Connecting you with todays arts leaders.

Ep. 6: Stuart Poyntz & Am Johal

INTRO

Welcome to Artful Conversations – a podcast about arts and cultural management. Annetta Latham and guest hosts interview leaders who help shape the world of arts and culture. We share their stories, their insights and observations. This season has been brought to you with the support of the faculty of fine arts and communications at MacEwan University. 

ANNETTA:  Welcome to Artful Conversations. I'm your host, Annetta Latham. Today my guests are the Co-Directors of the Simon Fraser University Community Engagement Research Institute (CERi), Am Johal and Stuart Poyntz. 

Am has been the Director of SFU’s VANCITY Office of Community Engagement since December 2018 and the Co-Director of Community Engagement Research Initiative since 2019. He is an associate with SFU’s Centre for Dialog and the Institute for the Humanities. He has taught courses and dialog at the School of Contemporary Arts, Graduate, Liberal Studies and Urban Studies. He is the author of Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene

Stuart is a professor and director of the School of Communication who works in participatory research, which largely involves teenagers in informal learning spaces and art institutes. His research more broadly addresses children's media, cultures, theories of public life, social queer and urban youth cultures. He has produced five books, including the forthcoming monograph YouthSites, Histories of Creativity, Care and Learning in the City. 

ANNETTA:  Welcome. Am and Stuart, it's wonderful to have you with us today. Can you both give me your ideas and about what is community engaged research and what are the benefits of it? 

STUART:  How about if I jump in Am. 

AM:  Do it. 

STUART:  Annetta, first of all, thank you for having us. It's really wonderful to spend this time together to talk about this work, which I know we share a great regard for. Community engaged research is I think the first thing to say is that it's a old and in many ways an entrenched, if not always visible part of how university centered research has been carried out. And it involves the relationships that we have with partners outside of the university that cross over into a number of different areas of civil society and oftentimes governance. So it can include work with government offices, civil servants and so on. I think the most obvious way of thinking, community engaged research, though, is it's a form of research that brings the university out of what we might think of as the ivory tower into the messiness, the ground, the living worlds and experiences of non-specialists, of people who work in everyday lives with critical concerns and crises that are before their communities that need direct action in response and research is called upon to help support that work. And what makes community research community is that it's led by, shaped by, often directly serving the needs that communities themselves define. There's obviously a spectrum of this work and it comes by names in different disciplinary traditions. Some people talk about it as participatory action research, some people talk about it as community-based research. I know in health sciences the language of patient centered research are all part of this field of multiple methods and multiple practices. But I think what glues them together is this sense that the needs and the experiences of communities themselves are absolutely central to defining the purpose, the meaning, the work of this scholarly practice. 

ANNETTA:  Yeah, this is absolutely wonderful. And I agree with you. I have a real passion for community engaged research. I think it's the key to what we do, really. So what lead to the development of the Community Engaged Research Institute at Simon Fraser and the Vancity Office of Community Engagement? Are they two different things or are they same thing doing two different? 

AM:  Yes, they're very different things. I'll start with the Community Engaged Research Initiative, you know, SFU came into being as a university in the mid-sixties. So, it came in a particular historical moment and in many respects, Community Engaged Research has been sort of baked into the DNA of the place from its very foundations. It might not have been called that and certainly in a three campus scenario as well, where we've built up facilities in university space in downtown Vancouver, but also in a fast growing suburb like Surrey, we've always, as an institution, needed to be embedded in communities and when you go back to the eighties and the nineties there's just great stories about prison education program, other in inner city community initiatives, and so, in some respects it's been going on from the beginning of the institution, and a few years ago there were some early research projects that were taken on to help kind of outline some of the strengths that SFU had had through the through the faculty members in partnerships with their and so for us it was in through the VP research portfolio to build up a social infrastructure at the university that recognized that this type of research requires more time, it requires more relationship building and having incentives, supports, resourcing that we could provide grants to faculty members, have a site of graduate student training, and for community partnerships to be able to be formed. It allowed the work to happen in a much better way. And the reality is that it also allows for other funding to come into the university as well. 

