zzOld_Web Resources for Participatory Research
Annotations compiled by the ANTH 714 Class of 2013
This bibliography provides resources for participatory researchers and activist academics in diverse fields who are interested in web-based fora for sharing research, engaging publics, and networking. The list is divided into three sections:
- Engaged Scholarship and Action Research
- Non-Profit Resources in Research Justice
- Social Media, Platforms, and Digital Technologies in Research
Within each category, a few sites have been annotated, and additional sites are included for reference. This is an ongoing collection, and we hope it will continue to grow with the Certificate in Participatory Research.
I. Engaged Scholarship and Action Research
International Collaboration for Participatory Health Research http://www.icphr.org
The ICPHR was founded in 2009 and includes a group of over 100 researchers, health professionals and engaged citizens from over 15 different countries. ICPHR is interested in promoting participatory health research as a way to improve the health of the people where we live. There are meetings once a year in a different country to decide what topics to work on together and what projects to organize. Projects include:
- Position papers on issues important to PHR
- Literature reviews in different languages
- Workshops and short courses on PHR
- Publications on PHR in scientific and professional journals
- Presentations at national and international conferences on PHR
- A database containing information on PHR studies and issues related to PHR
The Public Science Project http://publicscienceproject.org/
The Public Science Project (PSP) is a longstanding PAR group based out of the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. PSP began as a coalition of “activists, researchers, youth, elders, lawyers, prisoners, and educators” that came together to form a PAR collective. Today it provides a wide range of community-based research and youth PAR projects located in schools, community organizations, prisons, and neighborhood institutions. The PSP website includes research principles, current and past projects, and training opportunities (including its Critical PAR Summer Institute). Its work reflects a commitment at each stage to research by and for those most impacted by research. This means project design, production, interpretation, and dissemination must be community-led. PSP conducts and supports such PAR from this framework and towards making social science a public activity. In describing the collective’s collaborative practice they write:
In each setting, a series of “methods camps”/seminars are launched so that we can learn, together, the local history of struggle and develop a shared critical language of social theory, feminist theory, critical race theory and methodology. Depending on age, immediate struggles, and the nature of the research, we immerse ourselves in the writings and teachings of social psychology, critical race theory, queer scholarship, critical theory, feminist thought and indigenous knowledges, e.g. of Patricia Hill Collins, Fannie Lou Hamer, Paolo Freire, Orlando Fals-Borda, Sandra Harding, Stuart Hall, Ignacio Martin-Baro, Nancy Hartsock, Morton Deutsch, Linda Tuhiwai Smith and others, and we listen to hip hop, review magazine and policy representations of youth, study civil rights histories and local campaigns. Together, we craft the research questions, challenge each other to assure that varied standpoints are represented in the original framing of the question, work through the specifics of design, data collection, analysis and products ‘of use.’
Groundswell: Oral History For Social Change http://www.oralhistoryforsocialchange.org/blog/
The Groundswell website is a national network of oral historians, activists, cultural workers, and documentarians both in and outside of academia. Its blog provides resources and reportbacks from its Practitioners Support Network and local gatherings. Some resources include a list of movement building oral history projects, an archive of digital works, and a sampling of online tools available. This blog can be helpful in terms of researching funding and finding examples of university-community collaborations. It also provides creative insights into how oral history can contribute to community organizing through innovative uses of narrative. “Groundwell is a space to leverage our collective experience, build and expand the field and support others to embrace and use these strategies and methods.” Originating out of Columbia University’s Oral History Program, Groundwell is now an independent entity.
Sonoma State University Center for Community Engagement http://www.sonoma.edu/cce/blog/
“The Center for Community Engagement (CCE) advances community based programs on the Sonoma State University campus.
The CCE supports faculty in developing community based teaching that integrates academic theory with community service and scholarship that is inclusive of community partners and students to address local problems. By incorporating these projects into the curriculum, we teach students to be active citizens and that the theories taught in the classroom do apply to real world issues.” (“About CCE – CCE Mission”)
The Sonoma State University Center for Community Engagement (CCE) website recently integrated their WordPress blog into this CCE website. There are new posts to the blog about every two weeks. Topics include sharing information about local speakers, workshops, conferences, lessons learned, guides to navigate some of the resources on their site, and a range of suggestions and advice for PAR work, like “tips and trends in service-learning workshops.” The CCE blog posts are easy-to-read, user-friendly, and engaging with occasional use of videos with text. The CCE hosts at least one workshop or conference for community partners per semester. Although the activities and events they post on take place mostly in California, the site offers many potentially useful resources for researchers in general, like an Agency Orientation Checklist and Recommendations for Developing Partnerships with Faculty. The CCE is connected to many social media sites, like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, and an RSS to follow the CCE blog feed. They also have their frequently updated Tweets integrated into a side bar on many of their website pages.
AntipodeFoundation.org – http://antipodefoundation.org/
AntipodeFoundation.org, launched in January 2012, serves as a companion site to the renown peer-reviewed journal Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography (Impact Factor: 2.43). Since 1969, Antipode has been a clearinghouse and catalyst for scholarship that draws on “a radical (Marxist/socialist/anarchist/anti-racist/feminist/queer/green) analysis of geographical issues and whose intent is to engender the development of a new and better society” (“About the Journal and Foundation”).
