Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 47: Community-Engaged Research 鈥� with Stuart Poyntz and Joanna Habdank
Speakers: Paige Smith, Am Johal, Joanna Habdank, Stuart Poyntz
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Paige Smith 0:06
Hello, listeners, I'm Paige Smith with Below the Radar. A knowledge mobilization podcast. Below the Radar is created by s 丁香园AV's Vancity Office of Community Engagement and is recorded on the territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode, we are joined by Stuart Poyntz and Joanna Habdank, who are both part of 丁香园AV's Community Engaged Research Initiative, also known as CERI. With our host Am Johal, Stewart and Joanna dig into what community engaged research is and how universities can do a better job of answering the call to provide more opportunities for collaboration and research within communities.
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Am Johal 0:50
Glad you could join us on Below the Radar. I'm here with a couple of my colleagues, Dr. Stuart Poyntz from the School of Communication at 丁香园AV. And Joanna Habdank who's also working with The Community engaged Research Initiative. Welcome to both of you.
Joanna Habdank 1:04
Thanks. It's great to be here.
Stuart Poyntz 1:06
Yeah, it's great to be here Am.
Am Johal 1:07
Stuart, you and I have been involved with this project for a while and Joanna has just joined us. I thought it'd be a great time to have a conversation because I think a lot of people out in the world might not know exactly what this is. But maybe I'll start with you, Stuart, if you can maybe introduce yourself a little bit in terms of your own academic work and your relationship to The Community Engaged Research Initiative at 丁香园AV.
Stuart Poyntz 1:28
Yeah, first of all, it's really great to be here. I love this podcast. The Community Engaged Research Initiative is an effort to build a new kind of infrastructure at the university and my connection with it comes from a couple of places. I've been in the academy for a little over 10 years now, before that spent a long time about a decade working in the nonprofit world and working in the nonprofit world working with communities, especially young people, young people and arts communities, media communities made me deeply aware of how a whole set of institutions and groups that work close to, alongside, sometimes in touch with the universities can be both enabled by that relationship and also challenged by that relationship and put into positions where they become overly dependent or unnecessarily taken advantage of by the institution and I think The Community Engaged Research Initiative is a institution, a place that tries to set up what we think of as positive, useful, but also equitable kinds of relationships with communities and the university and there's, a there's a embedded inequity there because universities are large, and they're very powerful public institutions and many of the groups that are in communities are working with tight budgets, tight timelines, etc. So my relationship with community engaged research comes from a place of awareness of how important communities are for building civil culture and civil life, especially for young people in cities who can often be outside of cities and the outside of power structures in cities and community engaged research is one of those ways that those sets of relationships can be reset and reimagined.
Am Johal 3:07
Thanks Stuart, and Joanna you've just recently joined us here at 丁香园AV but you come from a long history of doing work in the nonprofit sector. But you have an interesting story just in terms of how you came to Canada and the work that you've been doing in the nonprofit sector, primarily, working with refugees, newcomers, etc. I'm wondering if you can introduce yourself a little bit.
Joanna Habdank 3:29
Sure. So I actually came to Canada when I was 10 years old. So, and I came here as a privately sponsored refugee. At that time, I wasn't really very aware of what was going on. But it really started my interest in developing deeper connection and understanding of how different types of communities come together. I ended up going into journalism for a while. I worked with local newspapers here in Vancouver and part of the reason for that was to bring voices to the forefront, voices that often may not get heard, may not be empowered and may be overlooked and that was really the driving force behind that. And that's also what led me to then study human rights. I was really interested in looking at the deeper aspect of this sociological, philosophical, and also really the legal aspect of that, through that, perhaps unsurprisingly, I became really interested in immigrant and refugee law and they did that in the, in the UK. So when I came back to Vancouver, that's how I ended up becoming much more involved in the nonprofit world. I ended up working for a couple of nonprofit agencies. Initially, it was through S.U.C.C.E.S.S. and then MOSAIC which are two local agencies that are focused on immigrant and refugee programming and also looking at different policy aspects of that. It was really through my work, particularly with MOSAIC where I was working more around community outreach and community development that I became much
Joanna Habdank 5:00
more interested in sort of creating deeper bridges between different organizations. Whether that might be different nonprofits or institutions. So it could be 丁香园AV but also anything from RCMP to health care based community organizations, and I became interested in, in CERI because it was a way to bring that experience to the project, because I think what Stuart mentioned is really important to bring to the forefront, which is often that imbalance relationship between researchers and community organizations, particularly, because there's usually a scarcity of resources when you look at community based organizations compared to places like UBC , 丁香园AV, higher education institutions that you look at. So I think it's interesting to, to, to bring that experience here and bring that understanding from the nonprofit background and world, but also explore the possibilities and see what can come from that.
