Episode 022: Uzo Anucha
Dr. Uzo Anucha of York University is a shining example of the community-engaged researcher. She’s the founder of YouthREX, which mobilizes academic research for the benefit of youth workers in Toronto. Her research collaborations with local youth and youth workers are the academic equivalent of community-based activism.
Transcript
Cameron Graham: My guest today is Associate Professor Uzo Anucha of the School of Social Work at York University in Toronto. Dr. Anucha was recently awarded a research chair by York University in recognition of her work on youth and contexts of inequity. She does community-based collaborative research that builds the capacity of youth leaders in Ontario to access and evaluate critical research in their field. She is a researcher who is deeply engaged in the community. She's also the academic director of YouthREX, the Youth Research and Evaluation Exchange. Uzo, welcome to the podcast.
Uzo Anucha: Thank you, Cam. Thank you so much for having me.
Cameron: It's a real pleasure to have you here. I really wanted to get the chance to sit down and talk to you in person about the way that you do your work, because it is so different from the kind of work that I do on the academic side. I do have some community engagement stuff that I do parallel to my research, but a lot of my research is looking at dusty documents and archives, and you are actually doing your research in the community. It's not just doing it in your office and then taking it out to the community. You're doing it in the community.
Uzo: With community partners.
Cameron: Yes.
Uzo: Yeah, yeah. Definitely. Yeah.
Cameron: I want to talk to you a little bit about this whole notion of having a research chair at York University, because it's something that you actually have to apply for.
Uzo: Yeah.
Cameron: You and I have agreed that we're going to walk through the actual application that you put together in order to illustrate the kinds of things that you have to do to convince people that your research matters and it's worth supporting.
Uzo: Worthy, yeah. Actually, that is the final application. It is a two-stage process. You do an initial application at your faculty level. Your faculty reviews that, and they shortlist a handful of people before you do the larger application. It's a more extensive process, yeah.
Cameron: So, it's a lengthy process as well, it sounds like.
Uzo: It is, yeah, it is.
Cameron: Because universities don't make decisions quickly.
Uzo: Yeah, it is. The initial nomination application at the faculty level was in August. The deadline was August, and then you hear back and then you have a couple of months to put together the full application. Part of the application process is also sending your application out to external reviewers who review it and assess it and send that back at both levels, at the faculty level and at the university level. I was really excited when I was successful to get this.
Cameron: Yeah, tell me about that. How did you actually get the news? Did somebody phone you or did you get an email?
Uzo: No, you get an email from the president, from Rhonda [Lenton}. Yeah, yeah. The process started in August of 2018. The full application went in in December, 2018. We didn't hear back until April of 2019. Just clicked an email and there was an email saying, "Congratulations, you've been awarded your research chair."
Cameron: How did you feel?
Uzo: I don't think I've been as excited as I was. Usually when you get all these big awards, people are like, "Congrats." You try to play it down, you're like, "Oh, no, it's nothing." But with this, when people came to me, I was dancing. Really, I was dancing in my school. I'm like, "Yes, I'm so happy."
Cameron: That's good.
Uzo: Yeah.
Cameron: Well, being an academic can be a bit lonely sometimes.
Uzo: Yeah, yeah.
Cameron: You do your work by yourself, you publish it, and you get the word back from the journal or whatever that your work is published, and you maybe have a glass of wine to celebrate yourself, but not many people come around and dance with you.
Uzo: Exactly, exactly. Actually, recently I learnt that maybe there are other models of doing the research chair. I'm heading to Montreal tomorrow to do a keynote at the launch of another chair at University of Montreal. There's a different model. It's a research chair held by five women. It's a combined research chair in youth mobilization held by five women holding one chair. That's an amazing model of how to do collaborative work.
Cameron: It is.
Uzo: Yeah, it is. Yeah.
Cameron: That is fascinating, because we have this implicit, sometimes explicit model of the academic as the heroic individual scientist.
