Service projects or community partnerships? Charity work or reciprocal collaboration? Those participating in community-university collaborations, intellectual partnerships between university affiliated researchers and those outside of universities, have long troubled the ways that this work can be—and is—ethically fraught, messy, and risky. One common suggestion for working against these issues, on the other hand, is to provide community partners with a seat at the table, with an opportunity to play an active role in the organization and implementation of these community-university partnerships. Another has been for university researchers to deeply consider their own roles and perspectives on the effectiveness and ethics of the community-university partnerships in which they engage. 

In Rewriting Partnerships: Community Perspectives on Community-Based Writing (2020), however, Rachael W. Shah proposes that simply inviting community partners to pull up a chair isn’t enough. Instead of just providing space for community voices in theory, Shah reminds us of the important practical work that must be done to not only listen to but to equally value community members’ knowledges and perspectives on community-university partnerships (96). In order to do this work, then, she suggests that community-engaged researchers and program coordinators rewrite the partnerships they have with community members and organizations. Specifically, a rewriting that makes space to provide more opportunities to “honor community voices” in tangible ways so that community members can act as equal intellectual partners (170). Moreover, Shah implements a diverse range of theoretical frameworks and a collaborative storytelling methodology to help her theorize this framework. Drawing on indigenous traditions, she articulates this methodology as relying on personal interviews in order to value community voices, their storytelling practices, and the ways in which they desire to guide conversation (31). Additionally, in order to put her theory of critical community-based epistemologies into practice, Shah did not go about interpreting and analyzing the interview conversations on her own. Rather, she involved community members in the interpretations of their experiences of community engagement in order to collaboratively learn together (32). 

Shah organizes Rewriting Partnerships into five chapters which introduce and illustrate her concept of a community-engaged epistemological framework, as well as a concluding chapter concerned with what this framework might look like in further research and practice. In the opening chapter, “The Homeless Woman Who Spat on Me Is a Teacher: The Politics of Knowledge Construction,” Shah outlines this framework by considering the ways that community-engaged work has long been interested in issues relating to epistemology, or “theories of knowledge” (14). For instance, while acknowledging the ways that the field of community writing itself has become “deeply invested” in researching community-university partnerships, she also sees a lack of research on how community members themselves “view and experience community engagement” (5). In other words, there is a great deal of literature about how those affiliated with the university perceive the effect of community-engaged partnerships, but “there is a curious paucity of research on how community members themselves view and experience community engagement” (5; emphasis mine). Shah, therefore, sees a critical community-engaged epistemological framework as one potential solution for this epistemological imbalance—that is, who is considered the knower and what kind of knowledge is considered valuable—between university perspectives and community ones. 

Shah explains that a critical community-engaged epistemological framework contains three major strands: experience, participation, and assets. And within each of these strands, Shah works to build a case for why “community partners are creators of knowledge, why their stories and analyses should be considered important forms of knowledge, and how these knowledges can be engaged” (14). To make this case, therefore, she relies on three different kinds of scholars. First, those she considers as from the center of the field (the likes of Dewey, Freire, Kretzmann, and McKnight) to show the ways they can help practitioners rewrite partnerships in ways that value community voices. However, Shah also asserts that while these central theorists are foundational, she also has decided to draw on those scholars from the margins or “nondominant” theorists (Rendón, West, Ladson-Billings, and Delgado Bernal) because of their theoretical value, the ways they elucidate inequalities between the community and the university, and to help Shah work with diverse forms of knowledge that might differ from her privileged positionality as a “white, educated, heterosexual woman from a relatively privileged class background” (10). The third group influencing Shah’s theory building is what she calls “a natural extension of the movement” from theorists at the center and the margins—those who “continue off the page entirely” (11). These are community members themselves: high school students, non-profit staff, and community members involved in graduate engagement. Without including these community members, Shah’s framework would lack what it argues we need most: space for “community member knowledge to be incorporated into the ideas and best practices that guide community engagement work” (11). In other words, a community-engaged epistemological framework, and all of the theoretical foundations it compells us to draw on, allows us—those invested in community-engaged work—to actively pursue a democratization of knowledge, but also concrete, practical ways for putting this abstract theory into practice. 

When taking up the strand of epistemologies of experience, then, Shah focuses on the ways that emotions, especially difficult and uncomfortable ones, are often overlooked but should be valued as ways of knowing. For instance, in “Chapter 2: Relationality: Youth Who Collaborate with College Students,” Shah takes up the first strand of her proposed framework: insights that come from epistemologies of experience. Extending Dewey’s ideas of experiential knowledge, as well as West’s claims that we need to pay attention to the painful, emotional experiences of people who are marginalized, Shah claims that “community members’ experiences, especially difficult experiences, become critical sites for knowledge” (42). Shah grounds this experiential strand of critical community-engaged epistemology in Wildcat Writers, a partnership between the University of Arizona Writing Program and local high schools that bridges high school and college classes for “writing exchanges, joint class sessions, and field trips” (43). Foregrounding interviews with high school students in Wildcat Writers, Shah demonstrates the ways that their insights into the partnership revealed the negative impact that the emotion of fear had on the knowledge production and exchanges happening between the secondary and university students.

Therefore, Shah asserts that it is time for community-engaged researchers and coordinators to actively consider the impact emotions have on community members’ experiences with these partnerships because marginalization of particular experiences and knowledges can create emotional barriers to sharing insights (51). In the case of Wildcat Writers specifically, student interviewees who lent their experience to Shah’s research suggest how important relational experiences are in cultivating a critical community-based epistemology. When personal relationships are foregrounded in these settings, negative emotions such as fear and shame are less likely to be felt, because even “when extra chairs are present at the table, emotional obstacles can make it difficult to speak” and share knowledge (65). In order to cultivate an environment in which students might feel more comfortable to freely share their experiences and knowledge, they suggest turning to values of relationality including personalismo, affirmation, rigor, and role fluidity.   