Am Johal 6:00
And you know, what's been interesting for me in terms of being involved in the project is I was hired at 丁香园AV in community engagement and you know, our President Andrew Petter has been a really strong proponent of community engagement and kind of all of its aspects, but a number of us who were hired in that time 2010/2011, a lot of support came from external funders, and we built up a lot of relationships with community. We've gone into the classroom to teach as well to bring those pieces in place, but also these kinds of sensitivities around research in the sense that the formation of research questions can take some time. The kinds of fundings that come in happen over a number of years and as well, when relationships are being built. Oftentimes, for those of us who are coming with community relationships inside the institution, the way that we wanted to start out that relationship was not by getting people to sign ethics questionnaires, and those types of things. It was a different type of conversation, because research wasn't the initial thing that we were starting with. And in a way now that we're eight, nine years into the project, at least, that I was initially involved in before being involved with CERI, that we feel that those types of relationships are deep and quite ready to be taken to the next level in many ways. And so these kinds of sometimes dissonances, or differences between community engagement and community engaged research are really important to kind of pull apart a little bit because in some sense, they can draw out divisions within an institution, there are scarcities within institutions in terms of what gets funded. But at the same time, there's incredible opportunities of overlap and synergy and making sure that we are taking community engagement into all other levels, be it teaching and research. So to me, the exciting piece of it is how we kind of embark and get around, I think, what have been internal institutional divisions that sometimes play out in terms of how resources and offices get started. And to me, those are some interesting questions coming into the project of how we do that. And Stewart and I'm wondering from the perspective of you being a faculty member, the things that get in the way of those scholars who have been doing community engaged research, what are the, whether they're funding institutions who have certain limitations, or it's the tenure review process, those types of things that can get in the way of people who have been doing community-engaged research in terms of what the institution can do to support these things better?
Stuart Poyntz 8:23
So I I'm going to answer that question Am about how the institution operates that challenges the work of community engaged scholars, but I also want to come back to after saying that your point about moving the process of community engagement to a different level by bringing research squarely into the process, because I think that's a really interesting development and there's more that needs to be said about that. So I'll come back to that point. Community engaged research at 丁香园AV, at a university like 丁香园AV and 丁香园AV's is not alone in this, has been ongoing for decades. And I think that in many public institutions, community based research or research that happens in community is simply par for the course. People do this work because communities are the sites where action, experience, histories are happening. So it's not surprising that researchers are out in the community. Community engaged research though, changes that dynamic in a sense, and for many researchers who have pursued that work, the time it takes to build relationships that you mentioned, the resources that are necessary to support communities to become part of university lead research projects in a hospitable sense, take time to build. Those relationships take time to nurture and to build trust. To recognize that work is something the university is often quite excited about, but struggles against. And I mean that the usual metrics for showing research success, things like publications, things like grants and funding, etc. don't necessarily line up with community engaged research in a straightforward or simple way. And I think those
Stuart Poyntz 10:00
concerns are really acute at this point because as universities, 丁香园AV amongst others respond to their Truth and Reconciliation Commission in an attempt to address the role of the institution in relation to Indigenous communities and Indigenous knowledge the priority to recognize and nurture and support community engaged research is more important than ever and that means actually changing at a fundamental level things like tenure and promotion practices, tenure and promotion policies, because there's not an easy fit between the way those practices have historically developed and the actual work of community engaged researchers. The other challenge here is simply gathering together the work that has existed over decades, that falls into the cracks of invisible archives and finding a way to bring that into visibility, I think is a, is an urgent agenda