What is Engaged Scholarship?

Engaged scholarship is the co-creation of knowledge that shifts the position of students and community groups from knowledge consumers to knowledge producers and partners in problem-solving. Engaged scholarship is the generation of new knowledge through the combining of academic knowledge and community-based knowledge, eliminating a hierarchy of knowledge and a one-way flow of knowledge outward from the college or university.  (Brown University's College and University Engagement Initiative)

In my experience, this approach involves listening to the insights and experiences of others, offering incisive questions that advance thought and practice, and proposing participatory ways of collecting data that will allow systematic analysis of changes in policies and behaviors over time. Engaged scholarship has served to improve the quality of research questions, observation instruments, hypotheses, and research impact. One implication of this process is that policy insights (and sometimes policies themselves) emerge from populations directly affected by policy proposals, potentially making them more realistic and sustainable to enact.

The participation of increasing numbers of people in decision making about the development of their place is also a well understood instrument and, often, goal of development (see, e.g., Localizing Development). 

This portion of my website is intended to provide examples of my own nascent attempts at applying this approach in Uganda across various settings. I will try to update this page over time as I accumulate experience using this approach.