Celebrating Black Community-Engaged Researchers

This article is written by Kiara Okonkwo - CERi's 312 Main Research Shop Coordinator. Kiara Destiny Okonkwo (she/her) is a Master's student in the Communication Research for Social Change program at SFU. She has a background in journalism, community organizing, and creative writing.

I first learned about Zora Neale Hurston, the academic, folksorist, and anthropologist, in an anthropological theory class that questioned the future of the discipline. Hurston’s 1935 ethnography of African American folklore, Mules and Men, defied the conventions of anthropology. Hurston, studying underneath anthropologist Franz Boas and alongside Maragret Mead, conducted her graduate fieldwork on a group from which she belonged. While Mead travelled across the world to study the “Other,” producing research on Samoans and the Balinese, Hurston travelled back to her hometown in Eatonville, Florida. 

Hurston’s ethnography, popularly considered to read like a novel or collection of short stories, was knowledge mobilization in its early form — an ethnography written to be accessible and authentically represent the vernacular and dialect through which the folklore stories were told. Hurston wrote with the intention to undermine the hegemonic perspectives of the African American monolith by showcasing the specificities, intricacies, and diversity of African Americans in the south.

Similarly, W.E.B. Dubois' methodology of emancipatory empiricism, developed through a linking of academic training and research goals with lived experience, turned sociological study into a tool for improving the material lives of Black people in America. Dubois' empiricism came about most prominently in his study of rural agricultural production in the American south, which led him to an analysis of the political and economic life of rural Black communities. It was this subversion of academic standards, a turning away from the institution and turning toward a community of belonging, that continues to disrupt and reshape academic research as we know it. 

To position yourself within research has been traditionally regarded as a folly. A mistake made by the inexperienced. Empirical study meant objectivity, resulting in research that has for centuries, caused legacies of harm to marginalized and historically oppressed groups. Or worse, illegitimized the important work of researchers conducting community-engaged or participatory action research on their belonged communities in the so-called “Global South.” 

Research Shops, throughout the country and globally, are on the rise, disrupting notions of who research is for, the privileges and subjectivities influencing who gets to participate, and of what true use academic research is. To quote Dana Ain Davis, a Black feminist anthropologist: “What did you do today?”

I want to note that I have not adequately recognized the extensive contemporary community-engaged research work being done in South American and African countries by Black and POC researchers. However, I am happy to write this short reflection on the legacy of community-engaged research for Black History Month. By raising the contributions of a few Black scholars who have used the academy to question social inequities and rally for material change through  research and writing against culture, I am reminded of the weight behind asking, “who is this for?”