 Everyone here in person and joining us online to the inaugural event in Rackham's Gupta Professional Ethics Series. I'm Joe Sayedella, Senior Program Manager for Internships and Public Scholarship at Rackham. This event was jointly planned by Rackham's Professional Development and Engagement Team and staff at the Ginsburg Center for Community Service Learning here on campus. So before introducing Dean Solomon and our speaker to give opening remarks I just wanted to thank Nirja Aravamadan, Cecilia Morellis at the Ginsburg Center, who helped us identify Dr. Santiago Ortiz as a great match for the goals of this series. Also wanted to say for those of us joining online you can sign into the UMS YouTube page for the event and ask questions when the time comes in the chat. We'll be monitoring it and and try and make time for as many as possible here. So without further ado I'm gonna turn things over to our Dean Mike Solomon to introduce our speaker. Thank you Mike. Thanks very much Joe. I'm Mike Solomon, the Dean of the Graduate School and I'm very delighted to welcome you to the first event in the Gupta Professional Ethics Series. I was just remarking that I think this is my first in-person introduction of an event since the pandemic. It's a bit of a journey and a bit of a transition but I'm really delighted to take that one step in that direction and I hope that you all are as well. The series that we're doing today is designed to encourage interdisciplinary conversations about ethics among graduate students and postdoctoral fellows as they prepare to create positive change in their fields and in the world. Rackham is committed to fostering the highest ethical standards in the conduct of scholarship and professional ethics are critical on any career path from academia to industry to government. The series will play a vital role at how we as a graduate school support students in developing the skills to be successful at Michigan and beyond. For those of you who are joining us in person it feels great to be here in the Rackham building with you. This building was created with the intention that it would serve as a hub of interdisciplinary conversation and exchange on campus just like what we have planned here for today. And for those of you that are joining us virtually I also welcome you. Our experience in the last two years has taught us that we can expand the reach of Rackham's programming through hybrid modalities and I'm delighted that we're capitalizing on that opportunity today. I'd also like to gratefully acknowledge the guptas for their generosity and supporting this event. I believe they might be tuning in virtually as well. Throughout their careers Margaret and Shashi Gupta have committed themselves to the belief that business can be a force for positive change. Margaret is a Rackham alum and she and Shashi have been supporters of the graduate school for nearly 20 years. They previously established the Gupta Value Scholarship which provides a cohort of students each year with scholarship funding and the chance to travel to Washington DC for an immersive experience with other beneficiaries of the Gupta support. As with their scholarship program they hope this new series will promote a lifelong exploration of the values of integrity, respect for human dignity and excellence among scholars in order to prepare them for their roles outside the university. The Gupta Professional Ethics series aligns with the values that Rackham itself seeks to embody and instill. I'm extremely grateful to the Guptas for making this new series possible and to everyone at Rackham and the Ginsburg Center who work for it to take shape. As for our inaugural event today Rackham's professional development engagement team and the Ginsburg Center chose to focus on professional ethics as they relate to community engaged learning and scholarship, a strong and growing area of professional and scholarly interest among our graduate students. We are therefore extremely fortunate to welcome Dr. Arora Santiago Ortiz to speak about ethics in community engagement for our first event in the series. Dr. Santiago Ortiz is a Lyman T. Johnson postdoctoral fellow at the University of Kentucky and she received her PhD in social justice education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. As a trailblazer in the field of community engaged research and teaching, Dr. Santiago Ortiz exemplifies professional ethics through her research, teaching and program facilitation. Her decolonization approach to service learning has spurred conversation about ethical standards in the field of community engaged scholarship and serves as a practical and conceptual guide to grow and sustain ethical community engagement for new generations of scholars. Her work has been published in peer reviewed journals, Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, Trotsky Urbane, Italian Journal of Urban Studies, Chicano Latina Studies, Debusable Past, Society and Space, Nackler Report, Zora, and Elva Volserer, sorry, Elva, thank you. I really fell down today on that. I would like to thank Dr. Santiago Ortiz for joining us today. Please join me in welcoming her to the podium. I'm going to take my mask. We're all distanced enough, so I don't sound all muffled. Well, good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for being here in this really beautiful intimate space. Thank you, Dean Solomon, for that marvelous introduction. I would like to start by acknowledging that the University of Michigan is located on the traditional territory and ancestral homelands of the Anishinaabe, Waiandot, Seneca, Delaware, Shawnee, Miami, Salk and Fox, among other First Nations. And more over and beyond knowing whose land we are on, it is important to remember that the struggles for self-determination of indigenous and other colonized peoples continue in the