The website is a valuable resource for politically engaged graduate students in critical geography and related fields, offering information on the Antipode Foundation’s Graduate Student Scholarship, Scholar-Activist Awards, and Institute for the Geographies of Justice (a biennial interactive workshop for 25 participants on social justice theory and praxis). As a clearinghouse to support geographical thinking, the website houses video abstracts and interviews with authors, a book review section with plans to expand reviews to other textual forms, and open access “virtual issues” that draw on selections from Antipode’s extensive archive grouped around particular contemporary issues. Of particular interest for engaged scholars, the site features a section called “Interventions”, short essays that engage with current events through geographical/critical theory, as well as report-backs and reflections from Staff Reporters, many of whom are graduate students, on radical politics and social movements.
Community Research Collaborative http://crcblog.typepad.com/
The Community Research Collaborative (CRC) Blog is a partnership of United Way of Greater Cincinnati and the University of Cincinnati. Although their “About Us” page is not accessible, they keep their website updated regularly, with blog posts being added about every two weeks. There are five 2012-2013 CRC Fellows who contribute to the blog. The posts focus geographically in the Cincinnati area with topics including expanding career pathways, public health, economic and financial literacy, and economic and population trends for Cincinnati and the nation. The site has limited usefulness for PAR researchers, as they have no substantive offerings of resources. They have their Twitter feed integrated in their website that is regularly updated, but the Tweets are not very helpful for PAR work. This site could be useful if your work relates to one of the topics the writers blog about (aforementioned), but other than that, it is very limited.
Other Examples of Engaged Scholarship
http://inq13.gc.cuny.edu/blog/
This blog is connected to a participatory open online course focused on East Harlem, NYC based out of CUNY.
University-community partnerships for worker rights.
http://storytelling.concordia.ca/blog
Based out of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University.
Community Innovations Lab at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning.
http://cbprinstitute.wordpress.com/
San Francisco State University has been hosting annual CBPR Institute conferences since 2012
http://unclineberger.org/training/seminars/strengthening-community-academic-partnerships
“This series will consist of one and a half-hour sessions to promote community engagement and engaged scholarship being done at UNC-CH.”
II. Non-Profit Resources in Research Justice
Community-Campus Partnerships for Health https://ccph.memberclicks.net/
“Established in 1997, Community-Campus Partnerships for Health (CCPH) is a nonprofit membership organization that promotes health equity and social justice through partnerships between communities and academic institutions. We view health broadly as physical, mental, emotional, social and spiritual well-being and emphasize partnership approaches to health that focus on changing the conditions and environments in which people live, work, learn and play.
By mobilizing knowledge, providing training and technical assistance, conducting research, building coalitions and advocating for supportive policies, we help to ensure that the reality of community engagement and partnership matches the rhetoric.” (“About Us”)
The CCPH website is very comprehensive, user-friendly, and bound to have something useful for anyone engaging in academic work with communities. It is a go-to resource for several public health academics engaging in CBPR. Although the CCPH does not have an actual blog, they have multiple Twitter accounts one could follow as well as several listserves one could join (https://ccph.memberclicks.net/listservs-and-social-media). They also have their frequently updated Tweets integrated into a side bar throughout the CCPH website. They offer a plethora of resources on their website, such as toolkits, databases, reports, and archived presentations. The CCPH also has 6 focus areas highlighted on their website, many of which would be useful for PAR; these focus areas are: Community-Based Participatory Research, Community-Engaged Scholarship, Community-Institutional Partnerships, Service-Learning, Research Ethics, and Anchor Institutions. For example, the Community-Engaged Scholarship (CES) page has a toolkit to assist “graduate students and faculty to carefully document their CES and produce strong portfolios for promotion and tenure.” The page also links out to CES4Health, “a unique online portal for peer-reviewed publication and dissemination of products of CES that are in forms other than journal articles,” a really important point for PAR dissemination. The CCPH also hosts a US-based international conference every other year. Lastly, there is an option to be a CCPH member, which would provide member benefits, like publication discounts, networking opportunities, and discounted training, technical assistance, and phone consultations. However, membership is not needed to access the vast majority of the resources on their site.
Race Forward http://www.raceforward.org/
Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation (previously the Applied Research Center) is a non-profit organization researching pressing issues of racial justice. The website provides three arms for this work – research, media, and practice. Research tools are available as well as reports on structural racism in the United States. In media, Colorlines advocates for racial justice by writing about current national stories through a critical racial lens. Colorlines (via its website, email, twitter, and facebook) is an award-winning news source as well as social media tool of community engagement. Practice is the space for advocacy, campaigns, and leadership building. Here Race Forward offers innovative tools for bringing racial justice into curriculum, trainings, and workplace. The website is useful in learning about how research can be applied both in journalism and in movement building. Presenting a model of accessibility, “Race Forward Research seeks to provide evidence of the entrenched and systematic barriers to racial justice.”