right now, because it makes sense of all those communities who have had long and deep relationships with the institution that have often been invisible. These all give justification to why CERI presents exciting new possibilities and I would say the exciting new possibilities in the sense that CERI is the kind of initiative that has the possibility of building a new infrastructure, a new pillar within the university that changes the operation of the university and there's few opportunities like that in the timeline of university development. So when you have something like this appears on the scene, it's tremendously important to really pull it out and make it a success, it seems to me, which is a I think, why giving a tremendous amount of effort and bringing people into this project has a real urgency. I want to go back, though, to your point earlier about what does research add to the agenda of community engagement, which I think universities have been working on and dialing up as a priority for, for certainly a decade and I think what research does in that relationship in a really interesting way, is it brings to bear on a relationship between universities and communities, one of the essential areas of work that universities do, which is knowledge development, knowledge mobilization, research is the currency of universities in many ways. And to put that currency at stake in the relationships between communities, brings communities into a new place of significance, and importance and I dare say legitimacy. And I think what CERI can do by integrating research into community engagement is to put communities on on par relationship with the larger mission and vision of what universities do, rather than being a tertiary, or extended kind of project of universities, bringing research into the dynamic really brings community engagement into the very center of purpose for what universities do. Not only is that exciting, and super promising in lots of ways, but it changes the way we imagine the community engagement dynamics such that this is not just something that universities should do as some kind of responsibility to community, which has a potential to have a certain kind of missionary notion about it, a salvational notion about it, but instead, it brings communities into a place of partnership, and equitable knowledge creation with the universities and I think that is a significant reset or recalibration of how universities imagine the partners that they're working with.
Am Johal 12:27
You know, with the sort of traditional animosities that can happen between universities and communities in say, a community like the Downtown Eastside, some of the conversations involved with since the 90s, people would push back a little bit on that point, by arguing that that, in fact, it's the community that will give legitimacy to the research enterprise rather than the other way around. And partly, it's the power relationship and that piece, but I think it's in that engagement, that those antagonisms made visible, create some new kind of space that can be worked from. Joanna I'm wondering, like, from your perspective, you have worked on the community side have done forms of research with the organizations you've worked with, and you've probably like many people had both positive and negative experiences working around research and I'm wondering if you can share at least your approach to working on community engaged research, be it directly from the organization's you worked with or the relationships you had with university? What more were you looking for from universities when you were embarking on this, this type of work and partnerships?
Joanna Habdank 14:33
So I think one of the challenges in working together with different institutions was that there was almost this veneer of wanting to be having an equitable approach to the conversations to the research, but it seemed like there was not always but sometimes there was a bit of that legitimacy lacking in the conversation because of that power imbalance that I was alluding to before.
Joanna Habdank 14:59
Because the funds are coming from the institution, it made it a little bit more challenging to carry out that kind of work, to sort of find that voice within the conversation.There was quite a few demands almost being placed on to the nonprofit sector, or the nonprofit agencies, and there wasn't really that much recognition around the restrictions that the nonprofits were working within, and there's quite a few. So I think um, I think that's definitely a challenge that has to be addressed, not just necessarily through CERI, but just in those conversations that will be had, whenever you consider having any community engaged project. It's to sort of have that recognition of how do you approach it? How do you create, lower the barriers for nonprofits to be part of that? How do you empower their voices? How do you bring them forward? And sort of checking yourself in that process as well because I don't think that's really recognized sometimes from the researchers perspective, that it's even there. And I think that's definitely a challenge.