Additionally, taking up the second strand of her framework, Shah considers the relationship between epistemologies of participation and the ecological, networked environments of community writing partnerships. She explains that these participatory ways of knowing are especially needed when considering best practices for teaching students to write in and for community partners. In “Chapter 3: Networks: Nonprofit Clients for Students Projects,” Shah gounds this discussion of epistemologies of participation in the experiences of community members who have partnered with students in professional writing courses and the troubling finding that less than one-third of projects to come out of these collaborations are useable for the non-profit organizations “‘as is’” because the final products did not accurately reflect “the particular context or knowledge network of the organization” (93). For Shah, then, this finding demonstrates ways that students are not properly engaging with the various ecologies and ways of knowing that exist in the community organization with which they work. Therefore, epistemologies of participation means community-based partnerships often require “a participatory understanding of knowledge that places” those outside of an organization “inside” its networked knowledge system (93). In practice this kind of deep participation might look like instructors teaching the “intangibles of assertiveness, engagement, and communication” (93), foregrounding Rendón’s theory of difrasismo and facilitating ways for students to do more than superficially engage with the community organization.    

Taking up the final strand of her proposed framework, Shah argues valuing ways of knowing in community-engaged partnerships requires more than just knowing the correct logistical or pragmatic steps to take when working with community members. Rather, it requires a disposition of openness toward ways of knowing of those at the margins because of the advantages for which they allow. This final strand, epistemologies of assets, influence her proposed framework by openly acknowledging that “those who are marginalized hold a kind of epistemological advantage” (127). In other words, epistemologies of assets can be defined as viewing the stories and interpretations of those from the margins as “foundational assets for building community partnerships when the right dispositions create openings for sharing” (127). In “Chapter 4: Openness: Community Members Who Work with Graduate Students,” Shah considers epistemologies of assets in practice by focusing on community members who had experience with graduate students engaging in community-based work in two different seminar courses. After interviews with twelve community members who partnered with graduate students in these courses, she found that they described not particular steps that needed to be taken by the graduate students but rather there was more of a “disposition toward knowledge building” needed in these partnerships (102). Specifically, a disposition of openness which helps us theorize “how openness creates space for the special insights that come from community knowledges” (97). Therefore, the epistemologies held by community members can shift from being viewed as unreliable and risky to assets that must be explored as foundational to these partnerships. If, as Shah asserts, “These knowledges [of community members] live outside books, and often outside written words entirely,” then we must strive to be acutely attuned to the ways these people and their knowledges can be overlooked and undervalued (128). Citing the insights of a community member interviewee, Shah provides a few examples of ways that community-engaged graduate courses could better prepare students to cultivate a disposition of openness, which include discussions about conversations that can be had with community partners about assets each partner is bringing to the collaboration, ways to balance voice, having a positive disposition in difficult situations, and how to have conversations with folks without having an over-the-top, condescending attitude (127).

In the final section of the book, Shah provides examples of ways for community members to be in the rare position of holding the university answerable and accountable to community-university partnerships—because it is their ethical right to do so. Because calls for sweeping structural change in the academy can often feel like shouting into the void, Shah sees opportunities for change at the programmatic level as the “institutional sweet spot,” as a hopeful way to incorporate a critical community-based framework into the scaffolding of community-engaged partnerships (131). Furthermore, she posits that small programs can serve as rich sites of enacting this approach to epistemologies because they function “as an ethical vision that acknowledges the importance of community member voices, perspectives, and priorities” (132). Three potential opportunities for rewriting partnerships within this framework include community advisory boards, participatory program evaluation, and community grading. Community advisory boards provide a structural way for community members to hold the program’s leadership accountable to not only the program’s goals but also to the expectations and interests of community members themselves (134). Additionally, participatory community evaluation, “an approach to program evaluation that involves stakeholders in analyzing the effectiveness and impact of an initiative,” allows for direct stakeholders to have a role in shaping the insights and results that come from programmatic evaluation. (154). And community grading serves as an invitation for community members to grade students themselves in order to provide yet another way to “structurally create space for community member perspectives” (157). These three approaches serve as potentials, as options, for enacting answerability and accountability that “flows upward and outward from partnerships toward those who hold higher positions of power” (169). 

Through a vivid, collaborative storytelling methodology and diverse range of theoretical frameworks, Rewriting Partnerships makes a case for the real-life stakes that are involved whenever talking about issues of epistemologies. Shah helps illustrate the ways something that can sound so theoretical and abstract, such as epistemology, can—and does—have material consequences in people’s everyday lives. If we, as teacher-researchers who do public facing work, are concerned with marginalized communities and issues of social justice, then we must also be concerned with epistemological marginalization. If we continue to see marginalized communities as “places of intellectual and material deficiency,” then we not only participate in epistemological marginalization ourselves, but we also continue to enter those spaces as colonizers of knowledge. Instead of entering these spaces as researchers ready to discover knowledge, what if we are invited into co-created spaces where questions can be asked collaboratively and answers can be communally explored? What if we enter in ways that hold us more “answerable and accountable” to community members and partners (173)? As Shah puts it, if we work to “recognize the messiness of knowledge production, we can give up on controlling it, shifting to become responsive and responsible—answerable” (172). Rewriting Partnerships helps us consider not just what it means to value community perspectives as tickets to the next cool service project or as gold mines of knowledge for academics to extract, but instead as “world builders” from whom we can all take much guidance (181). 

Works Cited

Shah, Rachael W. 2020. Rewriting Partnerships: Community Perspectives on Community-Based Learning. Utah State University Press.