present. I also want to express my deep gratitude for the organizers of the event and the folks that supported my visit. Joseph Cialdela, Nirja Aravamudan, Jean Sanong, Cecilia Morales, the Ginsburg Center and the Rackham Graduate School. So I'm very grateful. And if I messed up your last names, I'm very, very sorry. I am so thrilled to be here with you all in person and virtually as well. And I propose this being the inaugural Gupta Professional Ethics keynote. I want to begin by grounding the concept of ethics. For many of us, ethics represents an abstract concept that is grounded in philosophy and in questions of morality. And those understandings are useful in certain contexts. Ethics or issues of ethics also come up when we think about research, whether that be around the imperative of doing no harm, or maintaining confidentiality, the confidentiality of those that we're doing research with, for example. For those of us that engage in research with humans, there are institutional safeguards in place so that we do not exploit or harm others or to mitigate these risks, yet sometimes this is inevitable. These institutional safeguards also create a sort of barrier between the person in the academic setting and those outside of that setting. Sometimes these distinctions can become blurry when the researcher is in fact part of those communities that they are working with. And in today's talk, I will share with you some of my experiences in the realm of community-engaged work with the hopes that we can have a conversation later and collaboratively think through what sorts of things come up and how to navigate the complexities of developing mutually beneficial ethical and reciprocal community university partnerships that are grounded in solidarity. But before getting into my experiences, I want to return to thinking about ethics as a concrete action, an orientation, or a behavior. That works, yes. So, in our essay, An Ethic of Care, Joan Tronto defines ethics as quote, knowledge about how to live a good life. Tronto discusses ethics within the context of care, which is defined as a philosophical term, an action or practice, and a standard so we can live in the world as well as possible, as Tronto says. Tronto and Fisher developed a framework around the ethics of care that is helpful in thinking about working towards collective well-being. And I want to highlight some of its elements because of their relevance to my own ethical commitments in both research and in everyday life. An Ethic of Care, as Guyen and colleagues note, quote, highlights vulnerability and dependency as inherent to the human existence, end quote. Care ethics scholars further, quote, propose a moral concept that instills people to care beyond the realm of their home and their intimate others, end quote. And this understanding of ethics of care is like solidarity, very similar. It's a term, a concept and a verb that I continuously grapple with and seek to theorize in my own work. Ethics of care and solidarity are orientations that require actions. They are also practices that move away from the individual and instead are rooted in the collective. They require us to think beyond our own individual desires, wants and needs. And moreover, they also impel us to see others as fully human and acknowledge that others share both commonalities and differences from us. So I will discuss some of these lessons that I've learned throughout my time working in community engaged research settings, and that mainly took place in Puerto Rico where I am from. And I do so in three parts. The first is, can we decolonize service learning? And that focuses on the article that I wrote titled from critical to decolonizing service learning. The second, that's the shortened title, the second is the second part that I will discuss today is the academic is personal. And that explores my experiences in the field in the direct aftermath of Hurricane Maria. I examine the potential pitfalls to doing community work. And my own role in that self reflexive process. And part three looks at solidarity as decolonial liberating praxis that reorients the ways that we interact with others and to create other worlds. But before I get into that, I will talk a little bit about my prior trajectory that got me to where I am right now, in terms of both my activism and my scholarship. My work focuses on how people from different social identities and backgrounds work together towards social transformation and build solidarity. And as I am sure many of you have heard the word solidarity before. And I've always been fascinated with the word solidarity. Growing up, I heard the term at my mother's gatherings with her friends as she discussed what was going on in Latin America in the 1980s and early 90s. And this was a time where there was a lot going on mainly related to the effects of US foreign policy over and cover in the region. I grew up between Puerto Rico and New York City. And I remember going to marches and demonstrations as a young girl. We were protesting the treatment of political prisoners in the United States and some of whom were fighting for the independence of Puerto Rico. And so solidarity has been ingrained in me always as a practice that's rooted in the acknowledgement of the interconnected struggles of racial gender class struggles. But they're not limited to these forms of oppression as well. These struggles were salient to me growing up as I grew up understanding my own colonial subjectivity. And so solidarity is thus very much tied to social justice and to liberation. I understood that even though my struggle is not the same as someone else's struggle, I still needed to show up for other oppressed folks and support their struggles as well. And so when I was in high school, my mom and I camped out in civil disobedience on US Navy grounds in the island municipality