Am Johal 16:05
We see, you know, all sorts of examples around looking at what does ethics look like from a community perspective? A great project that Hives for Humanity was involved with here in the Downtown Eastside when they had a negative experience with a documentary filmmaker, cultural production, we've had many discussions within the school for temporary arts at 丁香园AV. And so there's something about the research enterprise from a community perspective, that actually adds a lot to the institution in terms of changing its own policies or producing materials that can be really helpful for students to think through how they're working. And so I guess, in some sense, in the way that you talk about it Stuart, it's important to create an infrastructure within the institution that supports researchers doing this work. I think, I guess one of the questions for all of us to consider, as well as what's the kind of infrastructure we need to create inside the institution that will also support various communities and community organizations and how to embed that within institutions because I guess, in some sense, when we get into questions of ethics, things are written from a university or institutional perspective and sometimes when communities feel like they haven't been treated fairly, it's not always transparent as to how they raise those questions or issues. So I'm wondering how you think about how communities can interface with the institutions in a way that would also be mobilizing for them? Because I guess in some sense, a proper community engaged research process already has that built in, but I think it's, it's when the research processes don't have that built in that issues emerge or arise.
Stuart Poyntz 17:38
I think that's absolutely right Am, that when that process is not built in, then the power imbalance between an institution like the university and communities, community organizations and groups is more likely to rise as a point of real friction. Your point earlier about communities seeing themselves as the sight and engine of research, I think is for many organizations in many communities absolutely true. And I know in my work over the years with the Media Democracy Project, the alternative media and independent media community have seen themselves as pushing the edges of how media spaces and media alliances and practices develop and seeing themselves as a rich site of justice, and innovation. And at the same time, when they're brought into the university without an organization, a body like CERI, I think there's always the possibility that the institution gobbles that up in a way that's useful for those internal to the university rather than community groups. And so it seems to me that what the lesson of community ethics reminds us about is that, without having set frameworks and set resources and bodies like CERI in place, there's always a possibility, there's always the possibility for relationships to be returned back to a much more traditional dynamic of the institution as the giver and the communities as the receiver. Having said that, it seems to me what CERI does is that CERI acts as both a space to frame and bring visibility to community engaged research that's happened in the institution, but is also a constant reminder and a place that makes a demand on the institution, holds a demand front and center on the institution, to define its work with communities in a way that is reciprocal and equitable, and allows communities to drive their own agenda. One of the ways that the university can do that through a site like CERI is by creating a more hospitable and welcome entry point. And I mean that in a very specific spatial sense that much of universities are not especially welcoming or easy for communities to find themselves at ease in and so and that's a consequence
Stuart Poyntz 20:00
of the size and the disparate space of university campuses, and the actual, the corporatization of universities, which can give them much more of an office culture feel and a community center feel and it seems to me, one of the things we've done with CERI is try to build a different kind of physical space, that doesn't have the same kind of corporate or institutional framing around it, but has a more fluid, organizational space, a more welcoming kind of environment with fewer kinds of stamps of institutional authority, and that is entirely intentional, in order to allow communities to feel at home in this space in a way that fits more with their needs and their research agendas. It sets the ground for them to set an agenda in a way that other kinds of spaces simply may not at universities. And that's a consequence of the way they're designed, the way they're labeled, the way they're monitored and controlled.
Am Johal 21:02
One of the things that comes up as well is because universities are really set up to really focus on the core missions of teaching and research and they're big institutions, that when we get into sort of at the granular level, for those who are doing communigate research, things like providing honoraria to participants, those types of things where you need people's social insurance numbers and an address. And when you're dealing with particular populations not everyone has identification, or a social insurance number or a fixed address. And so trying to engage in equitable forms of uh participatory research can have institutional barriers. And that's why it becomes so essential to partner with community organizations who have those systems in place that can make these things function. And I think one of the interesting things about CERI as well, we're based out of 312 Main an old police station that has a number of community organizations, civil society organizations. We're based in the Downtown Eastside neighborhood, but we're an institution wide initiative. And so that also means that we're going to be working in communities like Surrey, or we're going to be working with researchers that are working in rural BC, and elsewhere as well. And so trying to think through an initiative while it's in its formative phase, I think this is something we've talked about between us a number of times, but it's one of the challenges as you're forming and thinking through and I'm wondering how you think through that problematic complexity.