But in terms of the two offices that I work out of, you know, I think it's really important to think of community engagement as a method that enhances research, teaching and partnership building. My other position is in external relations and community engagement sometimes can be used in a really superficial way by institutions to talk about anything they do in public. And there is a long-standing academic terminology that community engagement is based around it as a specific landing point in higher education. And I do think that when these things get messy and people are working in their broader ways, there's very interesting intersections where the magic happens between what happens when you're directly working with communities on partnerships and how that has the ability to intersect with teaching and research. And I think particularly if we can do it in a collaborative way, there are really interesting models and I think in the case of CERi, where myself as a staff member at the university, I have different sets of networks than Stuart does as a faculty member. But we've been working collaboratively for four or five years together on this. And I think this is where we have actually a lot of strengths as, as an institution. 

ANNETTA:  So, Am you have two very different hats. You have the co-director of CERi and the director of the Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Is there a difference between them? Is one more faculty driven and one more faculty and research driven? Are they both research driven? Like what is their difference in their focus? Or are they the same focus but different fund base of how a community engages? 

AM:  Yeah. So, SFU went to the office it could be an engagement started when SFU School for Contemporary Arts was moving from Burnaby Mountain into the inner-city area of Vancouver and part of the process around the building coming forward, there were demands from the community around what the university's commitments were going to be around community engagement. So, I've had a role that plays sort of at that space between university and community to figure out partnerships that can happen. We've had theater groups from the neighborhood, for example, partner with a former faculty member, Ker Wells, where we had a semester long project. We've had arts groups, the Heart of the City Festival happens annually out of the inner city, so we provide space for a community group to be able to do that work. And then we also try to embed students, grad students in undergrad and others. So, they're directly in the room with people from the neighborhood. We have a community journalism program with Megaphone Magazine, our local street newspaper. And so, in many respects, you know, I come from doing community organizing work that goes back 20 years. And at that time in the late nineties, there were questions around research and inner-city communities and, you know, forms of exploitation that can happen in the political economy of research. So in the very early days of starting at SFU I wasn't involved in that many formal research projects. But as I brought things into teaching and inside the classroom, it became a natural evolution that if you're going to do this work inside of a university, inevitably there will be research linkages and really important questions around ethics come up and in particular in terms of working with communities. And that's where I was intersecting with faculty members in research and on community driven models of ethics, which have been really fascinating. 

So when Community Engaged Research Initiative came forward, the timing of it, I'd been at the university already eight years by the time I had stepped into it, and so the timing of it was right. But it also was sort of the last thing that I got involved in because the other pieces are to be in place. But my advice to all other institutions, to do this, that it needs to be integrated and collaborative for this to work out properly, because at the end of the day, you are a university and what does a university do well but that teaching research, partnership building and if you can create sites inside the university where communities can enter in and create a porosity that works in multiple ways for all of the groups involved, really special things can happen, particularly related to influencing public policy. 

ANNETTA:  Yeah, all this absolutely wonderful to hear. Stuart. I'd be really interested on your take in relation to coming back to a little bit of what was mentioned before about the collaborative approach and things like that from what do you believe and see are the values and the benefits really of a collaborative research infrastructure at a university for the students and the community? 

STUART:  Yeah, that's a great question. Well, let me begin by saying that I think a research infrastructure at the university allows this field of community engaged research to have a certain kind of profile that gives it status in disciplines and that matters inside the university. It's not infrequent that community engaged research in all its different forms is kind of pushed to the margins of disciplinary practice. So one, I think one of the major benefits is you provide a home for a lot of people who feel like they're working at the margins of their disciplines. 

Secondly, I think one of the major benefits and I want to speak to the students in a moment, but before I do is I think the question of recognition of this work as Am has shared community engaged research has really been baked into the DNA of SFU for some time. That's not to say that it has been well reflected across the institution at an administrative, institutional level. And I mean things like when you're trying to recognize young scholars work in community-based research through tenure and promotion practices, those formats have not really been well-articulated in the past. So what CERi has been able to do is work with a number of different departments in schools in the university, along with their young faculty, to help bring forward ways of evaluating and measuring impact of community engaged research to build that into the tenure and promotion cycle. That's a really important way of build, of creating the building blocks for people to establish careers. And without that, you know, some of the most active practitioners of this work young not a typically it's young female and often young female scholars from various historically excluded communities in the university, Indigenous scholars and so on, and where the university is making effort to welcome historically excluded groups. You need changes in tenure and promotion to help those people build careers. CERi can definitely do that and has done that. 