Uzo: Working alone.
Cameron: Yes, yeah.
Uzo: Working alone. I think that model sometimes carries onto when you do community-based work, collaborative work, because you've decided to do collaborative work, you still need to be attentive to making sure that the benefits of such endeavors are collaboratively shared. So, you have to commit to not going off on conferences by yourself, going with people on conferences, which means rather than doing three, four conferences from a particular grant, you may do one because you are taking other people along with you. You are doing co-publishing, you are doing a lot of things that sometimes don't necessarily show up on your CV. I feel lucky to be in a place like York where senior promotion processes acknowledge engaged scholarship to an extent, because there are other universities where such collaborative work might not get the recognition it deserves. Right? The expectation is that you're just publishing sole-authored publications and you're doing sole presentations. You're not doing that kind of collaborative work. But at York I think there is some recognition of collaborative processes, yeah.
Cameron: The way that you go about doing your research is very much about breaking down the barrier between the university and the community. The other ways of producing knowledge that involve publication and academic journals to a certain extent set up or presume a barrier between the academic world and the outside, and kind of create an insular space. You're actively trying to break that down.
Uzo: Yeah. I think when you look at traditional scholarship and community engaged scholarship, there are a couple of differences. Because we are traditional scholarship, the expectation is that you have the sole investigator in an office on campus doing all their work there. The goal usually is that you produce theory. You're working with students mainly only, and with community engaged scholarship, the expectation is that you're out there, you're out there, you're not just within the walls of the institution, but you could be out there. You're working with students, but you're also working with community partners. All my research projects have included what I call community-based research assistants, and it depends on what the issue is. If I'm doing something on youth issues, then I'm working with youth from that particular community. When I did a project on newcomer women, I hired a lot of newcomer women on the project. The goal isn't that you're working with them during only one phase of the project, but you're working with them through all the phases of the project, right? Yeah. From the conceptualization of the project, from collecting data to analyzing data to publications, yeah.
Cameron: Well, that's, I guess, what you meant when you used the word with.
Uzo: Yeah, with.
Cameron: You're doing research with the community, not just in the community.
Uzo: Exactly, right.
Cameron: I'd like to go through, if you don't mind... oh, I had one question before I launch into looking at this proposal. Can you just explain to me a little bit about what kinds of resources the research chair provides? Do you have funding or teaching releases?
Uzo: Teaching release. For me, the most important one was the teaching release. So, with a York research chair, you teach 50% of your usual teaching load.
Cameron: So that frees up time.
Uzo: That frees up time, frees up time, because time is something you just need a lot more of when you're doing engaged research. You're also provided with $20,000 every year. It's a five year appointment. Over five years, you get $100,000 and you get a teaching release.
Cameron: What kinds of things would you typically spend that money on? You mentioned taking people to conferences.
Uzo: Research assistants, conferences. Part of my plan includes to do the beginning of an exploratory primary research, so all that goes in there. Yeah. That goes in there, yeah.
Cameron: So, $100,000 sounds like a lot of money...
Uzo: Over five years.
Cameron: ... but when it's $20,000 a year, if you have to pay a research assistant a proper wage, obviously that's going to be part-time. So, what, about 10 hours a week or something, maybe, for somebody like that?
Uzo: Well, in my own case, I'm also lucky that I have several ongoing external research grants, so you leverage those.
Cameron: Okay.
Uzo: Yeah. So, for example, right now, you can leverage funds from several [sources], to piece together and have a post-doc. You can leverage them to pay a youth research assistant. You can leverage the funding to go to a conference. It might not just come from one source, at least for now.
Cameron: Right, okay.
Uzo: I think the expectation is the York research chair funding is kind of seed funding that enables you to do other things. Yeah.
Cameron: It's not restricted to specific outcomes.
Uzo: Exactly. Then also that allows you to attract more funding, I think. Yeah.
Cameron: Okay, yeah.
Uzo: Yeah.
Cameron: The cost of taking people to conferences, these are not $50 entrance fees to these conferences. They can be hundreds of dollars.
Uzo: Exactly. You're paying a flight, you're paying hotel. Yeah. But for me, one of the benefits of doing funded research is the opportunity to be able to offer students and community-based researchers with opportunities that they can use as a springboard to bring their career that they might not ordinarily have access to. But further, you can hire a high school student. I don't pay minimum wage as a value. I try and pay something that's more like a living wage. You can offer someone the same job, means that someone has the opportunity to be paid to learn. Yeah. I see it as an extension of what I do as a professor. Yeah.
Cameron: Good.
Uzo: That research capacity building, I don't see it as different from my work as a teacher. I see it as part of what I do as a teacher, yeah.
Cameron: Yeah. I wanted to clarify that, because these labels are thrown out there about someone is a "research chair," and in practical terms, I'm not always sure exactly what that means. Let's turn to the application that you've put together for this position. Just for the sake of listeners, I'm just going to just outline the structure of it, and we'll talk about each piece. You started out by laying out of your research objectives, what is the research intending to address, the research context, and I think in there you get at some of the underlying social issues that you're trying to address and what other people have done in this field, and then ... I'm going to turn some pages here ... you talk about specific research methods that you're going to use in your study, and there's some very interesting stuff in there I want to talk to you about. Then the second last piece is engagement with research users and the communication of results: how do you get your research results out to somewhere that matters? Then the fifth piece is what we were just talking about, the training strategies. What do you do to actually train other researchers to come along and join you in this research? Given that structure, let's look at what you've written here.
Uzo: Yeah.
Cameron: So, you've talked-
Uzo: Just a quick note that the headings are headings that you are provided.
Cameron: Ah, so you have to fill in.
Uzo: Oh, yeah. You have to work with those headings. You are given headings, you are given page limits and word limits.
Cameron: So it's very structured.
Uzo: It's very structured. You have to stay there.
Cameron: The first step in becoming a successful applicant to a research chair is being able to express your innovative research in a very traditional format!
Uzo: [laughs] Exactly! I think the hardest part for me was trying to decide what our focus is on, what will be the issue that you're going to focus this on? How does this extend and build on my current work? Where do I want to see this going? Trying to come up with an idea, for me, that was the hardest part of this. Then you start working on the other components once you nail down what this is going to focus on, because you could go in so many different ways. Yeah, yeah.
Cameron: So, how did you go about selecting a focus out of all the things that you're interested in working on?
Uzo: Yeah. For me, I wanted to make sure that this was aligned with my current work. For the last five years, I've been working on the Youth Research and Evaluation Exchange.
Cameron: YouthREX.
Uzo: YouthREX, yeah. That has been my work for the last five years. I wanted this to extend the mandate of youth rights. Our mandate in YouthREX is more around knowledge mobilization, to make research and evaluation practices accessible to Ontario's grassroots youth sector.
Cameron: So, that YouthREX is very focused on making sure that all the youth workers in the province have access to the knowledge and skills and stuff that they need to do their job.
Uzo: Exactly, to do the work they do. So, making sure that the research that has already been produced, that they can use that research in their work.
Cameron: Okay, so it's connecting research that has been done with youth workers.
Uzo: Yeah, exactly, with youth work. Then secondly, helping them understand the impact of the work of the youth programs they are running. Those two things. So, you connect them to research, so that informs the planning and development of their programs, and once they have programs running, you can help them understand the impact of the programs they are running on youth well-being. That is the mandate of YouthREX. What the York research chair helps us to do is to extend that mandate by focusing on the experiences of youth, youth workers, and the systems that sustain these youth programs.
Cameron: Those are three key pillars that you mentioned several times in the document. The youth, the work, the system. So, could you talk about each of those pieces in turn, to just explain to me how that piece fits into what you're trying to do here?