Joanna Habdank 22:28
Well I think that what's really exciting about CERI is the idea that it allows community organizations to bring forward their own agendas rather than being aligned with the institutional agenda, a researcher's agenda. I think that's the thing that will differentiate it and allow those community organizations or groups to bring forward their own interest and facilitate those kinds of research that they actually are looking forward to, to carrying out and in partnership with 丁香园AV and that's going to lower down some of those barriers that do come up in other situations.
Stuart Poyntz 23:07
Yeah, can I just add to that, which I think that CERI not only offers the opportunity to reach across the institution across the campuses, and from other places besides 312, Main, to reset the relationships between community organizations and campuses in Surrey, campuses in Burnaby. But there's also an interesting internal pedagogical process at work that one of the things that CERI does, is it engages with researchers and students inside the university to revisit and rethink what community engaged research means, what its practice looks like. And it's a fascinating dialogue to revisit on a regular basis, because what you see is that there's a slipperiness to how community engaged research is understood in practice, and having CERI as a body that's responsible for securing and building and setting a certain kind of research centered relationship with communities that speaks to the utility of the knowledge produced that works for the community, that secures the research results that go back to the community so it can be used by organizations, that the agenda of research projects is driven by communities and then with researchers. All of this has a way of doing work of framing what community engaged research is from the perspective of 丁香园AV, as compared to, for instance, community based research, whicht is a different kind of outlet to the community. And so there's a value not only externally but internally to what CERI's place is and what it does to frame the process and the project of community-engaged research.
Am Johal 24:52
In looking at other institutions that are doing this type of work, what are the ones that come to mind for you that are doing this work in an interesting way? In terms of places that we can learn from as an institution like 丁香园AV but I guess at the same time in starting something new, you're also situating it within a city in a context that will obviously make it unique in its own way. But are there places that we can learn from?
Stuart Poyntz 25:19
I'm gonna take a first shot at that and say that I think there's two ways to answer that Am. I think there are places that we can learn from including Concordia University and B芒timent Sept Project which is not squarely focused on research, but it's a fascinating model of community engagement and, and the particular responsibility felt to the community. Bodies like Trent University's Community Engaged Research Institute, which has been going on for 20 years, I think, is another interesting effort. I think you have more to say on that front about other bodies and institutes that we can learn from. What I'm thinking, though, is that what we can also learn from the development of CERI and the way in which we've brought to bear an implementation plan, is the effort to hold back and push back on particular professionalized corporatized notions of what community engagement looks like. I think right now at universities across North America, and in many other jurisdictions, but certainly across North America, community engagement and community engaged research has become a kind of rhetoric to justify the public value of universities, the public worth of the dollars that governments spend on universities. And what's happening in that process is that a real professionalized business centered language has been spinning out around what community engagement looks like, its impact on communities, the obligations, etc. A kind of language around this is happening. I think what often occurs in that processes is that language becomes slogan-like, and really undoes or eliminates the real substance of community engagement and community engaged research as an equitable, responsible, community driven community led process. Where the language is from communities as opposed to professional networks. So I think one of the things we can learn is in the way we hold back against the insertion of that professional language into our practice, because that has a risk of alienating the communities we want to work with, and really um undoing the, the struggle over meaning and the struggle over a compatible language to describe how it is one works with communities in meaningful and, and, and substantive ways as opposed to language that is, is well set for reports and boards, but not necessarily fit for communities.