The Society for Community Research and Action http://www.scra27.org/blogs
The Society for Community Research and Action’s (SCRA) “About” page shows their vision as “[SCRA] will have a strong, global impact on enhancing well-being and promoting social justice for all people by fostering collaboration where there is division and empowerment where there is oppression,” and their mission statement as “[SCRA] is an international organization devoted to advancing theory, research, and social action. Its members are committed to promoting health and empowerment and to preventing problems in communities, groups, and individuals. SCRA serves many different disciplines that focus on community research and action.”
The SCRA home page lists recent activity and posts, showing updates as recent as earlier today. The home page also highlights recent comments, a RSS feed for the American Journal of Community Psychology (AJCP), and their Twitter posts. The website offers an alphabetized Resource Wiki, discussion forums, and access to specific publications. There is also a member center if one opts to become one, and membership benefits include a free subscription to AJCP and the SCRA newsletter, involvement in regional and national conferences, and other additional resources. Overall, this website has strengths in how it is regularly updated and has easy-to-use opportunities to participate in a discussion forum, but it is weak in how much resources it can offer non-members.
Media Mobilizing Project http://mediamobilizing.org/
Media Mobilizing Project is a media and popular education organization. Under the motto “Movements Begins with the Telling of Untold Stories,” MMP and community leaders produce TV and radio on local issues in Philadelphia. Their website describes trainings and research projects directed by community activists.
Research Justice http://www.datacenter.org/whats-new/news/
Research Justice blog attentive to the work of the DataCenter in Oakland, CA.
Research Justice http://researchjustice.com/
This is a working group that plans the Research Justice Track at the Allied Media Conference.
Restaurant Opportunities Center United http://rocunited.org/research-resources/
Restaurant Opportunities Center United runs a few worker-led research projects.
Total Worker Health http://www.linkedin.com/groups/NIOSH-Total-Worker-Health-4473829?home=&gid=4473829&trk=groups_guest_item_detail-h-logo
Forum to discuss efforts to promote Total Worker Health™, including research that is being done on this and related topics.
Ethics of Community Engaged Research http://primr.blogspot.com/2009/02/ethics-of-community-engaged-research.html
Blog examining ethics of biomedical and social science/behavioral research
III. Social Media, Platforms, and Digital Technologies in Research
Networked Researcher – http://www.networkedresearcher.co.uk/
Networked Researcher, based in the UK and affiliated with the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, is an online platform that encourages researchers to engage in social media and digital educational technologies. Conceived as a networking and learning forum, the site offers a blog for researchers in a broad range of disciplines to disseminate scholarship and receive feedback, particularly on the use of digital research techniques. Interested researchers create an account with Networked Researcher that allows them to contribute to the multi-author blog as often as they wish to. Blog posts are public, assigned a Creative Commons license, but authors retain individual rights to their work.
The Networked Researcher is a useful ‘practice’ site for researchers interested in exploring social media as either a component of their methodologies or as a focus of their research, particularly as a venue to network with others interested in digital technologies. Blog posts reflect a wide variety of research strategies, tips for social media ‘beginners’ and tool-specific methods, as well as reviews and commentaries on how social media intersects with and complicates conventional academic research. For graduate students and early career academics, blog posts and ‘Peer Interviews’ with academics may be worth exploring to learn how academics are successfully incorporating social media in pursuing their research and increasing conversation around their fields of expertise.
Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC) – http://www.hastac.org/
HASTAC is an online “community of connection” (“About”) for researchers, artists and educators interested in critically engaging in digital learning. With over 11,500 members, HASTAC is a vibrant interdisciplinary forum for networking, discussion and collaboration. Once registered, members can contribute blog posts, participate in interest groups, and share information about tools, conferences, jobs and funding opportunities.
For graduate students interested in the growing field of “Digital Humanities” (DH), HASTAC is a great way to connect with other emerging innovators in digital research/technologies. Blog posts by HASTAC Scholars – a yearly cohort of undergraduates and graduates interested in the intersection of technology and learning defined broadly – define terms used in digital media, review useful tools and software for collaborative praxis, and reflect on how digital technologies shift and challenge academic practice, artistic work and humanities education. Blog posts on pedagogy and teaching also offer practical advice and reflections on specific tools and ways to incorporate digital media in various educational settings, whether in the classroom or in online learning environments.
Other useful sites
* The Guardian’s list of research-oriented blogs:
* The LSE list of academic Tweeters, divided by subject area:
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2011/09/02/academic-tweeters-your-suggestions-in-full/
* How and why should academics blog? Read to learn more:
http://patthomson.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/acwrimo-work-in-progress-how-to-research-academic-blogging/
* MLA’s “Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media”:
http://www.mla.org/resources/documents/rep_it/guidelines_evaluation_digital
*AAPCHO CBPR Toolkit that allows for feedback/direct evaluation (navigate toolkit by clicking the section names in the box on the right; it provides several resources under each section)
http://www.aapcho.org/resources_db/cbpr-toolkit/#sec1
*AAPCHO community criteria for research participation (5 key criteria with several points under each)
http://www.aapcho.org/resources_db/community-criteria-for-research-participation/
*Application of CBPR through arts projects with youth
*Application of CBPR with Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR)