Call For Chapters: Equitable Community Engagement with Colleges and Universities: Exploring Equity in Community-Campus Relationships – Aug 23

Posted by Routledge on July 30, 2024

While community engagement has been an integral element of American higher education since its inception, equitable approaches to community engagement practice have ebbed and flowed across time and institutions. This edited volume will interrogate the concept of equity in higher education community engagement by examining how equity is perceived and experienced in community-campus relationships; contemporary practices of equitable community engagement; the various ways they are defined across diverse cultures, perspectives, and contexts; and how they are initiated, enacted, revised, and institutionalized.

This edited volume seeks contributions from community organizations, faculty, staff, practitioners, and students to share their experiences creating and maintaining equitable community-engaged relationships in their teaching, research, and/or practice. Authors will be asked to produce a chapter using a case study to critically reflect, dialogically explore, and/or convey research that examines equitable definitions, values, frameworks, policies, or approaches that have been implemented in community-campus relationships. For the purposes of this book, communities are defined as external to the university. (If in doubt, please email!)

This edited collection will explore the considerations, successes, and challenges of creating and maintaining equitable community engagement between communities and colleges/universities, which takes many different forms and may touch upon many different issues. As such, topic areas to explore may include, but are not limited to:

• How historical trajectories and perspectives of communities, universities, and community-campus relationships are considered in the work
• How equitable community engagement is defined and what it looks like across diverse cultures and perspectives
• Frameworks and toolkits for conceiving, building, and implementing the work, including protocols that ensure equity is built into community-campus partnerships
• How initiatives are co-designed with community members as thought partners and leaders in the work, and how community partners prefer to work with university partners
• How the values and priorities of the community guide the work, and how academic and experiential knowledge and expertise is leveraged in the work
• How groups navigate cross-cultural values and diverse standpoints, and how their understanding of equity changed during the course of the work
• Ways to center social justice and anti-racism in community engagement relationships and practices
• How a community-campus relationship overcame gaps in understanding or other barriers to equitable community engagement across diverse cultures and perspectives
• How institutions and partners engage in equity work in contentious political environments, particularly those in Texas or Florida contexts
• How equitable community-campus relationships are institutionalized and sustained

This volume values diverse perspectives from writers across different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, positionalities, and roles (e.g., community partners, faculty of all ranks, administrators, staff, students, etc.), and will give preference to submissions that are collaboratively written by community members and diverse author perspectives. Final chapters will be relatively short submissions (3,000-4,000 words), where some submissions may be shorter or longer than others. Submissions of works in progress with critical reflection are also accepted.

Those interested in writing a chapter are invited to submit a brief chapter abstract (250 words or less) here by August 23, 2024.

For more specific information, further topic ideas, and the full chapter timeline, please visit the submission link.

If you have any questions, contact Cindy Vincent at [email protected].