Community Engaged Scholarship and the Academy

What is it about?

This article is about the barriers that exist in many academic institutions to fully embracing comment engaged forms of scholarship, and about what it's going to take to overcome these persistent hangups. In this paper, we argue that community engaged scholarship is an important means through which to bolster academia's social relevance and to carry out its civic mission, and we put forward some ideas about why academic institutions nonetheless still often treat community engaged research as less academic than other forms of scholarship.

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Why is it important?

The authors argue that resistance to community engaged scholarship that persists in many academic institutions reflects an existential impulse that is deeply embedded within the psyche of academia as an institution. As such, they argue that while many universities in North America are changing policy and procedure to better accommodate community engaged forms of scholarship, enduring change will require a cultural change in how universities define "scholarship." Some ideas about how this kind of change can be achieved are proposed.

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