of Viegas, Puerto Rico. We were protesting the killing of David Sanes, a security guard by a stray bomb, as well as the intense polluting due to the use of napalm and Agent Orange used in bombing exercises on the island. And after much public outcry and support from Puerto Rico, the US and internationally, the Navy finally left in Viegas in 2003, although there's a extremely high cancer rate on the island because of the effects. And during this time, I was an undergrad at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts studying film and television production. I was an am still fascinated very much. I'm passionate about documentary films. And so my thesis film was about US and Puerto Rican government's political persecution of pro independent supporters. I continued this work in Puerto Rico after college when I co founded a small film company that produced educational documentaries for communities incarcerated folks and grassroots organizations. And so around this time, I began law school at the University of Puerto Rico, which is the left is Tisch School of the Arts as many of you can see at New York University and in the right is the law school at the University of Puerto Rico. It's very nice palm trees and very green. And so I began my jurors doctor during the beginning of what is now known as an economic depression. It was also during the time of much turmoil and student activism on campus. 2010 and 2011 were marked by two major student strikes in the 11 campuses of the University of Puerto Rico, the only public university in the archipelago. Students were protesting tuition hikes and budget cuts to programs as well as faculty hiring. And these issues continue to this very day. And in 2017 students went on strike again to oppose the elimination of tuition waivers to athletes as well as arts majors. So I arrived at service learning sort of accidentally. When I finished law school, I faced a saturated job market. And I was also disillusioned at the justice system. I wanted to work directly with communities. And while I studied for the bar exam with an infant, I worked as an AmeriCorps Vista. And I worked at various organizations. I worked at a community press, at an environmental cleanup organization, as well as a university volunteer center. And this sort of marked a turning point for me. Because in 2014, when I moved to the United States again, I was I moved actually to New England and began coordinating a community service learning community at a public university in that region. And so during my time there coordinating that service learning community, I taught first year courses that took a critical approach to service learning. And this meant that the curriculum focused on power, privilege and oppression, as well as the root causes of inequity. Students chose a site in which they completed community service hours, which was mainly done through tutoring. The students all live together on the same floor and in a learning community dorm. And it was an immersive experience because we would meet during class, but I would also go to where they lived. We had guest speakers come from the various cultural centers on campus, as well as the Rainbow Center, the LGBTQIA plus center on campus. But there were moments of tension in the classroom, especially around conversations that had to do with anti black racism. Mike Brown's murder was recent. And that was very much part of our collective conversations during the time. Those conversations were very hard to navigate yet there were yet they were very much relevant to the broader systemic issues that many marginalized communities faced, those of which are being worked with right in these service contexts. I saw that many of the students came in with a very different motivation for engaging in service. For many, it was an experience centered on their own feeling of wellbeing that they were doing something good but not really thinking about why there was a need for service in the first place. And so this experience also led me to pursue my doctoral studies in social justice education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. And as a side note, my advisor Jimena Suniga as an alum of the University of Michigan, and was one of the founders of the program on intergroup relations on campus. And one of the practices that is part of that program is a critical dialogic methodology called intergroup dialogue, which I am trained in. Is anyone familiar here with intergroup dialogue? Yes. Oh, great. Okay, so a lot of you. So I am a trained facilitator in intergroup dialogue. And I will come back to this a little bit later when talking about my research and how I integrated that methodology into my work. And so this experience teaching service learning was tremendously impactful and so much so that I wrote an article about it from titled now from critical to decolonizing service learning limits and possibilities of social justice based approaches to community service learning. That's why I said it was very long. So we have we abbreviate that a little bit published in the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning. My experience is working in a volunteer center at that college campus in Puerto Rico as well as a nonprofit cultural center informed the way I thought about how to engage in community work. I saw firsthand how universities, nonprofits and government agencies took more than they gave and that they provided. For example, when I was coordinating that community service learning community, we went on an alt break to Birmingham, Alabama. The students supported a nonprofit by working on various projects such as cleanups and house painting. We stayed in a shelter and we were locked in from seven p.m. onwards and could not walk around the premises. We had little to no contact with the community. I thought about what the students as well