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Mohan J Dutta, Phoebe Elers, Negotiating Community–Academic–Activist Relationships Amidst the Pandemic, Communication, Culture and Critique, Volume 14, Issue 2, June 2021, Pages 381–384, https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcab029
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What does community engaged scholarship look like amidst the pandemic? In this performative essay, we draw upon our negotiations of our academic place within the university while crafting solidarities in working alongside communities at the “margins of the margins” (Dutta, 2014) under the umbrella of the culture-centered approach (CCA), a meta-theoretical framework for working in solidarity with communities at the margins to develop localized solutions for building and sustaining health and wellbeing, housed at the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation1 (CARE). We weave together our fieldnotes while working amidst the pandemic, and offer the concepts of: (a) the crisis university and its fissures, (b) distances, and (c) a politics of solidarity to articulate the interplays between community demands for justice and the organizing logics of universities.
The crisis university and its fissures
Mohan (23 March 2020): We have been told Aotearoa will go into lockdown to stop the spread of the virus. Our team of academic and community researchers grapple with how to stand in solidarity with our communities at the “margins of the margins” with the food distribution and mutual support work that has organically emerged in many of the communities we work in here in Aotearoa and in the Global South. The university, led by its crisis team, has issued directives that face-to-face research work has to stop, following safety guidelines. These directives remind us of the wide chasm that exists between the rules and policy responses adopted by universities and the everyday negotiations of struggles at the “margins of the margins.”
