Double Agents: Community-Engaged Scholarship in the Marketized University

NOG Masterclass by Alison Harvey | Wednesday February 26, 2020 | Utrecht University | 10.00 – 13.00 hrs

Double Agents: Community-Engaged Scholarship in the Marketized University

In the contemporary climate, there are increasing pressures to deploy academic research to address emerging societal issues and challenges. This masterclass focuses on the opportunities and exigencies of community-engaged research work, drawing on the presenter’s experiences engaging in this type of scholarship on work on gender, inclusion, and digital games in Canada and the United Kingdom. On the one hand, this kind of research work can for many kinds of scholarship offer a way of engaging in a productive form of praxis, collaborating with marginalized groups to engage in concrete action for change. On the other hand, however, a great deal of this emphasis on ‘real-world impact’ can be read quite cynically as anti-intellectual in how it is formulated in the criteria of some national funding and research bodies, reducing opportunities for a wide range of research projects and delimiting what is seen as viable scholarship. What is defined as ‘impact’ and how is it assessed by those necessitating it? A third challenge relates to how ‘impactful’ research engages with the communities it is targeting, and how the complexities of power and privilege are negotiated within these increasingly essential kinds of research projects.

In this interactive masterclass we engage with this challenge by considering ways of engaging in community-engaged scholarship thoughtfully, rigorously, and ethically in the contemporary academic environment. Participants, which can include all PhD and Research Master students interested in social justice and knowledge production, will have the opportunity to consider how their research plans might be shaped by the mixed blessings of community-engaged scholarship.

Readings (can easily be found online):

• Jeppesen, S., Hounslow, T., Khan, S. & Petrick, K. (2017.) “Media Action Research Group: toward an antiauthoritarian profeminist media research methodology.” Feminist Media Studies, 17(6), pp. 1056-1072.
• Krumer-Nevo, M. (2009). “From voice to knowledge: participatory action research, inclusive debate and feminism.” International Journal of Qualitative Research in Education, 22(3), pp. 279-295.
• Savigny, H. (2019). “The Violence of Impact: Unpacking Relations Between Gender, Media and Politics”. Political Studies Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929918819212

Registration:
Participation is open to all PhD and Research Master students interested in social justice and knowledge production.
PhD and RMA students will be awarded 1 ECTS for attending the masterclass. Additional ECTS is possible for writing a short paper. Please indicate if you wish to receive extra credit for the masterclass with your registration.
Please register for the masterclass before February 19, 2020 by sending an email with a short motivation, your affiliation (study programme, university, research school) and 2 questions related to the readings of the masterclass and in connection to your own research topic/interest to: nog@uu.nl

Biography:
Dr. Alison Harvey is Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Leicester, where she leads the MA Media, Gender, and Social Justice. Her research and teaching focuses on issues of inclusivity and accessibility in digital culture, with an emphasis on games. She is the author of Gender, Age, and Digital Games in the Domestic Context published in 2015 by Routledge, and Feminist Media Studies, published by Polity in 2019. Her work has also appeared in a range of interdisciplinary journals, including Games & Culture, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Information, Communication & Society, Social Media & Society, and Studies in Social Justice.