Intervening: The Value of Campus-Community Partnerships

“We have learned to say that the good must be extended to all of society before it can be held secure by any one person or class; but we have not yet learned to add to that statement, that unless all [people] and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having.”

Jane Addams

The 2011 National Women’s Studies Association white paper “Women’s Studies as Civic Engagement: Research and Recommendations” (Orr) provides strategies feminists can adopt to continue the mission to foster social change in the community and the academy. As the document contends, diverse networks and practices now work to effect social change, highlighting how pervasively scholars from across the disciplines have centrally infused feminist principles of meaning-making into their research and teaching. “[F]eminist-infused participatory and action research,” Briton M. Lykes and Rachel Herschberg argue, “clarifies the mediated nature of all knowledge construction and exemplifies ‘ways of knowing’ that are frequently absent from mainstream, top-down theory building” (352). It’s an opportune moment for feminist scholars—many of whom typically value a range of multimodal methods and methodologies—to intervene in divergent understandings of teaching, research, the value of higher education, and the role of the academy in creating and sustaining community activism. Thus the idea of this special issue came from the current moment and our shared interest in learning more about how feminist scholars have already experienced campus-community partnerships that seek to initiate or build activism. We recognize feminist community engagement as representing a recursive relationship between theory, practice, and action designed to foster a common good to which, as Jane Addams noted over a century ago, we are all obligated to contribute as citizens.

The four of us share a common disciplinary home in rhetoric and composition. Of course, each of us brings our own histories and interests to the editorial work. Kristine (Bowling Green State University) brings a long history of technological feminist outreach projects to our collaboration. One such project is The Digital Mirror, a residential computer camp for middle school girls Kris designed and facilitated. Her involvement with the camp, which she co-directed each year with several doctoral students, fostered Kris’s ongoing interest in exploring feminist outreach initiatives as important forms of professional development for future faculty as they begin to negotiate the academic politics of implementing and sustaining similar activist projects in new institutional contexts. Tobi’s role as the community literacy center director at Colorado State University has provided her the opportunity to witness the evolution of community literacy and publishing internships within spaces of confinement. Tobi has collaborated with graduate and advanced undergraduate interns for many years to work with incarcerated adults and at-risk youth through the SpeakOut! writing workshop program. Tobi’s work with the program has involved building critical feminist methodologies of tutoring and research alike. Lee, a colleague of Kris’s in the Rhetoric and Writing Doctoral Program at Bowling Green State University, traces an interest in campus-community collaborations to her ongoing partnership with Victims Services, a nonprofit advocacy service for victims of intimate partner violence. Lee has paired with this organization for ongoing service-learning projects in doctoral research methods seminars she regularly teaches. Lee’s ongoing course-based partnership leaves her committed to campus-community partnerships as integral to graduate curricula. Mary P. (University of Louisville) brings to this editorial effort a longstanding interest in the ways feminists can engage public communities in large, socially valuable work as a way to explore and illustrate the value of feminist learning. Having conducted an ethnography of a community-sponsored program for young girls, Mary P. integrates service-learning into both her undergraduate and graduate courses on literacy. Despite our different projects and local contexts, we share a common commitment to making visible and also interrogating the relationships and voices among all participants in community-based teaching and research—teachers, researchers, students, and community partners. That these relationships be deeply collaborative and voices co-equal is vital to feminist engagement. Of course...