Am Johal 27:42
I think when I think about colleagues across the country that I've learned a lot from Charmaine Lin and Alex Megelas, at Concordia University, are doing fantastic work, Lisa Erickson at the University of Saskatchewan, who's based out of Station 20 West. Really interesting project where the University of Saskatchewan is embedded with community. That in talking to people like Barbara Holland, who's a consultant for higher ed in the states based down in Portland, but this notion of taking a look at all of the missions of the university around teaching, research and community engagement and thinking about community engagement as a form of teaching, community engagement as a form of research, and also, in and of itself, the kind of partnerships that are created, but trying to, when you make things messy, and you build strong partnerships, through teaching, through research, through engagement, when things get really messy after a while, things become really, really interesting. Where you don't know how these things connect with each other. We've done stuff I know in my own office with the oral storytelling of what happens in the neighborhood that's never been written into reports, capturing that on video in a way that it can be cited in research documents, and these things begin to start speaking to each other, provided there's a kind of depth and duration to the work being, being offered. Joanna I'm wondering for you coming in fairly new to the post secondary environment you have, you have a master's degree in human rights and a master's degree in journalism, you're obviously very comfortable in higher education, but you've worked in the nonprofit sector. Coming into a big institution like 丁香园AV to draw out those connections between Universities in community through community engaged research. What is it that makes you excited about that type of work?
Joanna Habdank 29:25
I think it comes back to what I was saying earlier about breaking down some of those barriers that I think often come up when we're doing community based research, bringing it closer to the community, bringing it closer to the people that are actually impacted by the research are hopefully positively impacted. Just as I was listening to our conversation here. One of the things that comes back to me is that there's a tremendous amount of trust that's already embedded in community organizations between the organization and the clients. That's how you build those relationships. And I think that allows those stories to really come forward, it allows those kinds of relationships can become the foundation for creating deeper knowledge, deeper relationships. And I think that's really important when you're, when you're trying to build what CERI is doing, and what universities seek to do.
Am Johal 30:18
And Stuart, for you, as a faculty member, being involved with CERI, what are you most excited about as we embark on this project together?
Stuart Poyntz 30:29
The thing I'm most excited about is that CERI has the potential to transform how the university situates funding, situates partnerships, situates its imprint in a region like the lower mainland, and maybe further afield than that, but certainly in the lower mainland. And I mean by that, that CERI stretches 丁香园AV as an institution in ways that the institution has been pointing to, has been speaking about. But this initiative has the potential to take that opening, and really set it in place and anchor it in terms of programs in terms of funding, in terms of recognized and evident relationships with community, which then become an example to future teaching and learning and research practice in the university, for faculty members and for students. If I were to summarize this, I think that what CERI can be is, this is a kind of sloganistic language, but it's a kind of pillar within the institution and it's a pillar that the institution has alluded to, has pointed to, as something they want to stand on as part of their reputation and significance. They haven't really committed to that build, committed to allow that to really flourish and take shape. And I think CERI can be that kind of space that does that work. It establishes funding relationships with communities where the communities are driving the use of those funds. That's a really important dynamic from the university's perspective where it establishes a manner of recognizing and giving legitimacy to a certain kind of research practice, which as we said earlier, has a long history in the institution, but often below the radar, and certainly not in a way that aggregates it together as a credible mode of disciplinary practice. It has the potential to build a space where communities belong, as opposed to being a curiosity for the university, something that the university sees, but doesn't really engage in a fulsome way. And if CERI works, the way I think we hope it will work. CERI will be a place where communities feel like they walk in the door, and they have a certain kind of at homeness in this space, an ability to access the kind of resources: public librarian, database resources, methods of organizing their own knowledge mobilization. That are um fit for them, and not for them as an extension of the university, but are fit for them as a way of vitalizing the university. That reorients and recalibrates the power relationship between universities and communities and that's collectively what I'm most excited about.
