Community Engaged Research Without Community?

For 12 years, I have taught an MA-level Community-Based Qualitative Methods course at DU, in which student groups partner with different community-based organizations to conduct qualitative research projects on immigrant and labor rights. Despite having navigated the first Trump presidency and the pandemic, this January presented uncharted waters. It was clear that President Trump would make immigrants a target, but the velocity, cruelty, and often outright chaotic and illegal flurries of executive orders and policies was unprecedented.  

I’ve always found the question, “How can we help?” (also see Nuñez-Janes and Heiman 2024) foundational to community-based research. However, this particular moment led me to question what this meant. Given the climate of fear and overwork, coupled with my existing extensive body of research and classroom partnerships with many of these organizations, was it more burdensome to expect partners to take such an active role in the projects? Was it naïve to even ask “how can we help” when we (or at least I) might already know the answer? How should I balance students’ desires to learn the skills of qualitative research with my ethical commitment to respecting my partners’ limited time and precarity?  

The year prior, my class had worked alongside Denver’s work center, Centro de los Trabajadores Colorado, to understand needs and challenges of Denver’s migrant newcomers. Our plans for a one-year follow-up with the original 100 participants vanished; phone numbers were no longer in service, no one answered, or people were too fearful or busy to participate. Our collaboration with non-profit immigration legal services organizations to assess due process violations in Denver’s immigration court presented new difficulties and ethical dilemmas. Immigration court was even more of a ‘Wild Wild West’ than under more normal circumstances. Immigration attorneys were not only overwhelmed and scrambling, but also under attack. I made the decision that I would refrain from having students contact immigration attorneys for interviews or training, including some of our long established partners. Any benefits did not outweigh the burdens. As an ongoing project, we had existing infrastructure for training, ideas of others who could be interviewed might be less in the line of fire (or at least hadn’t already given their time to my class and project), and access to prior interviews students could analyze and learn from. A new collaboration with DU’s custodial workers, however, allowed students to see a different side of campus and workers’ rights issues by hearing how janitors had experiences last year’s transition from being DU to Sodexo employees.  

This quarter’s class raised new, but also old questions for community collaboration. A more honest conversation may be required to discuss how and under what circumstances community-engaged research may ethically mean doing so without the direct labor of our partners. Instead, we may ask, how can we build capacity, solidarity, power, and public awareness around the concerns we all share while respecting the power afforded our different positions in a climate of fear and overwork? Expecting community partners to spend scarce time orienting or training students felt more extractive than collaborative, let alone helpful. Yet it was also critical to be intentional and transparent at each step, leaving the door open for when and how partners wanted to contribute and shape the projects, but according to their timelines, demands, and interests—not mine. 

Students were also more stressed, making even showing up to class consistently, let alone the daunting task of conducting community-engaged projects in one academic quarter. An eviscerated employment market; threats to their own bodies, dignity, speech, and identities; assaults on immigrant and international students and their loved ones; financial precarity; intensified familial and work obligations; and lack of certainty whether they would be able to continue living, studying, and working in Colorado…This class always asks a lot of students, at a time where many had little left to give or felt the issues we were studying deeply personally.  

Some of the main lessons of the course are to value relationship-building and accompaniment as methods in their own right (see Yarris and Duncan 2024). This approach never expects community to accompany us, but instead tasks our end of the partnership—to take stock of our positions and the moment so we can meet community where they are at, even if it’s just showing up, listening, knowing when to step or pull back, or doing the work to educate and train ourselves and our students. This provides useful lessons in rigorous and ethical qualitative research methods. Research does not have to look like conducting x number of interviews or finishing the requisite number of questionnaires to answer a hypothesis. The process by which we obtain such “results” matters just as much; I would argue more. If qualitative researchers are interested in meaning, validity, rapport, and understanding the human experience (as many claim to be), it behooves them to listen and shed a bit of hubris. The challenges we faced made it even clearer, how even in more ‘normal’ times, community-engaged researchers and classes often continue to define the parameters of what partnerships looks like—expecting partners to accommodate students and research goals with little to offer in return (Janes 2016). Although I teach students about such tensions each year, this iteration made the power differentials and stakes all-the-more palpable. Rather than a limitation, from this understanding comes opportunities for students to learn, grow, and contribute to community and partnership objectives. For example, rather than lists of people to interview or partners to teach us, we looked for opportunities where our presence and ability to show up increasingly mattered; community forums, trainings, actions, protests, or volunteering at asylum clinics or listening to custodial workers’ concerns during meetings.  

Qualitative research has long stressed the importance of listening and standing alongside before stepping in or asking questions. Yet, these lessons are often pushed aside for tight quarter timelines, grant timetables, tenure metrics, and busy schedules. The political moment certainly created new anxieties and fears, but also encouraged the critical need to return to the core ethical tenets of community-engaged research: step back, take things slow, listen, and prioritize the process and value of relationship-building over externally imposed definitions of “results.”