Publications

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Play is a critical input to positive child and youth development. Recess is the only time in the school day when students can learn and practice social and emotional skills as well as be physically active, connect with friends, and take a break from the structure of the classroom. Today, in the aftermath of the…

By Rebecca London Campus + Community is a developing center at UCSC aimed at making visible the vital work that UCSC faculty, staff, and students perform in local communities as well as supporting ongoing and new community partnerships to have lasting effects in the community. As one of its first tasks, C + C undertook…