Thirdly, I want to say that for graduate students, one of the strengths and benefits of CERi at an infrastructure, at the level of infrastructure has meant that we've created an advanced training program, a cohort model that brings masters and doctoral students from across disciplines to develop their research proposals to expand their research programs, often working through ways of engaging with community in respectful and, as Am has shared ethically centered modes. That ability to support graduate students at a university wide level has really afforded this field of practice a different status. 

STUART:  Last let me say, Am is absolutely right about community engagement long being a feature of university work, especially in the last decade. And his office, the Office of Community Engagement is a fabulous example of that. It's not always been the case that that work has been recognized as feeding into and supporting how the university works with community. In other words, if I can say this simply research can be a very problematic framework for communities theory has helped to and this is work that we continue to focus on and develop is to establish what are the terms of ethical relationships with communities, how to scaffold and support community researchers to develop their own programs. These are efforts that are really crucial to the to the legitimacy of the university as a public institution and things that CERi can really help to foment and build out, creating resources, creating engagement and roundtable discussions that allows the community to, sorry, that allows the university to do this work in more defensible, ethically credible kinds of ways. 

ANNETTA:  Yeah, I mean, I think that's fantastic. And really what you know, I really like coming back to what you've saying about doing work with community rather than enforced upon community is significantly different. You've talked about ethical ways of engaging. What are some of the strategies and protocols that you have to take into consideration in your work to ensure that your community groups that you're working with actually feel comfortable in their participation? Like, what do you put into your programs to ensure that? 

AM:  Yeah. I can just start and Stuart can add on, you know, one of the things as a centralized aspect of the university, we're working with many faculty members across the institution in different disciplines. What we the best thing that we can do is provide guidelines, processes, because it's a range of practices that we're talking about. But ideally, if you have a community involved in the formation of research, questions involved in the research process itself and also in its knowledge mobilization, there are certainly questions that you can ask in that process to make it very clear and transparent how the research is going to be used, how it will be distributed. You know, one of the examples I can give as well as we've worked with a group in the neighborhood that produced a great piece called Manifesto for Ethical Research in the Downtown Eastside, which is really community driven. And that was really based around negative relationships they had had with either journalists or artists or university researchers. And one group had actually had a negative experience working with a documentary filmmaker where you sign a waiver forms and things and rights are taken away, verbal agreements are made, and all of a sudden something that's produced can reinforce stereotypes and cause stigma. 

And so, we've helped community groups produce their own guidelines. So, it's not just the ethical ethics process. You have to go through a university. That's one set of practices. But there are also other guidelines that we can catch things in the developmental mode. So having these types of pieces that are produced, we also have our own Community Engage Research Handbook that interfaces for community groups in terms of what the value can be for them as well. And so also to think of ethics as an ongoing conversation. So when people give their consent, it's not forever into the future that that people can also withdraw their consent, that context and consequences can change. And I think building that into account, particularly when we think about our Graduate Fellows program, it's a really important part of that work. And I'll pass it over to Stuart here. 

STUART:  I mean, Am has done a fabulous job. I would say, Annette, that, you know, there's a slogan that has led Indigenous action on a number of fronts, including working on research collaboration and work together. And that's that phrase “nothing about us without us”. And as a general and I know it's a slogan and unfortunately it becomes a cliché, but from CERi’s perspective, that has been a call to action, a call to framing with any community that we're working with. There is a series of stages of relationship building that begin the work together before the actual articulation of a research project, a research design, research roles is underway. And part of that is about unpacking the way in which research itself carries tremendous power with it. And for many, as Am shared, for many communities, this is not a positive relationship. This is a relationship of extraction and one where folks have felt as though they've been put forward simply for others ends and others benefits. And so being very clear that to begin, this is what will be placed front and center as part of thinking through our relationship and our work together over the subsequent period of time has been really crucial. As Am has also said and this can't be underestimated is that consent and collaborative agreement is something that is consistently and constantly worked. It's not a one-off moment that then gives license to do as you wish. It's an ongoing negotiation and dialog, and that dialogic component of research programs is both the way research method is carried out, but ethics is built into the research method as a constant point of reference. 

