News & Events
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FogNet — Fog Harvesting Solutions for Coastal California
FogNet is a research program that was developed to determine whether fog water harvesting has the potential to provide the coastal community with a viable and reliant water source.
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Making Agricultural Trade Sustainable
Making Agricultural Trade Sustainable (MATS) project’s goal is to identify key leverage points for changes in global agricultural trade policy that foster positive impacts of trade on sustainable development and human rights while reducing negative impacts. The project centers key United Nations sustainable development goals (SDG) including: 1) ending poverty, 2) ending hunger and malnutrition,…
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Community-Engaged Research and the Institutional Review Board: Opportunities and Considerations
By Claire Lawry and Rebecca London The Institutional Review Board plays a central role on university campuses in overseeing and administering the ethical guidelines for research. Its focus is on traditional research methods that involve researchers as the knowledge holders and producers and community members and organizations as the subjects of research. The IRB is…
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Community-Engaged Scholarship and Its Implications for Public Sociology and the Discipline
This article provides an overview of research, practice, and theory in community-engaged scholarship as a means to expand our understanding of public sociology and its broader implications for sociology as a discipline. We begin with an overview of community-engaged scholarship and how it is related to and distinct from public sociology. Five main principles of…
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Inventory of Community-Engaged Scholarship at UC Santa Cruz
Over the summer of 2023, Campus + Community (C+C) surveyed community-engaged scholarship and research collaborations across the UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) campus. A key takeaway is that centering community partnerships is happening in all divisions across campus and is conducted by faculty, students, and university staff. Focused on the past five years, the survey brought…
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UCSC Community Engaged Scholarship Guidelines for Tenure and Promotion
The University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) has a long and deep history of community engaged scholarship. For over 50 years, the university, a member of the ACLS Research University Consortium, boasted the only department of community studies in the United States. Beyond that department, scholars across disciplines have worked closely with community partners and organizations…
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The Psychological and Social Benefits of Agriculture with the Homeless Garden Project
The Homeless Garden Project (HGP) provides transitional work and support services to those facing homelessness through their 3-acre organic farm and related enterprises. They also provide job training, transitional employment, and support services to those experiencing homelessness. A crucial part of the support offered is the psychological and social benefits of agriculture work. Trevin Dace,…
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Playworks
Associate Professor of Sociology Rebecca London has been working with her community partner, Playworks, since 2008. Playworks is a national non-profit organization headquartered in Oakland whose mission is to facilitate safe and healthy play through supporting recess in elementary schools across the United States. A core part of their work involves helping schools to improve…
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Decolonize the Surf
David Crellin created Decolonize the Surf for his Master of Fine Arts thesis in Digital Arts New Media. The project was created to present research about the history of representation and racism in surf culture and to encourage meaningful conversation in the surfing community around these issues. A site-specific art and research project, Decolonize The…
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Research for, by, and about the People
Rebecca London writes on her experience and expertise with community-engaged research, arguing that rather than sequester community-engaged research to the sidelines of academia, sociology should elevate it as a rigorous, theoretically rich, and ethical way to conduct research and advance social justice. Read Research for, by, and about the People online via the American Sociological…
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Critical Engagement: Deepening Partnerships for Justice
Resurgent “culture wars” and American partisan politics have once again put higher education on the hot seat, and universities find themselves on the defensive, fending off charges of elitism, liberal bias, and irrelevance. Community-engaged research (CER) has become increasingly common on today’s campuses as part of this counter-campaign. Steve McKay outlines attempts at the UCSC…
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Community-Engaged Research (CER) in Contentious Times: Some Reflections
As demonstrated by this special issue of Footnotes, there is a growing and welcome recognition in sociology and allied disciplines of the value of community-engaged research (CER) and of its potentially transformative benefits for community partners, students, universities, and scholarship in the field. This has long been my experience with CER, most recently with the approach…