Uzo: Okay. So, when people think about youth well-being, they tend to think only of youth. Right? But when they think about youth in all this context of inequity, and when I talk about youth who are in the context of inequity, I talk about youth who are facing barriers linked to race, poverty, immigration, indigenous status, sexual orientation, and all the other sources of marginalization that exclude them from participating within the Canadian society. A lot of the youth programs that we work with, they support this view. The youth well-being also extends beyond the vulnerabilities that these youth come to the programs with. The goal is to extend the focus to understanding the sources of marginalization. Rather than only looking at youth, you turn your attention to the context that creates the inequities for youth. You turn your attention to the systems, to the policies that we have within Ontario's youth system.
Cameron: You had talked in the document, I'm jumping ahead a little bit here, about ... the acronym is PYD, it's "positive youth development." This is an approach to youth work that focuses on helping the young people develop themselves as potential workers, as whole people. As positive as that sounds, you are a little bit critical of that because it neglects some of the structural aspects of the situation.
Uzo: Exactly, exactly. I mean, positive youth development, PYD, is still better than what it replaced.
Cameron: What did it replace?
Uzo: Before there was such a focus on deficit-based behaviors of youth. If you look at some of the policies that we had before, there was a time in Ontario we had a lot of zero tolerance policies.
Cameron: Right, so kick students out if they misbehave.
Uzo: Exactly, exactly. So, all those policies, were informed by deficits and pathological framework of youth as the problem, youth who are seen as the problem. PYD challenged that framework and encouraged us to look at the strengths that youth had, rather than looking at their deficits. So, in that sense, PYD was on the right path. Ontario adopted it as a framework. PYD kind of focused our attention on creating assets within the community. The limitation is PYD doesn't draw attention that even if you have assets within the community, youth are differently positioned to be able to take up those assets. You can't use only PYD without drawing attention to some of the toxic elements within the community, all the isms we have within the community, whether it's racism or sexism or poverty. So, whether you have assets in the community, that's not enough. There is a need to merge PYD with a social justice framework that acknowledges the structural issues that you've experienced.
Cameron: This is the part of the application where you talk about the research context, which is not just the social context, but also the academic location of what you're doing, where these kinds of critiques of the PYD have been made. This step forward from the old model to PYD is part of a journey then that you are participating in. You're taking it to the next step.
Uzo: Yeah.
Cameron: Can you talk a little bit about the kinds of critiques that have been made of PYD a little bit more so I can understand that?
Uzo: Well, if you think, in addition to PYD, there's also been a movement around involving youth in the development or the programs that they participate in. There's a big move towards youth-led programming. Right?
Cameron: Okay.
Uzo: Some of the criticisms of both PYD and a youth-led movement is sometimes there's a performance. There's a tokenism.
Cameron: You used the word "performative."
Uzo: Exactly, exactly. That tends to happen where youth are involved, but they're not really involved. You know?
Cameron: Right. So, in other words, I'm just trying to wrap my head around the use of that word performative. You're seeing the encouragement of youth to participate in that kind of planning as a token gesture to show how enlightened our thinking is about that.
Uzo: Exactly.
Cameron: And not necessarily getting at the roots of the problem.
Uzo: Exactly, exactly. Then some of that is not very meaningful, is not meaningful youth engagement. Meaningful youth engagement when done right is great, is great for youth, because you are providing them with opportunities to learn, to expand their notion of what's possible, from just being the reason for a program. If you look at within the youth work sector, a lot of youth workers we come in contact with sometimes they started as the reason for a program, but because they had opportunities to develop their capacities and their potential, they are now running the program. So, that's what you want to see happen when there's authentic youth engagement, and when PYD is expanded to include a focus on social justice.
Cameron: Right.
Uzo: Yeah. So, we've moved from talking about PYD to talking about critical PYD.
Cameron: The "critical" aspect, so you're trying to take this received understanding of getting youth involved in developing themselves, to getting youth involved in a critique of the system that they're in. I think at one point you either use the phrase, or you imply, that that other way of doing it, where you're getting youth to help fix themselves, implies that "they are the problem."
Uzo: Exactly.
Cameron: Right.
Uzo: Exactly. That's part of the challenges or the difficulties of approaching research with youth and only focusing on youth. I think the innovative thing about the research agenda for my research chair is it includes a focus not just on youth, but youth workers themselves, and then the system itself, right? So, you are looking at the youth, the work, the system. You are looking at all three to be able to understand where the inequities are, because whenever you look at youth and you frame them as vulnerable youth, the focus then, the problem, becomes the youth. Right? But when you turn away from youth as sources of where the vulnerability is coming from and you look at the context that youth are located in, it switches the focus.
Cameron: I'm wondering, I'm going to step sideways for a second here. When you talk about getting youth involved in a critique of the system, the example that comes to mind right now is Greta Thunberg with her critique around climate change.
Uzo: Of climate change, yeah, yeah.
Cameron: She's speaking at the UN and so forth. That has been quite a powerful thing to observe, but there's also been a bit of a backlash against... well, certainly there's been a horrible backlash against her personally from some of her toxic critics, but even within a more sympathetic audience, there's a bit of a critique of the fact that she had to be the one to speak.
Uzo: She had to be the symbol, yeah.
Cameron: Yeah. It's a lot of weight to put on a young person. So, how do you create a space in which youth can critically engage with the system around them without making them your token anything of, "Look at your fearless leader here now. She's only 16 years old," or 18 years old, or whatever.
Uzo: But how do you also make sure that other kinds of youth have the opportunity. Even as we are critiquing having a token youth, how do you make sure that other youth who come from other communities have the opportunity? You know?
Cameron: So, the ones that are not as photogenic, the ones that are not as comfortable on the front, yeah.
Uzo: Exactly. Exactly. It challenges you to pay attention to who is chosen to be the spokesperson and who is not chosen. Whose work is recognized and whose work is recognized. Who has the opportunity to be put in a space where they can actually speak on behalf of an issue if they choose to. So, it's really complicated. Even while you say, "Yeah, great. What she is doing is great," you are saying we need to also provide that kind of opportunity to other kinds of youth. Right? Yeah.
Cameron: So, what kinds of things do you do then in your work to ensure that everybody has that opportunity to engage? Because they can't all go speak at the UN.
Uzo: No, they can't all go speak at the UN, but they're also other forums that they can go speak at. For me, I like to think of what we do as expanding the notion of what is possible for youth. So, for example, before YouthREX... YouthREX came into being because we worked for several years on a SSHRC-funded CURA [Community-University Research Alliance] project, the Assets Coming Together for Youth (ACT for Youth) project, focused on youth from the Jane-Finch community. We worked with youth. They would come to campus, they worked with our students for several years. We did research capacity building for those youth. They were able to work on research, present on their own work, publish on their own work. Just coming to campus for those youth expanded their notion of what was possible. We worked with youth who when they got into high school, they weren't doing that great. So guidance counselors worked with them to select youth who were what they called "social promotion" -- so you haven't passed, but you have to go into the next grade. So, the goals of the project included academic engagement, civic engagement. That provided them an opportunity to understand social justice, but also to contribute to that within their community. My point is, yeah, not everyone can go to UN, but there's a multi dimensional understanding of what participation by youth will be, if that makes sense. Yeah.
Cameron: What you've got then is this social justice approach to youth development as opposed to an individualized entrepreneur-of-the-self kind of approach to youth development. Another goal that you've got here, I'm quite interested in the way that you express this. "Since," -- I'm just going to quote from your paper here -- "Since launching in November 2014, YouthREX has worked hard to complicate the Ontario youth sector's understanding of PYD, and move this towards a critical PYD."
Uzo: Yeah.
