Community geography: Toward a disciplinary framework

Abstract

Community geography is a growing subfield that provides a framework for relevant and engaged scholarship. In this paper, we define community geography as a form of research praxis, one that involves academic and public scholars with the goal of co-produced and mutually-beneficial knowledge. Community geography draws from a pragmatist model of inquiry, one that views communities as emergent through a recursive process of problem definition and social action. We situate the growth of community geography programs as rooted in two overlapping but distinct traditions: disciplinary development of participatory methodologies and institutional traditions of community engagement in American higher education. We then trace the historical development of these programs, identifying common themes and outlining several challenges that community geographers should prioritize as this subfield continues to grow.

Community geography for precarious researchers: examining the intricacies of mutually beneficial and co-produced knowledge

“…Community geography provides a further model for geographers to integrate activist scholarship into research and teaching institutions through the establishment and support of collaborations with community-members (Robinson and Hawthorne 2018 ; Shannon et. al 2020 ). In doing so, community geography works to explicitly highlight and address some of the constraints experienced by community-engaged activist-scholars in geography as well as promote changes to institutional structures in ways that value community-engaged work.…”

“…Inspired by feminist and black geographies and methodological framings of pragmatism, community geography is sensitive to relations of power and positionality while allowing for a broad range of approaches and methods (Shannon et. al 2020 ). However, the foundational cornerstone of community geography is the establishment and nourishment of community partnerships.…”

Bringing geography to the community: community-based learning and the geography classroom

“…As universities face declining enrollments, and graduates struggle to be relevant in a rapidly changing society, the importance of real, tangible learning experiences becomes increasingly important. Community geography is a comparatively new term, but is well outlined by Shannon et al ( 2020 ) as a praxis which connects academic and public scholars to co-produce mutually beneficial knowledge, integrating research and action. Two key methods which form the foundation of this praxis are community-based (CBL) and spatial citizenship.…”

“…Geography becomes an additional method of coding the learning environment, which enhances the learner’s memory and adds value to the learning process (Vogler et al, 2012 ). The intersection of community-based learning with spatially-enabled learning is the pedagogical center of community geography, which fold these elements into applications within the communities being examined (Shannon et al, 2020 ). The focus on praxis allows the students and researchers to work through the process of identifying and defining community issues, identifying solutions through research and participatory methods, and culminating with social action (Robinson & Hawthorne, 2018 ; Strait, Turk, and Nordyke, 2015 ; Boll-Bosse & Hankins, 2018 ).…”

“…Geography is an intrinsic part of scholarship, to varying degrees, and spatial thinking can bring added dimension and value to the educational process (Vogler in: Thomas Jekel, Adrijana Car, Josef Strobl, and Gerald Griesebner (eds), Wichmann Verlag, Berlin, 2012). The intersectionalities which exist within the community, when examined with a spatial lens, are the core of community geography, a praxis-focused method of engaged scholarship (Shannon in Progress in Human Geography, 10.1177/0309132520961468, 2020 ). Community-based learning is not clearly defined, yet some established models exist.…”