as the community members would get out of the experience because there was actually no no contact, right? And so this first part, I'm going to delve into the article a bit more and can we decolonize service learning? I wrote the article to think about what we can do beyond temporary fixes or band aid solutions to community needs. And in the article, I invite practitioners and students to grapple with and think deeply about the ways communities are seen and engaged with even within critical service learning. Another question that I ask is who ultimately stands to benefit from these projects? If we were to take inventory, do students change more than the conditions of communities or vice versa? And so like the article mentioned, can we decolonize service learning, spoiler alert? No, we cannot. Or at least we can ask ourselves, what can we do to interrupt colonialism and settler colonialism within and beyond community university partnerships? And what I offer in both the article and in my broader work is an anti-colonial stance to these partnerships. In our context, where we're in a settler colonial state, to decolonize is to rematriate or return land to those who it has been stolen from. As service learning practitioners, this is practically an impossibility. So I didn't just want to leave decolonization as an impossibility or as a metaphor, as Eve Tuck and K-1 Yang tell us. But I also wanted to think about the ways we could move towards that anti-colonial stance. And I do so by outlining three moves that constitute what decolonial scholar Walter Mignolo calls epistemic disobedience or moves away from Eurocentric knowledge, paradigms and frameworks. And so the first one of these is shifting the way that these partnerships are envisioned. And I'm going to mention that a little bit more. I hope it's not too like that you can read it. The second one is incorporating an anti-colonial and decolonizing methodologies throughout the research process. I will talk a little bit about that as well. And the acknowledgement of settler colonialism as a as distinct, right? And the structures both inside and outside academic spaces. How does settler colonialism structure our social relations, the systems that we're in and what kinds of work can we do to sort of interrupt, bring attention to and resist. And so these moves frame my research, my teaching and my activism, which I share with you all today. And of course my scholarship inevitably stems from my positionality as a Puerto Rican woman living in the diaspora. And for those of you that do not know, Puerto Rico is in the greater entities region of the Caribbean and it is an archipelago. First colonized by the Spanish archipelago was invaded by the United States in 1898 and continues to be a U.S. colony in the present. This lack of self-determination has placed Puerto Rico at a disadvantaged social, political and economic position. Over half the archipelago lives below the poverty line and the median household income is 20,539 under half of the poor state Mississippi, which has a median household income of 45,081. So there's a stark contrast between the two. Puerto Rico is also undergoing an economic depression, as I mentioned, that began as a recession in 2006. Puerto Rico's colonial status was magnified for the world to see in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, which made landfall on September 20th, 2017. The hurricane removed the colonial veil for many that live in the archipelago, exposing a dysfunctional local government as well as the federal government's apathy toward rebuilding and providing aid to the U.S. territory. But Maria was hardly natural. It's a product of centuries of colonial subordination, government mismanagement and a crumbling infrastructure. And so when I began my PhD journey, I was focused on service learning as my site of study. But I decided that because of the questions that I wanted to explore, participatory action research was the kind of partnership that would serve as that space. And so now I'm going to shift to part two. The academic is personal. Because I have personal and political investments in my work, my research is centered in Puerto Rico. In the fall of 2017, I was starting to work on what at the time I thought would be my dissertation fieldwork. I was beginning to study an undergraduate research program that trains students in participatory action research, or PAR. Have any of you not heard of participatory action research? Great. Still going to define it. So participatory action research or PAR is a research methodology in form of knowledge production that combines aspects of popular education, community based research, and action for social change. Emphasizing collaboration within marginalized or oppressed communities, PAR works to address the underlying causes of inequality while at the same time focusing on finding solutions to specific community concerns. Although PAR emphasizes collaboration as its undergirding principle, research is sparse on how collaboration actually occurs, that process. And so I wanted to study how people come together and collaborate on research geared towards social transformation. Now I'm going to give a quick footnote. When I began this talk, I mentioned that I was fascinated by solidarity and that I wanted to study and theorize the term and the context of collaboration. I wanted to understand how folks develop solidarity with each other and how solidarity is expressed in three particular settings within participatory action research and in social movements as well as grassroots organizations. So those are kinds of the sites that I'm looking at. And for me understanding solidarity is crucial when navigating working across difference and really in any kind of setting, any kind of everyday setting and interaction, right? So end of the footnote. Back to my research trip