Cameron: Tell me about this notion of complicating things. Is this something you enjoy? [laughs]
Uzo: Well, I think that's the job of a researcher, particularly a researcher who is a social work researcher. Right? To draw your attention to things we might take for granted or things we might not notice, and to push us to keep getting better, getting better to that ideal, trying to make sure we create this community that includes everyone. For me, that's why the focus on inequity makes sense. Right? So, not just a focus on youth, but a focus on youth who ordinarily might not get included in certain projects, focus on not just going to youth who are the easiest to engage or the easiest to participate, but you are going to youth who it might be a little bit more work for them to participate, for them to engage, and then you think through what that means, what they need to be able to get to that place, and then people can use this as leverage, not just in terms of people, but also for communities. Stepping back, talking about the ACT for Youth project that YouthREX grew out of, one of the things that we focused on was the whole negative framing of youth within Jane-Finch. That's what we took on.
Cameron: The Jane and Finch area being the local community near our university.
Uzo: The local community that York is located in. Sometimes when we think about Jane-Finch, we tend to think of Jane-Finch as different from the university, but this is a community that the university, York, is located in. So, that was taking on that negative framing of youth, calling attention to how the negative framing is constructed, and trying to understand the consequences of that negative framing on youth that call the community home. That was the focus. Yeah.
Cameron: I think it's important to clarify for listeners to the podcast who aren't from Toronto that the Jane and Finch area is heavily racialized. It is a predominantly Black community, and is the recipient of a lot of aggressive policing, and has often suffered from negative stereotypes in the press and so forth.
Uzo: Yeah. Exactly, yeah.
Cameron: This is the community in which our university is located, and to which we must be committed.
Uzo: Exactly. Sometimes when we think about community engagement, we think of professors and students from York just going into the community. But for me, I see it as both ways, as reciprocal. We need to go into the community, but we also need to make sure that the university is accessible to people for the community so there is a spilling into and spilling over into the university.
Cameron: One of the key ingredients in what you're doing is to develop social workers themselves and youth workers, to improve them. You are offering a three day certificate in critical youth work, which is about bridging theory and practice. Can you tell me about that little piece of the program?
Uzo: That's part of YouthREX, the work we do at YouthREX. YouthREX is funded by the Ministry of Children and Community Social Services.
Cameron: That's funded by the province.
Uzo: By the provincial government, exactly, funded by the provincial government to support Ontario's youth sector. What we do is in three areas. There's the knowledge exchange. We have the knowledge hub where we make existing research accessible. So, we take a 20-page research article, we develop a research summary of two pages. That is easier for a youth worker to pick up and read and understand how that relates to the work they do. The second area is around YouthREX Ed, where we've developed a couple of certificates for youth workers who are working in programs. One of them is the one you mentioned, the critical youth work certificate. What that does is over three days, three days in person plus a couple of online electives, we have them think about youth work beyond just the youth they work with. They think about the concepts that shape youth work. They think about some of the theories around structural youth work, and then try to bring that into practice, what that means for the work they do on a day-to-day basis. There's a heavy focus on anti-oppressive practice, what that means, including anti-Black racism, what that means, how that shows up in the work they do, how the policies that organize youth work are connected to the work they do, how that affects the work they do. That's what we do with them over three days.
Cameron: So, you're really helping them to understand the context in which they're working.
Uzo: To understand the context, to challenge the context, to understand and to question the way things are organized. Yeah.
Cameron: Another piece of what you've outlined here is what you refer to as NOISE, which is the New Opportunities for Innovative Student Engagement. This is something that, as I understand what you're doing here, is you're bringing together your Masters and Bachelor of Social Work students into the community to get them engaged, too. You're teaching them how to do engaged work.
