(National) Co-Creating Knowledge for Justice

When: Wed, Apr 22 2020 12:00am - Fri, Apr 24 2020 12:00am 

Where: Santa Cruz, California

Co-presented by the University of California Santa Cruz and the Urban Research Based Action Network (URBAN)

Proposal submission deadline: January 6th, 2020

Students, Organizers, Scholars/Researchers, Foundations, Community Organizations and Research/Action Teams: Submit your ideas for workshops, posters, presentations, papers, art work or performances addressing how we build truly equitable partnerships for critical collaborative research, action and social justice.

To apply, please fill out an interest/proposal submission form, including a brief summary of how you or your team would like to participate/what you would like to present. The diverse programming will include invited panel discussions involving multiple perspectives and stakeholders, paper presentations, short talks, interactive workshops, performances, and art exhibits. Sessions will be organized thematically, based on abstracts received. Those who wish to have their work considered for a special issue of Civic Sociology, a new open-access journal from UC Press, should indicate their interest on the submission form and submit full drafts of papers prior to the meeting.

There is an exciting resurgence in critical public scholarship: a push for universities to reach beyond their academic audiences and build stronger partnerships with community-based organizations and others to address pressing issues, such as the affordable housing crisis, privatization and educational injustice, anti-immigrant policies, health and food insecurity, deepening economic precarity, environmental racism, and the climate crisis. A particularly rich vein of engaged scholarship is the involvement of undergraduates as equal knowledge producers. The conference will highlight nationally instructive local models, such as UC Santa Cruz’s Community Initiated Student Engaged Research (CISER), which magnify the multiple assets and collective power that diverse students, committed faculty, and community-based practitioners bring to collective approaches. The conference will also address methods for building institutional support for collaborative research, how to strategically leverage relations with collaborative partners, and how to build cross-sector networks for practitioners, students, and early career scholars. 

The conference brings together university scholars, community-based practitioners and researchers, undergraduate and graduate students, community members and organizations, foundation program officers, organizers, artists, and activists to share stories, strategies, practices, and solutions for action and the truly equitable co-production of knowledge.

Conference registration will begin in January 2020. Registration fees will be on a sliding scale, with some scholarships available and priority given to student and community member participants. Most meals during the conference will be provided. In addition to registration fees, teams and participants should plan to fundraise to cover housing and transportation. Proposal submission deadline: January 6th, 2020.  For additional information go.ucsc.edu/all-in or contact: Mykell Discipulo mkdiscip@ucsc.edu.

Link: Conference Call Proposal Submittal Form