ANNETTA:  I think it's a brilliant point, and it's one often that researchers, especially young researchers and you know, we have a number of young researchers here at MacEwan University. You think there's very much that mindset of one and done. You know, we've signed the form we're done we never have to revisit. And that you know, endless we can endlessly push this information out and we'll never have to check back with community or anybody to just go is it still okay? Has it morphed? Has it changed? And, I like what you're talking about is that it's not one and done. It's an ongoing dialog.

STUART:  Annetta, may I add one more point in on this, which is that I think it's been very important for us to recognize that research that extends into communities where need is perceived can also implicitly or even sometimes explicitly, explicitly carry a kind of salvation or tone with it, a kind of like missionary zeal to do right. And to be agents of positive change. And I want to highlight that, that sensibility needs to be approached with tremendous caution and tremendous wariness, because that notion of a salvation, really, it already positions the researcher in a particular role with the community that has been, in many cases, unhelpful, counterproductive to the research outcomes, disrespectful of the capacity capability that lives in community. So I want I want to highlight that, that feeling good about your work is not necessarily give you the right to or does not necessarily sanction your work is right by the communities that you're working in. 

ANNETTA:  And I think that that concept of perception of need sometimes is what we often go into research doing and that kind of thinking that we are the fountain of all knowledge and often we aren't sometimes. You know, my old dad used to say the best leaders are the ones who know how to follow. And I think that really comes into research, too, is knowing, you know, knowing that you're the beginner of the conversation. But be quiet and let the people in who are there in the conversation. Look, I know that my listeners are going to say, okay, but how do we get chosen as a community? How do we choose us? Choose us? So what is your process? You know, do community groups approach you and you match them with a researcher? Is it a researcher reaching out? How do you do it? 

STUART:  I'll start and then Am pass it over to him. You know, Annetta, this has been a crucial question in our evolution. When CERi began, I think naively, we imagined that in reaching out to communities, we would be able to, you know, open up and begin conversations about what kind of research they might need and would want to be done and so on. And what we found quite quickly is that the ability to share and work together in community engaged research takes time and it takes some resourcing, creating of common resources that we can talk through and mention. Community Engaged Research Handbook. That's not only it's designed less as a manual and more as a framework document that allows us to sit down with community partners to have a common language and a common set of questions for developing research projects together. We've done this because we came to discover that simply opening our doors and reaching out to communities is not the way you establish relationships that build trust, that allow communities to see this as a productive, collaborative relationship. 

And so, more specifically, in answer to your question, we've taken a kind of piecemeal process of evolving relationships that build out from our networks to networks to new networks. So rather than a kind of consumer model where you open your door and, you know, we're here, come, use us, as it were. We've instead relied on a model of relationship and relationship building. And that's allowed us to come into contact with communities that are evolving questions and immediately see us as helpful in that dynamic. And then we've had large scale research projects that we've brought into that itself has built out our collaborative network. We have reached the stage now over four years that I think CERi is in a much better place to receive requests for research and to work on those over multiple years. And that's been important for building up a capacity and a sense of competence on how to work with communities. But also, frankly, people inside SFU who we know we can call on to bring in to those networks. And having both of those dynamics and resources in place have been essential to allow us to work with community and welcome them into relationships. 

AM:  I was just going to add, you know, I was just on a call this morning with the Talloires Network, which is a group of community engaged universities. So interesting to hear from colleagues in South Africa, Central European University that's in Vienna, Edinburgh. And you see, you know, institutions in contexts continuing to struggle with how to do this work well, but committed to it as institutions. And certainly, in our own context, you know, organizations like University of Guelph, McMaster have set up research shops that have a venue. We've had other forms of participatory research done through SFU public interest research group in the past. And certainly, I think in our own evolution, we're going to look at piloting a model in the coming years around a research shop where a community can put their questions forward and we can help with the matching with faculty members and grad students in this early stage. 