Uzo: Yeah. NOISE was, I don't like using "innovative" a lot, even if it shows up sometimes in the title of things, but NOISE I think is one thing I can truly say was an innovative idea that worked out really well. The whole idea for NOISE -- and NOISE grew out of the SSHRC-funded project, the Assets Coming Together for Youth -- the goal was to bring youth from the Jane-Finch community, our Bachelor of Social Work students, and our Masters students, to create these community action pods where they all work together across these differences to take on different social justice issues. The youth and the BSW students -- and then we had MSW graduate assistants, who were the facilitators of these NOISE pods -- they worked together over a year, starting from September to April. They would develop a social action project, they would implement the project, and then we had a celebration of learning in April, where all the different action pods came together and they presented on what they learned from their social action projects. Some of them took on media projects to take on that negative discourse about the community. Some of them took on food security issues. Some of them... I'm thinking about the five years, all the different projects we did. But the youth came into NOISE when they were going into Grade 9. Then they had the opportunity to stay in NOISE from Grade 9 to Grade 12. One thing that happened was this co-learning. We didn't call it a mentorship project, like the traditional project where university students are supposed to mentor high school students. We use a multidirectional mentorship model. We recognize that in a community-for-action pod, that there are things that York students could learn from youth who live within the community.
Cameron: Right. It's two ways.
Uzo: Exactly, yeah. It was very reciprocal. Youth are learning from the university students, and the university students also learning from the youth, yeah.
Cameron: The methodology that you outlined in the third section of your application is very much about this kind of dialogue. I wonder if you could explain a little bit about this community dialogue approach. You've got a lovely graphic here, which I can post on the website for people, but it's hard to describe verbally. But it's very circular in terms of producing knowledge and the recirculating it back into the community.
Uzo: Well, the research methodology is framed by this Community Dialogue Approach, the CDA. The CDA is a community engaged research strategy. I've used it for all my research projects. It re-imagines research as a community dialogue that is centered on equitable community engagement. The CDA is connected to two main things, to multi-method, multi-focal research, which allows you to pull in to understand an issue from multiple perspectives.
Cameron: Right.
Uzo: So, for example, if you look at the ACT For Youth project we did, we did interviews with youth, we did a critical discourse analysis to understand how the media, the negative framing of youth, happens. We did a survey, we did a photo voice project. So, you try to understand this issue from multiple perspectives, and then you integrate all these to then develop an action plan.
Cameron: So, you're kind of firing on all cylinders at once.
Uzo: Kind of, cooking on all burners. [laughter] You have all your four burners cooking and you're trying to make a dish that is going to include different recipes. Then the second thing that kind of distinguishes the CDA is the extensive community engagement. Right? Sometimes people tend to think of community engagement as something you do, you get letters of support when you put in to get a proposal, and then nothing happens. But in my own case, what I've tried to live and to do is talking to people when you're developing the project, and when I write up the proposal, writing up the proposal with a caveat that some of this might change as the engagement keeps on happening. Then once we get funded, we'll bring people back. A highlight of CDA is community forums. I hold frequent community forums where I bring people together. You keep sharing, you give people the opportunity to participate. Also, trying to make sure that you budget for the involvement of people, so that you're not just expecting that everyone is going to just donate their time while you're getting paid to do that work. So, your budget includes a budget like if a youth program can't cover the costs of someone from their program to participate, that there is an honorarium that can cover the costs of their time, that you've budgeted for money to hire youth as research assistants. They are not just expecting them to volunteer on the project. So, you've attended to the material consequences of participating on a project like that.
Cameron: It sounds like a very integrated and networked approach. Something that happens in all of this is that people connect to each other. It's not just about what's said, but about who meets whom.
