Community Engaged and Critical Research Special Issue: Editorial Review Comments
Link to the JSE December 2024 CECR Issue Table of Contents
“Our beautiful Earth is becoming inhospitable to us. How should educators, researchers, and knowledge creators respond to this existential threat? By accepting an unpalatable truth: our mainstream approach to learning, education, and research is actively co-producing the very opposite of what we need at this time of unsustainability.” (Bradbury, Waddell, O’ Brien Teehankee, & Fazey, 2019, p. 3)
The siloing of research has implications for how knowledge is (re)produced, and reproducing disciplinary knowledge in this format stifles its ability to make scalable change for good. The world is on fire, and we can no longer afford to do research that does not directly benefit the communities and the environments that are bearing the brunt of the metaphorical and literal heat. Community Engaged Critical Research (CECR) is a constellation of approaches and practices that reorient power relationships toward social and environmental justice. CECR is (already) a significant area of expertise across the Prescott College campuses both in the state of Arizona and globally that goes hand in hand with the College’s longstanding commitment to mission-based experiential education. To honor the tradition of this work and to further enhance its visibility we offer this guest-edited special issue on Community Engaged Critical Research (CECR) for the Journal of Sustainability Education.
This special issue highlights scholars, researchers, and activists who utilize Community Engaged Critical Research (CECR) as a dynamic form of sustainability education for social learning and knowledge creation. The CECR model critiques the extractive, hierarchical, and often colonizing nature of research that leverages the researcher’s status, power, and position well above those researched (and often invisibilizes, dehumanizes, or degrades the research ‘subjects’). The end goal of CECR is to support community-led initiatives in a time of significantly complex societal and environmental changes. In terms of hegemonic research practices:
We won’t end the systemic patterns of harm by isolating and picking off individuals just as we can’t limit the communicative power of mycelium by plucking a single mushroom from the dirt. We need to flood the entire system with life affirming principles and practices, to clear the channels between us of the toxicity of supremacy, to heal from the harms of a legacy of devaluing some lives and needs in order to indulge others. (maree brown, 2020, p. 8)
Just as brown states, applied to the research endeavor, we must do this CECR work together, through life-affirming, interconnected, and interdependent means. The CECR project seeks to critique and dismantle the “toxic substance” of supremacy as it pervades research in education, and offer solutions, principles, and pathways that transgress it. With mycelia and their root systems as a model, we explore CECR through a lens of solidarity and community care.
There is a vital need to increase the visibility of CECR work, find common threads and guiding elements, and build practical/actionable theory so the global research community committed to sustainability and justice has increased resources, networks, actionable tools, and a path forward. Thus CECR focuses on engaging communities, redistributing power structures, and bringing criticality to research processes and products both socially and ecologically. This special issue supports further understanding of this common ground and develops a shared language and home for this realm of thought and action in the research arena. In response to that, this special issue aims to articulate an entry point of guiding values, theories, and principles for practice. Through the special issue call for papers, we invited critical questions on four key areas of Community Engaged Critical Research: Foundations, Capacity Building, Pedagogy and Training, and Reflexivity. The specific questions are listed below:
Foundations
- What are the purposes of research? Who and what does it tend to serve?
- Whose questions often propel a research project? What are the implications behind the origin of those prioritized questions?
- How might research be experienced as life and death by some people and communities?
- How can research be a means to shift power, capital, and resources? What are adaptive strategies that may aid and assist in that endeavor?
- What are new ways of “researching with and for” social and environmental justice, reciprocity, and wellness?
Capacity Building/Areas of Opportunity
- How can this approach to research become more common, accessible, and navigable by communities, institutions, and ourselves?
- What are models for international and field station operations and protocols for inviting and negotiating Indigenous research agenda-setting with community members, visiting scholars, and students?
- What collaborations, projects, or issues would you like to bring to or develop through this discussion?
- Where are opportunities for international, federal, philanthropic, and community based cultivation of and support for CECR?
Pedagogy and Training
- What place should Community Engaged Critical Research have in the future of higher education, STEAM research, and/or responsible innovation?
- How can CECR pedagogy be delivered through low-residency, online, or hybridized program offerings as an expression of experiential learning and co-creation building, learning, and teaching?
Reflexivity, Assessment and Ethics
- What do characteristics of extractive, not-community-centric research look like? In what ways have you participated in this?
- What kinds of community support, resources, and ideas might help you avoid the pitfalls of extractive research as default?
- What strategies will you employ to ensure the work you and the community do is, indeed, for (and led by) the health and justice of communities?
- How should institutional structures and policies (ethics training, faculty governance and promotion, and human and more than human subjects protection and risk management) be reframed?
