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Recently there has been a renewed call for research that seeks to understand the experiences of historically marginalized groups as a means of addressing inequities in governmental treatment and service provision. Although this call has been issued across all of the social sciences, its manifestation in the realm of disaster and emergency management has been limited based on the discipline's lack of use of critical methods within research designs. We argue that this is not necessarily a byproduct of a lack of interest in the experiences of minority populations or addressing inequity, but due a lack of understanding on how to use critical theory as a framework for research design in emergency and disaster management. As such, this conceptual paper offers insight into the need and value of critical theory as a means of structuring research. To aid the practices of other researchers, we offer two potential methods among many, critical ethnography and storytelling, as options for approaching critical research in emergency and disaster management.

Places of worship play important roles as anchor institutions that promote community engagement and motivate political activity. Universities, particularly in urban settings, can also serve as anchor institutions that connect communities. Yet, there is often a gulf between the two, to the detriment of the broader community. In this article, we present the Little Rock Congregations Study (LRCS) as an approach to community engagement with faith-based organizations in an urban setting. This research project, based at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, involves an interdisciplinary team focused on understanding and improving the community engagement of congregations in the city of Little Rock since 2012. We present qualitative and quantitative data to illustrate the benefits of our approach, including research results returned to community organizations, greater visibility of the university in the community, student involvement in research and with faith-based organizations, and substantive findings that inform the greater body of knowledge and our own community. Through more than eight years of community-based work on the LRCS we provide six key lessons learned for researchers and students building relationships with religious leaders that can help bridge the gulf between these two key community institutions.

As state governments expand the use of private contractors to provide public services, they create challenges to performance management and accountability. Using the framework of accountability as a social relationship, we evaluate New Jersey's oversight practices. We combine data from interviews and observation with a comprehensive analysis of the institutional framework. We raise two key questions. First, what causes New Jersey to neglect its performance management responsibilities? Second, how can New Jersey and other states strengthen their performance management and accountability practices? We posit that the state must retain some level of internal monitoring capacity as a core element of government. Effective oversight requires rebuilding administrative capacity and implementing ongoing, flexible, relational contract management that involves key stakeholders and does not put the entire burden of performance measurement on direct service providers. In this way, performance management and accountability can be linked together as tools for reflection and learning.