Engaged research: Timely,challenging and unavoidable

A response to Loretta Lees’ ‘What constitutes engaged dialogue in urban research? Thoughts from a long time “outsider-insider”’

Loretta Lees (2024) advances a vision and call to action for engaged work in urban research that is to be applauded. She confronts the hierarchical power relationships and divisions between academic and non-academic partners, including uneven exposures, risks and privileges in the production of scholarship. This is urgently needed. As a new journal, Dialogues in Urban Research is poised to embark upon this challenge and propel the momentum for more genuinely engaged research. Confronting institutional legacies of poorly engaged research means taking a critical perspective on the customs of western scholarship, spcifically the organized habits, processes and routines that systemically validate the dispensations and advantages afforded to academics (for instance, funding allocations, policies for tenure and promotion or publication in scholarly journals). In doing so, Lees justly urges meaningful engagement with ‘non-academics with in-depth, grounded knowledge of the urban’. This means confronting a deep legacy of domination within urban research by what Lees calls the intelligentsia, a class of thinkers holding privileged positions and extraordinary access to academic agenda-setting and intellectual dissemination. As Lees points out, the intelligentsia is essentially a social network, one that has constrained engaged dialogue by concentrating academic power at the exclusion of different experiences, priorities and socio-cultural positions. Moving urban research beyond academia is a means of developing more fulsome knowledge that is more equitable and more accurate and more accessible. But as Lees notes, while this pluralistic turn moves scholars into deeper and more complex relationships, problematic and perhaps impractical dynamics are unavoidable. Indeed, they are to be welcomed into core urban discussions. With its emphasis on critiquing present thinking and praxis in urban thought, research and pedagogy, Dialogues in Urban Research is an ideal forum for mobilizing Lees’ appeal.

Tackling the challenge of truly engaged dialogue means posing thorny questions that do not advance research agendas in the ways that are appreciated within contemporary academic modes. But these questions befit any serious commitment to meaningful engagement, and they are inescapable. The questions themselves should be tailored to each project and partnership, but a baseline for any engaged research ought to interrogate what accountability looks like and how it might be realized. University-aligned researchers can learn immensely when questions about freedom and control, representation and agency or respect and consent are centred within the research process itself. These types of questions feed reflexive methods that ground awareness of power and uneven relationships. Ideally, responses to these types of questions would be shaped by non-academics in conjunction with academics, and there will inevitably be occasions where differences emerge. Institutional ethics protocols simply are not enough, since they are typically designed to safeguard researchers from liability claims by casting relationships into abstractions that can be isolated and further abstracted should problems arise. Although confronting thorny questions early and repeatedly may slow the overall research process considerably and may shift research priorities at inopportune moments, investing this basic care in relationships between academics and non-academics should be a core ethical responsibility. It requires taking chances with new vulnerabilities for researchers – for instance, honest and candid self-evaluation, acknowledging errors, working through failures, losing supports, allowing research projects to evolve in unanticipated (and perhaps unfamiliar) ways and advancing without certitude or the promise of academically noteworthy publication – all while remaining respectful of power relations and impacts on communities. This is not for everyone. But for those who do care about engaged research and are willing to invest in methods that stray from the dominant norms, the promise of meaningful transformations in urban research is invigorating.

For those seeking grounded approaches to reconstituting university missions broadly, Lees’ summons for engaged dialogue present a key component in untangling the colonial machinery that underpins western scholarship. Instead of rejecting universities wholesale, Lees sticks with the notion that university scholarship may be critically rechanneled to serve as a viable forum for knowledge production. Lees is pushing us to explore ways to stretch university aptitudes and grow universities into more responsive and profound entities that do not just service the preoccupations and aspirations of the intelligentsia, but rather build functional relationships with the world beyond academia. Engaged research is not a means to bring scholarship ‘to the people’ or extract data from passive participants. Rather, it is an approach to awaken urban scholarship and shake off narrow-minded habits of thinking and doing. Centring the needs and priorities of communities, particularly those that have traditionally been excluded from scholarly discourse, necessarily means that academic researchers have to concede power. Obvious examples include the power to write on behalf of others, the power to one-sidedly analyze other people's lives, the power to take unilateral credit for revelations and the power to decide where the research is published. In short, it is a call to reconstitute academic norms, in keeping with the decolonial project set out by la paperson (also known as K. Wayne Yang) in A Third University is Possible (2017), especially where engaged research partnerships lead universities into decolonizing assemblages. This would be more akin to appropriating research traditions and reconstituting them in ways that do not just add representational diversity but rather propagate and generate new socio-cultural knowledge practices with pertinence beyond the Ivory Tower. The range of potential approaches is vast, and tailoring to particular research circumstances is necessary. In many cases, the practices of decoloniality in ecology may be instructive. As outlined by Trisos et al. (2021), this includes aspirations such as reciprocal learning, balancing labour expectations, recognizing systemic inequalities and historic precursors, emphasizing publication in media and repositories that non-academics have access to, amplifying diverse forms of expertise and widening pools of expertise, and practicing inclusive teamwork.