The articles in this special issue are transdisciplinary, innovative, and contextually rooted, and address CECR from numerous angles. We found three themes that the articles in this special issue encompass broadly: 1) Community Engaged Environmental Stewardship and Justice, 2) Inclusive and Accessible Approaches to Sustainability Education, and 3) Critical Pedagogy and Ethical Research in Social and Environmental Justice. The Community Engaged Environmental Stewardship and Justice theme highlighted research projects including: sustainable agriculture and wetland preservation, participatory conservation in Argentina, epistemic injustice, climate resilience, and bee-focused citizen science projects. The Inclusive and Accessible Approaches to Sustainability Education theme highlighted: rethinking sustainability through accessibility, translational inclusion in higher education, the disruption of supremacist pedagogy through professional development, ArcGIS StoryMapping for sustainability culture, and an assessment of curricula on political and environmental education. The theme Critical Pedagogy and Ethical Research in Social and Environmental Justice included: post-qualitative understandings of youth climate activism, a taxonomy of ethical research practices, decolonizing and transformative pedagogy for anti-fat bias, AI, Consciousness, and Posthumanism explored, and the effects of media delegitimization on Black Women Activists.
This special issue was preceded by a convening at Prescott College, funded by the Prescott College Alumni Fund for Faculty Endowment. A group of scholars (faculty and students alike) convened at the college to discuss a range of meanings, manifestations, and modes of Community Engaged Critical Research, since many of the community members were already aspiring to do research guided by these socially and environmentally just ethics. As a result of a full day of meaning-making in the community led by Dr. Gretchen Gano (co-editor), we realized that a global invitation to further explore CECR would deepen and refine our own understanding of what is possible in the critical, socially, and environmentally centered, community-oriented research endeavor. We hope this medley of dialogue on CECR supports your own development and praxis in imagining more just, equitable, transdisciplinary, and aspirational research dispositions and endeavors.
References
Bradbury, H., Waddell, S., O’ Brien, K., Apgar, M., Teehankee, B., & Fazey, I. (2019). A call to Action Research for Transformations: The times demand it. Action Research, 17(1), 3–10.
brown, a.m. (2020). We will not cancel us: And other Dreams of Transformative Justice. AK Press.
Gretchen Gano is a Science and Technology Studies scholar and serves as a committee member for doctoral candidates in the Prescott College PhD program in Sustainability Education. She studies dialog processes where diverse publics engage complex technological and environmental problems to catalyze policy and social change. She works as a sociotechnical systems analyst at Sandia National Laboratories. 
Dr. Emily Alicia Affolter (she/ella/they) is the director of and faculty for Prescott College's Sustainability Education Ph.D. Program. Prior to this role, she worked as a Senior Research Scientist and Equity Consultant at the University of Washington’s Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity. She earned her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with a focus on Multicultural Education from the UW working alongside Dr. Geneva Gay, founder of culturally responsive teaching. Emily's current scholarship, dissemination, and facilitation highlight culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies for teachers, faculty, and leaders in K-16 settings and STEM higher education utilizing an equity literacy frame, supported by the National Science Foundation largely. Additionally, Emily’s latest teaching centers on decolonizing research, climate justice initiatives, and liberatory organizational change methods. 
Dr. Kimberley Greeson serves as core faculty for Prescott College’s Sustainability Education Doctoral Program. As an interdisciplinary educator-scholar, Dr. Greeson’s work focuses on the politics of conservation and environmental issues, with a particular eye towards centering more-than-human entanglements and intersectional and decolonial perspectives. Her scholarly interests extend to sustainability education theory and practice, informed through decolonizing and culturally sustaining pedagogies and critical and emergent (post)qualitative methodologies. She actively seeks to engage a student-centered approach, leveraging community-based experiential learning principles to cultivate inclusive and collaborative learning environments. Dr. Greeson holds a Ph.D. in Sustainability Education from Prescott College, a M.S. in Biology with concentrations in Environmental Education and Research Methods from the University of Northern Colorado, and a B.S. in Zoology from Colorado State ... 
Clare Hintz is the editor in chief of the Journal of Sustainability Education. Clare has a Ph.D. in Sustainability Education with a focus on Regenerative Agriculture. She has been teaching sustainable agriculture and permaculture since 1998, and has additionally developed curricula for the University of Wisconsin, River Falls, University of Minnesota, Duluth, Northland College, and Prescott College. She is a permaculture consultant in the Midwest, U.S. Her research focuses on arts-informed inquiry, regenerative agriculture, place, and ecofeminism. You can see more of her work at www.elsewherefarm.com. 
