Shared voices, different worlds: Process and product in the Food Dignity action research project

Abstract

Diversity of perspective makes for greater depth when painting a portrait of community life. But embracing the idea of representing true diversity in a formal research project is a whole lot easier than putting it into practice. The three dozen members of the Food Dignity action research team, now entering the fourth year of a five-year project, are intimately familiar with this challenge. In this article, four of the collaborators explore the intricacies of navigating what it means to bring together a genuine cross-section of community-based activists and academics in an effort to draw on one another’s professional and personal strengths to collect and disseminate research findings that represent the truth of a community’s experiences, and are ultimately disseminated in a way that brings tangible benefit to the heart and soul of that community. The authors include Food Dignity’s principal investigator (Porter) and three community organisers (Marshall, Herrera and Woodsum) in organisations that have partnered with Food Dignity. Two of the organisers (Herrera and Woodsum) also serve project-wide roles. These collaborators share their personal and professional hopes, struggles, concerns, successes and failures as participants in this cutting-edge effort to equalise community and university partnerships in research. Keywords: community-based participatory research (CBPR), food justice, equitable community-campus partnerships, food sovereignty, case study, action research

Experiential Extractivism in Service-Learning and Community Engagement

“…Key et al (2019) outline a continuum of community engagement that names equity indicators (e.g., power, decisionmaking) and contextual factors (e.g., history, transparency) alongside a spectrum that spans from "no community involvement" to "community-driven or community-led." That framing directly affects where community voice enters, whether or not local knowledge is valued and validated, and whether the autonomy and dignity of communities are being preserved in that partnership (Porter et al, 2014). The ivory tower perception of universities in communities is rooted, too, in assumptions of power and privilege that connect implicitly and explicitly to class and race (Bradley, 2018).…”

Visualizing Expertise: Collaborative Pathway Modeling as a Methodology for Conveying Community-driven Strategies for Change

“…Why should community organizers trust and share with outside researchers their hard-won expertise, with the all-too-common history of seeing it misused, or scooped up and taken away for analysis and publication while they continue to battle the challenges they are working to solve? (Cochran et al, 2008;Corbie-Smith, Thomas, & St. George, 2002;Christopher, Watts, McCormick, & Young, 2008;Porter et al, 2014). The effort to establish equitable, collaborative relationships and trust among the community and academic partners in the Food Dignity project was an active commitment and challenge in the early years of the project, requiring ongoing recommitment.…”

Triple-rigorous Storytelling: A PI's Reflections on Devising Case Study Methods with Five Community-based Food Justice Organizations

“…The leadership from community-based co-investigators has led us to center our analysis around communities and people, as opposed to, for example, food or soil. Two, the lens variation among co-investigators has often been paradigmatic, in the Kuhnian sense of differing worldviews (Kuhn, 1962;Porter, Herrera, Marshall, & Woodsum, 2014). This is in addition to the array of disciplinespecific theory and methods the academic co-investigators (whose disciplines are listed in the last row of Table 1) have brought to our case study and other research.…”

“…Among academic-based investigators, we used auto-ethnography with technical approaches approximating Anderson's (2006), but always with ethical commitments mirroring Denzin's (2006). For examples from Food Dignity's work, see the graduate student reflective essay in this issue on emotional rigor (Bradley, Gregory, Armstrong, Arthur, & Porter, 2018), and (Porter et al, 2014;Wechsler, 2017).…”