how to use this tricky
          technology to supplement their oral remarks with visual images
          and fragments of text, rather than allowing themselves to be
          dominated and rendered passive, and boring, by the technology
       · Finally, the look and feel of the "civic product," in situations like
          this or on TV, and even on the radio, depends vitally on some very
          physical things about the presenters themselves: how people stand,
          how they carry themselves physically, their facial expressions and
          their gestures, their tone of voice and vocal cadences


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      · The messengers, in short, become crucial to making the research a
        "common thing," which they can only do to the degree that they
        self-consciously strive to communicate energy and passion about
        what they are saying, with their faces, bodies, and voices
      · So what I've found is that it really makes a huge difference if you
        allow for time in your project for students to practice their public
        presentations, to make mistakes, to sound flat ­ and then to pump
        up the energy and break through their inhibitions


So in closing: whether you're a professor or administrator at a private
institution, or at a public university with an explicit legal mandate to serve
the public interest, I think one of our core values as higher education
professionals ought to be supporting research that seeks to make a positive
difference in the world

· Moreover, the research we promote should not just try to solve problems
for people, but should help democratize the process by which social
problems are identified and addressed ­ not just the content, but the form,
too, matters

· And I've tried to suggest that even when we move in the direction of
community-based research as a way of making good on this commitment, all
sorts of challenges await us and await our students

· We can meet these challenges, IF we have high levels of institutional and
financial support, AND if we cultivate an understanding and passion for
CBR as a dynamic process of labor to fashion and re-fashion those "worldly
in-betweens" in ways that make them more and more public




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