Rethinking Time and Support in Community-based Research: In Pursuit of Research Justice by Margaret Goldman

My name is Margaret, and I’m entering my fourth year in the department of Criminology, Law and Society at UCI. Community-oriented research has remained foundational to my graduate career and my personal interests in the ways students and their families create alternatives to carceral education and compulsory schooling. As a 2020-2021 Newkirk Fellow with the Research Justice Shop, I was able to experience how “research justice” and community partnerships follow core tenets that extend across research topics, participant populations and specific goals. As a Research Justice Shop Fellow, I collaborated with Orange County Environmental Justice (OCEJ) and Coast keeper to continue developing OCEJ’s Water Quality Photovoice project. This project, which began in 2019, documented salient water quality issues in Fullerton, Santa Ana, Anaheim, Buena Park and Garden Grove, five cities in Orange County whose residents struggle with and against economic disenfranchisement. What grounded this project was residents’ experiential insight. 

Research justice seeks to disrupt the historically exploitative relationship between the university and communities seen as or made to be “marginal.” There are key ways that university-community partnerships remain exploitative and harmful beyond the researcher-researched power dynamics that ethics conversations typically focus on. Conventional (and capitalistic) notions of time and productivity, exemplified in academic settings, are harmful, reproduce uneven distributions of wealth, health and access to resources, and have consequences for research justice. My experiences working with OCEJ on the Water Quality PhotoVoice Project illustrate the importance of flexible, transformative and non-conventional understandings of time and productivity. These alternative conceptions of time and productivity can inform how we think of “support” in the context of research justice, and the expectations we should have of ourselves more broadly as university researchers pursuing projects grounded in the needs and interests of community partners.  

Early on in our partnership, while other RJS Fellows were moving along in their projects, OCEJ was experiencing internal restructuring that placed both the Photovoice project and our partnership on “hold.” My research partner, Ethan Rubin, and I had a series of conversations about how we were going to manage the “open time” (what turned out to be over a month) that we had until we would finally meet with OCEJ. My personal (and habitual) inclination was to prepare, prepare, and prepare some more– for example, preparing research questions, drafting plans for the partnership, outlining ways the project might unfold, etc. Part of this inclination came from the pressure of comparison (or academic competition), but a lot of it was rooted in those notions of linear time, rigid timelines, unforgiving deadlines, and constant productivity that structure academia, institutional spaces, and capitalistic social arrangements more broadly. In this context, “productivity” (quite literally) refers to actively producing an output of goods— that is, tangible deliverables with quantifiable value. This sort of productivity demands that people constantly be on go, and leaves behind anyone who cannot keep up. The way that the university “does time,” in other words, is exclusionary, hierarchical and rooted in political economic systems that equate human worth with particular notions of productivity and development (see Sojoyner, 2017¹; 2020²).

In contrast, many grassroots and community-oriented spaces operate on, or at least aspire to embrace, different conceptions of time that are more flexible and, as such, much more inclusive. Likewise, many community organizers resiliently demand that resting, taking breaks, doing “less” and taking time to just be, are in fact profoundly productive for mind, body, and overall well-being. To be sure, the “professionalization” of community organizing work has imposed upon, or made routine and unavoidable, capitalistic notions of productivity (see Rojas Durazo, 2007³). This has, in effect, systematized “CBOs” and 501(c)(3)’s that do the work of conventional institutions, in “the shadow of the state” (Gilmore, 2007⁴). This fact aside, there remain many community organizing spaces– particularly those that are grassroots, but also many who have “official” 501(c)(3) status– that do their best to refuse the harms associated with rigid time constraints, even as they are sometimes forced to operate within them. OCEJ did just that, and turned out to be a wonderfully inclusive space. 

Thus, in the case of our “delayed” community partnership, the academic impulse (or command) to do – to constantly be on “go” – would have strained our relationship with OCEJ before it even began. Over multiple conversations, Ethan and I ultimately decided that the best thing to do was to wait, extend support, and come to the table with an appropriate amount of background knowledge that would create less labor for the organization– not more. The Research Justice Shop community, through our frequent discussions about the importance of relationship building, provided a meaningful source of support. By resisting the inclination to over-prepare, we avoided setting the parameters of the relationship and of the project in ways that would impede a truly collaborative process. Over-preparing, in other words, would have over-determined the trajectory of the project in ways that would reproduce knowledge hierarchies and uneven social relationships. It would have sent OCEJ the message that building a genuine relationship with them before “producing” research was of little interest to us. 

As folks in the university seeking research justice, we have to recognize, first and foremost, that there is no possible way to achieve a truly horizontal relationship with community partners– our institutional positioning within the university, and the historical use of research to advance projects of exploitation, prevent that possibility. However, in attempts to redistribute resources and alter the uneven arrangement of social relationships, it may go a long way to recognize that research justice may require falling back or supporting community partners in ways that exist outside of, and at times may seem irrelevant to, the “tangible outcomes” of the research project itself (see Costa Vargas, 2008⁵). 

Over-preparation reinforces conventional researcher-community dynamics, where access to resources such as time and other materials that allow us to constantly produce, enable people in certain social locations to dictate the trajectory of knowledge production. This exposes a key point of tension in the pursuit of research justice: researchers must find an appropriate balance between capitalizing on excess resources (for example, by taking the initiative to call extra meetings or putting in extra work behind the scenes to make deadlines)– and honoring those alternative conceptions of time that are incompatible with constant “action” with and “productivity” in the form of concrete deliverables with quantifiable value. This requires always centering the question: What is the goal of this partnership? Researchers might also ask themselves: How do I define productivity in an institutional setting (and in my daily life)? What sorts of things fall outside the parameters of what I consider “productive”? Are any of them critical to relationship building?  While the specific answers to these questions will take varying directions, their points of origin should always be grounded in the needs, expectations and world views of the community partner. If social transformation occurs through the daily practice of doing things differently, it is my opinion that resisting the urge to over-prepare is a powerful act of (research) “justice” — and radical support — in and of itself.   

Margaret Goldman is a doctoral student in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. She was a 2020-2021 Newkirk Fellow with the Research Justice Shop, and wrote this blog at the close of her fellowship in the summer of 2021. For more information regarding the Research Justice Shop please visit the website or contact researchjustice@uci.edu or follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. 

References: 

¹ Sojoyner, D. (2017). Dissonance in Time: (Un)making and (Re)mapping of Blackness, In John, G. T. & Lubin, A. (Eds.) Futures of Black Radicalism (pp. 66-79). 

² Sojoyner, D. (2020). Review of An Anthropology of Marxism (Robinson’s An Anthropology of Marxism). Current Anthropology, 61(3), 389-390

³  Rojas Durazo, A.C. (2007). “We Were Never Meant to Survive,” In INCITE! (Eds.) The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-profit Industrial Complex, pp. 113-128.  

⁴  Gilmore, R.W. (2007). In the Shadow of the Shadow of the State, In INCITE! (Eds.) The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-profit Industrial Complex, pp. 41-52.  

⁵ Costa Vargas, J. H. (2008). Activist Scholarship Limits and Possibilities in Times of Black Genocide, In C. Hale (Ed.) Engaging Contradictions (pp. 164-182).