Fresh approaches needed to activist-academic alliances

Intent on tackling societal ills, academic researchers have increasingly forged ties with community groups and activists across the country.

Blending research with grassroots advocacy sounds like a smart idea. But in practice, says a sociologist at UW–Madison, partnerships between the worlds of academia and activism often end up lopsided.

“Academics do all the right things and ask all the right questions, but they are rarely connected to the outcome of social change that a community organization is trying to achieve,” says Randy Stoecker, a newly-appointed associate professor of rural sociology. “While academics don’t understand the social action piece, [community] organizations don’t understand the research piece. Social change and research need to be integrated more.”

It is a message Stoecker brought to the table this week, at a meeting on Jan. 25 with representatives of five Madison-based community organizations. At a time when campus-community partnerships and student service learning programs are steadily on the rise, Stoecker says it is critical to assess whether the trend is actually helping or hindering advocacy efforts in the long run.

“There’s been a lot of research on how service learning programs help students, but now we’re looking at what it does for communities,” he says. Working with a core group of organizations, students and UW–Madison faculty members, Stoecker will spend the next few months researching community group experiences with service learning. In May, he hopes the work will lead to an organizing event involving up to 100 Madison community organizations, service learning experts and potential funders.

Ultimately, the hope is to work directly with community members to ascertain how their organizations can benefit the most from joining forces with UW–Madison. In a letter inviting them to this week’s meeting, Stoecker wrote: “Because this project will be guided by those it is intended to serve, it will serve you better.”

It is a point Stoecker made last year in his book “Research Methods for Community Change.” In it, the sociologist described how advocates and researchers can work together more effectively by collecting and analyzing data together, and using that information to diagnose what a community’s actual problems are, be it in housing, poverty or health. Better information is likely to bolster fund-raising efforts too, he says.

“Everybody who goes up against corporations or the government needs good information, but getting that information requires special research skills,” says Stoecker. “The challenge is if you take your cause to authorities, what you say better be accurate.”