Session: Exploring Collective Efforts at Centering and Advancing Marginalized Voices and Priorities in University-Community Research Collaborations (Society for Social Work and Research 28th Annual Conference - Recentering & Democratizing Knowledge: The Next 30 Years of Social Work Science)

Racial and social injustices when uncontested, perpetuate oppressive interpersonal and structural systems across areas of social work focus, including community organizing, youth development, and education, and family dynamics. Recent social events have resulted in a re-examination of our societal systems, including those within university life and research approaches. To that end, there has been a renewed call for a scholarship that avoids traditional notions of objectivity, which inherently privilege white supremacists norms and ways of knowing and understanding the world around us. Instead, scholar-activists and public leaders are calling for scholarship that is more closely connected to and co-constructed by the communities the work is designed to serve, and the abandonment of work that is “about us without us.�

The current symposium presents a set of studies that collectively demonstrate one School of Social Work’s grappling with what it means to be community-engaged and collaborative scholars and institutions. Specifically, in this symposium scholars from the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Social Work discuss their efforts in building a range of collaborative and reciprocal community-engaged research initiatives that purposefully center community voices and interests, and collaboratively build and carry out science that is of immediate relevance and benefit to the communities involved.

The first paper utilizes a participatory action research framework as the basis of a collaboration between an interdisciplinary team of scholars and a nine-member youth research advisory board to co-create a data-literacy tool that centers the lived experiences of Black youth. This work resulted in the creation of a data analysis tool and data literacy curriculum that can be used in PAR. The second paper presents a 5-year effort at democratizing knowledge and promoting collective efficacy through collaboratively developing and conducting a randomized trial of a community survey as a tool for addressing community violence. The third paper captures the work of a university-community reciprocal partnership, whereby a collaborative of five community agencies partnered with a racial justice-focused university research team to create a symbiotic research-to-practice-to-research collaboration that would benefit the agencies and the families they serve, while also contributing to the co-creation of knowledge around Black family experiences with oppressive educational systems. Results capture how the collaborating programs subsequently utilized the study findings to advance their own strategic and continuous improvement efforts within their programs, as well as the formulation of macro-level change in the region. Finally, the fourth paper in this group presents findings of an intervention co-facilitated and tailored by Black parents in the community to provide capacity and support to Black caregivers raising Black children. Results capture the effectiveness of the partnership in building parents' capacity to promote positive racial identity, engage in oppressive school systems, and promote positive mental health supports within their families.

Individually, these papers document a range of approaches to community-engaged and reciprocally collaborative research. Collectively, they capture both the successes and challenges of conducting research that centers community needs and voices, and de-emphasizes the hegemonic and exploitive approaches that often typify university engagement with communities grappling with oppressive social forces.