We've been supporting faculty student research projects where oftentimes the partnerships are already built between the researcher and the community partner. Oftentimes they've been working together for multiple years. I did want to make just one other comment around the ethics piece, and I have the little card in front of me that was produced in the community. And it's amazing how, you know, some of this stuff just seems so straightforward. And sometimes you have to write it down in that plain language you know. But they are respect, reciprocity, responsibility and return. And in the areas that they're putting questions around, you know, a reasonable understanding of purpose and expectations, a reasonable understanding of risks, an ongoing process with the ability to withdraw at any time, that affiliations are transparent. Agreement is mutual sharing and return is understood. And so there are, like, you know, when you're looking at ethics process at the university, it's a very kind of legal form very jargonistic in these pieces. But sometimes we have to get away from those pieces and look at what the community is presenting to us as frameworks and to learn from them as well. 

ANNETTA:  As we starting to wrap up, what do either of you have a real standout research project that you just thought really ticked all the boxes and you just really thought that that's it. We we've got it right. 

STUART:  Am. Can I jump in on this? I think you know, there have been a number of projects. One really remarkable one with Immigrant Refugee Citizenship Canada are developing a resource, developing a model of refugee and migrant services from the perspective of refugee and migrant communities. And that has never been done in the country. And we're working on a model in the lower mainland that is that IRCC aims to move out across the country. So that's real concentrated impact from community. But the what the project I really want to share on Annetta is a project called Walk with Me, and Walk with Me is centered on Vancouver Island. It began in the area of Courtney Comox Valley centered around an art gallery community, Indigenous nation, Indigenous leadership, community members and two local universities. 

STUART:  And this collaboration is about a response to the drug poisoning crisis that has not emerged by looking at one off solutions or forms of medical intervention. And this project has been led fundamentally through a form of Indigenous centered research called The Circle, where the voices of the drug user community, their allies and support network, Indigenous nations, medical community and researchers are brought together in a parallel dial, not a parallel story, but a dialog centered around the circle of participation where all voices matter. 

STUART:  The project's been going on now for three years. And what's remarkable about it is it began with a recognition of a need for a deeper engagement and involvement with community to lead the resource understanding. That's part of this. And what they've managed to do is shape how health authorities and emergency room staff, doctors included, are responding to and acting on the drug poisoning crisis they have. It began with one hospital. It's now moved to three hospitals. It includes the health authority across the entire island. This, I share this project with you because it has managed to move into that question of impact in a way that I think some people approach community engaged research as a ethically important area of practice, but with questions about what does it do to change policy and institutional action? And this project has had a direct bearing on policy, institutional action at the level of emergency rooms, health authority, resourcing of hospitals and so on. And this strikes us as really bringing to the foreground how community engaged research can be rigorous, can be powerful, can be deeply empathetic with community, and yet impact the most kind of science driven institutions in our public life. And that seems to me to be a remarkably powerful story. 

ANNETTA:  My goodness. Yes. And Am do you have one that really kind of stands out for you? 

AM:  Yeah. I'm going to mention two, actually. Well, one is I wanted to highlight our Graduate Fellows program that's run by Kari Green and Tara Mahoney, partly because you just see so many young people doing their Masters and Ph.D. who are doing work in suburban communities, doing work with different communities that it's research happening for the first time oftentimes, and so just seeing that energy and enthusiasm to work in this way. I'll just reference Angela Kaida, who is a health sciences professor, did a wonderful project around people living with HIV AIDS and looking at the most recent science, working with these around stigma attached to having to declare HIV status prior to sexual activity. And as the science has changed and transmission rates have changed with the kind of medical interventions are available, that research helped to change and alter the language around public policy in Canada. So there's myriad examples of where the research ends up interfacing at public policy. We have numerous examples that to us it makes the research very real in terms of what the benefit it can be back to community. 

ANNETTA:  Both of this is all been wonderful and thank you so much for sharing those examples because it really does highlight that community engagement actually does raise capacity of community and increases community capacity on a level that sometimes is so unexpected when you first go into the research in the first place. Look, as a final question, it's kind of a double-barreled question. What do you believe is the future? What's your hope and dream? And is there anything else you'd like to add to our listeners about the, you know, the importance of continuing to think about community engagement? 