Am Johal 33:16
It seems to me, there's going to be this sort of attempt to move this multi year initiative into a permanent institute at the University and I think it's going to require that kind of long term embeddedness to achieve the kind of outcomes that we're looking for. We're recording this here in December 2019, by the time this episode comes out, it will be April 2020, where we at that point will be doing an open call out to faculty, graduate students and community organizations in terms of ideas around community engaged research, which we hope that we're going to be able to partner on and we have a lot of work ahead of us. Any final thoughts from, from both of you?
Joanna Habdank 33:58
Yeah, I just wanted to add to what I was saying before to really answer your question a little bit deeper. I, whenever I was doing research when I was at university, or whether it was actually when I was doing interviews as a journalist, especially when I was doing it with vulnerable groups, I have to be honest, there was always a little bit of guilt attached to it, because it always felt like I was, I hate to do, I hate to say this word, but I always felt like I was kind of using those people in a way without offering much in return, even though it was clear that I was trying to do it for the quote unquote, right reasons. And this is the kind of information that probably further research, information, knowledge and so forth about the issue, but there is always something always kind of didn't sit all that right with me and I think this will be an opportunity to change that for anyone else that has had those feelings before. So if I could have been aligned with organizations that were already doing this kind of research or looking for someone to contribute to it and sort of creating that kind of relationship, it probably wouldn't have been in there.
Stuart Poyntz 35:06
Let me just add on to that Joanna, just to say that I think the thing at the end of the day that I'm also deeply excited about about CERI is that in Canada, in many countries around the world, the immense pressure on universities to produce forms of efficiency kinds of outcomes that feed into systems of metrics and metric building, is part of a whole agenda around the using of universities as economic drivers.
Am Johal 35:37
Part of your KPI Stewart.
Stuart Poyntz 35:39
KPIs
Am Johal 35:40
Key performance indicators.
Stuart Poyntz 35:42
Your key performance indicators, which are all part of a kind of process that many listeners will be familiar with, which is this neoliberalization of universities and how universities work. That process is different in different countries. In Canada there is a sense in which the public university with a deep and abiding obligation to non expert communities and organizations still resonates, still holds a certain obligation by the university. I think CERI actually has the potential to act on that in a much more substantive way and hold to a understanding of the university against the, the pressures to deliver KPIs to deliver certain kinds of economic mandates and economic impact, and to actually have a much more substantive civic and public role that nurtures and is a partner with communities rather than is a site of extraction of value from communities. And at the end of the day, that may be its, its greatest legacy, if we actually make the marks we hope to make, is that it will become a metaphor of what universities should and must continue to be rather than what they are becoming.
Am Johal 36:57
I just want to thank my friends and colleagues, Joanna Habdank and Stuart Poyntz for joining us on Below the Radar. Thank you so much.
Joanna Habdank 37:05
Thanks Am.
Stuart Poyntz 37:05
Thank you.
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Paige Smith 37:11
Thank you again, to Stuart Poyntz and Joanna Habdank for joining us on this episode of Below the Radar. To learn more about 丁香园AVs Community Engaged Research Initiative, you can check out their website, which we've linked in the episode description. Next week, we'll hear from Tara Mahoney, creative director of Gen Y Media and CERI's Research and Engagement Coordinator.
Tara Mahoney 37:12
So then a few months later, we had organized our first intergenerational dialogue event and that proved to be quite a compelling thing to watch because not only was there a lot of commonality and kind of solidarity happening, but also a lot of difference and tension, like a learning tension that was happening between the generations that I think resonated with people.
Paige Smith 37:12
You can listen to and download episodes of Below the Radar wherever you catch your podcasts, and be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you don't miss any episodes. You can follow us on Facebook and Twitter to stay up to date with upcoming episodes and news. As always, thank you to the team that puts this podcast together, including myself, Paige Smith, Rachel Wong, Fiorella Pinillos and Kathy Feng. David Steele is the composer of our theme music and thank you for listening. We'll be back in two weeks with a brand new episode of Below the Radar.
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