Lees profiles three cases from her own experience, and these are compelling in their range of actors and outcomes. However, it may be helpful to also consider models beyond distinctly urban research when considering ethics and methods for engaged dialogue. A remarkable example is the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) in Newfoundland, Canada, detailed in Max Liboiron's (2021) Pollution is Colonialism. This is an interdisciplinary lab that focuses on feminist, anti-colonial science about plastic pollution, where care for a subject of critique is grounded in affective relations and attachments within infrastructures of inequality, which in turn create obligations of care. Incorporating community-based and citizen science, in the CLEAR lab settlers ‘stand with’ Indigenous researchers to co-constitute knowledge. The CLEAR methodologies may be of particular interest to urban researchers embarking upon engaged research. Grounded in humility, accountability, equity and in good land relations, the lab's methods move beyond good intentions to create protocols around matters such as equity in authorship order, choosing collective lab values, running meetings, citation politics, guidelines for research with Indigenous groups, community peer review and collective consent (CLEAR, 2024). The methodological approach is thoughtful, comprehensive and continuously evolving, The CLEAR website is a goldmine of information, resources and shared learning that can help guide any engaged research practices.

The principle of complementarity as a means of overcoming dualities in theoretical and conceptual approachesis centered in Lees' work, rebuffing the rivalries between Marxism and postmodernism metanarratives in that often captivate Geography scholars in favour of united yet dynamic juxtapositions. In doing so, Lees advocates for dialectical relationships such that ‘“revolution” will occur at the interface between the two’. However, this is a point that warrants continued scrutiny, and it is vital that researchers do not extend assumptions of complementarity into engaged research relationships. This is an all too common miscalculation that undermines the capacity for anti-oppression scholarship. For instance, as Tuck and Yang (2012) note in the closing lines of their seminal paper on the incommensurability of decolonization with human and civil rights based social justice objectives, ‘Decolonization offers a different perspective to human and civil rights based approaches to justice, and unsettling one, rather than a complementary one. Decolonization is not an ‘and’. It is an elsewhere’ (36). Lees vision of complementarity is laudable, as it will reduce intellectual myopia and enrich proficiency in scholarship, producing higher calibre urban knowledge. Yet, there are important moments when commensurability is impossible and/or inappropriately sought, for which urban scholars must remain alert.

Lees’ work stirs but does not address questions about moving engaged research into teaching, and this is an urgent direction that many scholars must consider. Committing to engaged research practices requires time, relationship-building and plenty of constructive dialogue. As Lees emphasizes, for academics engaged research is largely about listening. How might this translate into the classroom? The mission of Dialogues in Urban Research clearly positions teaching within its purpose. How might urban-related pedagogies articulate engagement with non-academics researchers’ partners? This presses us to consider what engaged curricula looks like. How might engagement fold into the critical research that students conduct in urban-themed courses, at all degree levels? How might engaged methods become an expectation from masters’ theses and doctoral dissertations featuring community-based research? How can we ensure that students are trained and supported in the vulnerabilities that engaged research demands? Exploring the teaching and pedagogical potential for critical engagement with non-academics in teaching is certainly key to moving urban research forward, especially if it unravels the legacy of inequitable habits of thinking and practice within urban research.

Lees presents a robust case for engaged dialogue, one that realigns urban research from its core. This is timely and germane to the relationship of urban research with more just and sustainable futures. For academics, the challenge is both substantial and substantive, requiring concessions alongside new aptitudes and humilities. Moving towards more genuinely engaged research will be uncomfortable for some scholars, but it exists more instinctively for others such as Lees. This is great news for anyone who has ever felt like an outsider-insider, been a first-generation academic without a scholarly pedigree, not identified with the intelligentsia, or simply cares about the lived experience of marginalized urban existence. Making more space for non-academic voices through engaged research will help to remedy some of the most inequitable and unjust traditions in urban scholarship.