STUART:  Why don't I start and then Am will jump in? Am and I have been very much engaged in building out CERi with a target of a transition to a ongoing infrastructure within the university. And an initiative is a special pocket of a special initiative of the university receives targeted funding for four years and over that four years the idea is to build up a mandate and a record of success that allows the university to see this as a necessary and, you know, financially justifiable project that can receive ongoing support. That's where we're at Annetta. And I think Am and I feel as though one of the things we've been really satisfied about, about many things is the number of large-scale research collaboration projects we've been able to bring into the university through CERi. And these are three-to-seven-year projects in areas of community engaged research that are really central to our work climate change, drug poisoning, crisis and so on. We have a strong sense that we will transition in April to a more modestly funded but ongoing infrastructure in the university that allows us to continue some of our core programing the graduate fellowship program Am mentioned. We're also in a position to expand that program into a second grad cohort that would focus on specifically on community engaged research in climate and the climate crisis. Those are all very positive signs and directions. This would obviously fulfill the work that we've been, you know, focused on over the last four years. But more to the point, it would allow an element of the university to sustain a kind of structural support that has been nonexistent in the past. And that, for us, is maybe the largest accomplishment and aim of CERi. To have this as an ongoing infrastructure that treats community not as partners. Partners are instrumental, often transactional relationships, and instead works with them as the elements of the or the fabric of our civil society and our public culture that communities are. And they need universities in ways that help. And universities in turn, need those communities to believe in them. 

ANNETTA:  Yeah. Thank you. 

AM:  Yeah. I was going to say, you know, with the proliferation of the term community engagement, it can become a really empty signifier. And we have to bring it back to a proper terminology and link it back to a history of how it came to be inside of institutions. Because at the end of the day, it could be viewed as a method by which we enhance the impact of teaching, learning, research and community partnerships in order to add to the public impact of public universities. And if we take that work seriously, it means that this is going to be relevant for professors who are teaching universities to the Chair of the Board of Governors, to somebody working front lines and student services. It's partly about changing the culture of public institutions like universities to enhance their public impact. So it needs to pass through the entire institution if it's to work. People need to see themselves inside of the question of what community engagement is and depending on discipline, depending on roles, that's going to be very different. But it needs to be viewed as an integrated project if it's going to have the intended impact it claims to have. 

ANNETTA:  Thank you both. It was we've had a wonderful conversation and I really appreciate it. And for, you know, people who are thinking about this from an arts and cultural management perspective, you know, everything that we've talked about is relevant. The effects, the engagement, how you engage, how you journey through, what that looks like, thinking about capacity building and where you put yourself in that. In that conversation around arts and culture and community, especially as post-pandemic, we're looking more and more to cultural layered regeneration for economic recovery and all of those kind of things. So thank you both for your wisdom. I really appreciate it. It's been wonderful talking to you both. Do either of you have any last words before we sign off? 

AM:  I was just going to talk about one more project that we're involved just as a research consultant with the Alliance for Arts and Culture. Given your interest in the arts, of course, is that were working on arts and prescription research project over three years. Canada Council has supported it and we've got Kari and Tara from our office working on it as well. And it's a great example of, you know, if, does arts have health benefits in a way, if somebody prescribes you to go to the opera, to get a book, to go to a dance performance, there's various models of this. And so it's a really exciting project around the arts and being out of an art school, you definitely, from my perspective, it's such a gentle way of bringing people together in such politically polarizing times. And so for us, it's such a wonderful way to welcome people into conversation. 

ANNETTA:  Thank you. Thank you. And it's it is a great field that's been explored. I know New Zealand and the UK are really dipping into this kind of stuff as well. Look, thank you both. I really appreciate the conversation and your time. 

STUART: Thank you. It's been lovely chat. 

AM: And wonderful to chat with you. 

OUTRO

This show was created by executive producer and host Annetta Latham, Technical Producer Paul Johnston and research assistants Terri Le Gear, Micah Carter and Ian Small. 

Theme music by Emily Darfur and cover art by Constanza Pacher. Special thanks to MacEwan University for their support and to our guests. Arts Conversations is a production of Artful Creative, all rights reserved. 

REFERENCE

Latham, A. (Executive Producer and Host). (2022, November 1) [Season 3: Episode 01]. Am Johal and Stuart Poyntz. Podcast retrieved from: www.artfulconversations.com

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