Uzo: Exactly. It's networking, the building of the connections. Typically, in traditional research, you go through the research process and you have your findings, and you write it up, you submit it to a journal, it takes time before the findings become available. When you do engaged research in this way, because you are all co-creating the knowledge in real time, people understand what's coming out. People know what the findings are. People can take that away and go back to their programs. They can work on that. I frequently joke, I go to an academic conference, present to people, I might have 10, 5, 15, 20 people in the audience. But it's supposed to count, because it's refereed. I have a community forum, I can have 60 people,60 people who are going to go back to their programs the next day, pick up the findings of what we talked about, implement it in their program -- but it doesn't quite count because it's not refereed, right? The way we count things in academia. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Cameron: It's an illustration of the challenge of fitting your mold of research into the old frameworks here, that when you get down to Section 4 of the document on engagement with research users and communication of results, you still have to talk about the way that you're producing the knowledge, because there's no separation for you in producing it and communicating it.
Uzo: Exactly, exactly.
Cameron: So, you've got the shared findings and knowledge, converting knowledge into action is part of your research methodology. It's not an outcome all by itself. Right?
Uzo: Exactly, exactly.
Cameron: This is where you are addressing the ability of the community to generate the knowledge and to energize and to translate. Can you talk a little bit about that process of translating into action? What's the difference? Do you see that there's a distinction between the talking that you're doing as a community and the action, or is it also integrated?
Uzo: In a way, it's integrated, and the goal is -- the action is a goal. Right? I think sometimes there's criticism of seeing research as part of activism, because sometimes people think the goal of research should be to produce knowledge. Right? You contribute to the knowledge base, you produce theory. But research can also be to make the world a better place. Right? To make sure that there's a way we can unveil, we can point attention to things that we need to make better in real time. It doesn't have to take that long, but we can co-create knowledge. We can all sit down, have a dialogue, have a dialogue, share those experiences, capture them, share them. You're sharing them in real time, and then you're energizing action at the same time, if it makes sense.
Cameron: It's a phenomenal project. The last piece of the puzzle in this application form is where they require you to describe your proposed training strategies. We've already talked a little bit about the way that you would engage your grad students in your work, but maybe you can talk a little bit about this specific aspect of the proposal.
Uzo: One of the things that I try to also make clear is that while the training is focusing on graduate students, sometimes undergraduate students, it also includes youth themselves who are in this context of inequity. So, stepping away from just seeing those youth as sources of data for my research -- right? -- to having them also be part of creating knowledge. I think that's something that for me is really important. You're not just doing interviews with youth and doing survey with youth and then taking that knowledge and publishing it, but you're doing it with youth, and some of the publications include youth themselves. Some of the more visual elements of that dissemination also includes youth. Through that, you're providing them opportunities to, again, expand their notion of what's possible, having them come in as a youth researcher, and then eventually they're becoming York students or they become students somewhere. They become graduate students, and they build their own research agenda on that.
Cameron: So, it's all extremely organic.
Uzo: It is, in a way. It is. It is organic, but you also have to be intentional. What I've learnt is you have to plan for certain things or they are not going to happen. You can't just leave things to chance. There has to be some intentionality towards certain outcomes. You have to know what outcomes are important to you, so you make sure of those big pieces. So, for all the different research projects we've talked about, the ACT for Youth and YouthREX, one of the first things we do is develop values. What are the values that are going to shape this project? What kind of values do we believe in as a community? As part of ACT, we sat down and we developed publication guidelines that built in those values, the values that the academics won't take the data and go away and publish without including our community collaborators. That was actually really helpful.
Cameron: I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you because the kind of work that you're doing is so different from the way that I was trained to do my work, doing archival research and digging around in amongst dusty documents and so forth. I am trying to branch out more into doing more engaged research like you're doing, and I feel like I've got so much work to do to catch up to where you are. I'm really proud of the work that you are doing. As your York colleague, I'm very proud of the work that you're doing in the community, and I look forward to many more opportunities to learn from you.
Uzo: Well, thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to chat about this. Yeah.
Cameron: It's been a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you, Uzo.
Links
Faculty webpage for Uzo Anucha
Credits
Host: Cameron Graham
Producer: Bertland Imai
Photos: Toronto Star, YouthREX
Music: Musicbed
Recorded: November 13, 2019
Location: York University, Toronto
