Walking to Build a Critical Community-Engaged Project: Collaborative Observations of Neighborhood Change in Long Beach, California

Abstract

Academic and community research partnerships have gained traction as a potential bridge between the university and local area to address pressing social issues. A key question for developing justice-oriented research is how to integrate best practices for creating genuine, authentic research partnerships. In this paper, we discuss the process of building a critical community-engaged project that examines how urban redevelopment changes neighborhoods within immigrant and/or communities of color. Focusing on Long Beach, California, in this article, we detail the development of a mixed-methods study that involves undergraduate students and community members as co-collaborators. We discuss the use and outcomes of co-walking as method, emphasizing observational findings, as well as the process of building team collaboration. We find that neighborhoods in Long Beach are changing rapidly in terms of the use of greening, increased technology integration within neighborhoods, and modern aesthetics, revealing that new residents will likely be younger and single residents with disposable income and no children. From this process, we identified a more critical question for the research project: “Development for whom?”. We argue that co-walking as method is an observational and relational process that assists with the foundational steps of building a critical community-engaged research project.

Critical approaches to mentorship: Creating access and equity for undergraduate research experiences.

“…For students of color, their racial and ethnic positionality creates an authentic connection with participants of similar backgrounds, which not only enhances the student's sense of belonging by emphasizing their unique contribution to the research team but also can benefit efforts to recruit diverse participants (Kelly et al, 2022). Participatory approaches assume that those most affected by the social issue need to be cocollaborators and active participants in all steps of the research design (Fine & Torre, 2019;Lo ´pez et al, 2022). Therefore, by implementing a participatory and student-led approach, students used their resistant capital to engage with and advocate for other minoritized students.…”

“…Such assumptions are racialized since “race is often coded as ‘cultural difference’ in schools” (Yosso, 2005, p. 75). The CCW framework is rooted in a critical race theoretical framework (Yosso, 2005), which also urges the development of methodologies and pedagogies of engagement that address inequities in the education of minoritized students (Fine & Torre, 2019; Gordon da Cruz, 2017; Greenberg et al, 2020; López et al, 2022).…”

“…Therefore, by implementing a participatory and student-led approach, students used their resistant capital to engage with and advocate for other minoritized students. In addition, participatory research assumes that all students can conduct research and, regardless of formal experience, have the necessary capital to produce knowledge that benefits research outcomes (Gordon da Cruz, 2017; Greenberg et al, 2020; Fine & Torre, 2019; López et al, 2022; Yosso, 2005;). However, participation is the first step, with the goal of students leading the research at all stages of the project as part of a process of the coproduction of knowledge between student and mentor (Greenberg et al, 2020; López et al, 2022; Sletto & Vasudevan, 2021).…”

Community-Engaged Research for Economic Justice: Reflections on Concepts and Practices

“…Throughout the research process, critical engagement demands that our researchers engage with community members as co-equal producers of knowledge, as experts on their own lives and the communities we are studying (Lopez et al 2022) (Greenberg et al 2020). In our case, students are based in a research center rather than a classroom setting or honors program (Santana et al 2022).…”