The community-engaged method (CEM) movement, on the other hand, is a call to use research to create social change. It is a movement towards collaboration and building healthy relationships between technical researchers and marginalized communities, as well as community-based organizations. Like other relationships, this method requires us to demonstrate clear communication, trust, consistency, transparency, and accountability, and take power imbalances and historical and current oppressions into account.

CEM Overview

Community engaged methods are not one specific method but an overarching approach to research built on a value of “nothing about us, without us.” Meaning that the people or communities who the research is on, should be included in the research process. Community engaged methods recognize this and center the expertise of the people and communities closest to the topic of study by intentionally including their input, participation, and reflections into research. As mentioned above, CEM research works to both reckon with the harmful practices of research design and improve research by grounding it in the lived truth of people involved in it.

Projects that use CEM can take many forms. These research methods can be applied from the early stages of project design to the later stages of interpreting the data and creating recommendations. These methods range in how much they actively center community members. The most rigorous forms of CEM, called community-based participatory research and participatory action research, bring in (and pay!) community representatives as full partners in the research. More modest CEM can include community consultation, where community stakeholders and residents provide input at different points of a research project-- especially at the end, when data and reports need to be made useful for everyone involved. Researchers who authentically use CEM make important research information accessible for all, including by publishing findings in multiple places, not only in academic journals or on websites requiring paid subscriptions for access.

Researchers using CEM in their work need to be transparent to both themselves and the communities they are working in. Research teams using CEM must actively reflect on their own potential to do or reinforce harm. We have the potential to cause harm when we are not honest about what research can and can't do; if we are dishonest about our personal motivations to do research and when we are dishonest about our own experiences or biases.

Participatory Action Research

We are using participatory action research (PAR) as our method for this project. PAR understands that lived experience is just as valuable to a research team as a PhD. Two aspects of PAR that make it different from other types of community engaged methods are its requirement to 1) include people closest to the topic of study as members of the research team, and 2) its explicit goal for action. What that means is that PAR projects are intentionality set up to work with community members as researchers and are set up to use the research findings to create changes.

W.E.B. Du Bois

In terms of studying the criminal legal system and those entrapped within it, there is a long lineage of scholars who use their experiences as a lens from which to analyze and create change. As Serrano (2018) tells us, one of the earliest seeds of community-based research was planted by W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois was the founder of American Sociology (as well as the NAACP), a Pan-Africanist, Civil Rights activist, and the first Black American to earn his doctorate from Harvard University. In one of his most well-known research projects, he wanted to understand inequality and the current state of Black folks living in Philadelphia. In addition to confronting the harmful, inaccurate, and racist science of the time, he also wanted to use his study to further justice for Black people in Philly. He used his findings and work to advance social change.

Convict Criminology

Convict criminology is a philosophy, perspective, and movement that centers the experiences of those who are entangled (or formerly) in the criminal legal system. Those who weave convict criminology into their work use their experiences, and the experiences of others in the criminal legal system, to guide their analyses and interrogate structures of domination that created the conditions that led to their imprisonment (Richards 2013). This movement served to challenge articles, books, and other writings about prisons and imprisoned people that was not fully informed or aware of the experiences of people involved with the justice system; it challenged the academic literature that further replicated structural injustice. In our approach, we will honor and use a framework that merges both the traditions of community-based research and convict criminology.

Who better to research Credible Messenger programming than someone who has 1) been in the shoes of youth entering the program and/or 2) been a mentor/mentee in the communities. You have been hired on as a community researcher to use your lived experience and connection to community combined with research training to do this work together with Urban. 

One leader in CEM is an organization called Chicago Beyond, which recently published a guidebook for community organizations, researchers, and funders called “Why am I Always Being Researched?.” This guide encourages readers to think critically about the fact that, if evidence matters, we should care deeply about how it is found and how it is shared.

Think about the project and the guidebook above. What do we need to be mindful of in engaging in this project within your communities and the CM movement broadly? Share anything you are willing to in the Module 4 discussion on Slack or privately in your own notes.