in Puerto Rico. As I mentioned I was beginning to study this undergraduate research program that trains students in PAR. I arrived in November 2017, less than two months after Hurricane Maria ravaged the archipelago. What I experienced was total shock when I arrived. Most homes did not have power and I stayed at my mom and my stepdad's house. They turned on the generator at night, like many other homes nearby. Having a generator was a luxury and that was not lost on me. And also you can hear a lot of noise pollution as well. And so I wrote about this experience in my piece Testimonio as Stitchwork, Undoing Coloniality through Auto Ethnography in Puerto Rico. The choice to write in the form of auto ethnography and testimonial was very much an ethical decision, as well as a way to bridge the political, the academic, and the personal. This type of ethical and decolonial practice provides the methodological space needed to contemplate my role as a researcher, as well as to heal from loss, grief, and the wounds inflicted by colonialism. In the article I document the events that occurred during a visit to a community in a town in the eastern region of Puerto Rico's main island. The program students and professors were accompanied by two international aid workers that came to Puerto Rico after Maria to distribute water filters. So this wasn't a typical day for the group in the program, and when we arrived at the Forber School turned community center, no one from the community showed up to take the workshop on the water filters. However, we were able to glimpse various open boxes of food provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA. This picture shows some of the food that was provided to this and many other communities in Puerto Rico. So you see a lot of like military-grade food, there's like turkey nuggets, a lot of like dehydrated food, a lot of folks got twinkies and candy and crackers, food that is really not nutritious or healthy at all for communities, and that also says a lot about the situation, and also how other folks kind of had to take the reins of providing aid and relief because the government could not do so. So over the course of that day things did not unfold the way that we had envisioned. Given that no one from the community that we were in came to the place where the workshop was originally planned, the students and professors talked about next steps. After reaching consensus on a negotiation it was decided that we would go door to door talking to folks and inviting them to the basketball court in the community, and that's where the aid workers would actually give the workshop. And as we were going door to door the aid workers and I began to talk. They did not speak Spanish and most of the students did not speak English, so I became sort of that cultural buffer. I asked them what they knew about Puerto Rico, which was nothing except the song Despacito, and I realized soon enough that they did not intend to learn anything about Puerto Rico's colonial status, much less anything about the community we were in. When they were offered food by an elderly woman in the community they did not accept, and it's customary in our culture to not turn down such a gift. And when we went to lunch the aid workers changed the students' drink order and had them drink from the water filtration system without asking them. Although they were not researchers, these kinds of actions demonstrated a blatant disregard for meaningful engagement with communities. And so during the site visit many of the residents shared their painful stories and experiences during the passing of Hurricane Maria and in its direct aftermath. I chose not to write about them, to move away from narratives that exploit marginalized communities and portrayed them as damage as Education Scholar E. Tuck tells us. During the moments when they shared these stories with me I was not a researcher to them, like they didn't care at all. I was a fellow Puerto Rican that was invited into the living room of an abuelita that reminded me of my own, given a gift of conversation and sustenance. I was also able to have meaningful conversations with those students throughout the day. They asked me questions about my research and what going to graduate school was like in the United States. And I gladly shared my experiences and knowledge as a small way to reciprocate how they shared their experiences and knowledge with me. Rather than treat this as a business as usual research trip I let go of that agenda very quickly and instead engage in strategies of refusal, accountability and alignment with communities rather than institutions. And so these strategies are intent on foregrounding a praxis of solidarity as a deeply personal ethical and political commitment. This piece that I wrote, this testimonial invites the reader to witness how as a bicultural diasporic colonized researcher navigating liminal spaces and seeking a decolonial praxis of solidarity. I'm guided by the work of black and women of color feminists who write about how difference can be mobilized in pursuit of liberation without flattening or erasing differences in race, class, sexuality, ability and citizenship. And because my scholarship and political commitments are entwined decolonization is not solely an academic project but one that seeks to create an other world in the present. And so I now will take us to part three, solidarity as decolonial praxis. In this last part I turn to my own experiences, teaching and studying participatory action research. And so during the 2019-2020 academic year I moved to Puerto Rico to conduct field work for my dissertation which took place in Calle, a town in the central eastern mountainous region of Puerto Rico. My study setting was an interdisciplinary undergraduate research course that I taught at the University of Puerto Rico Calle campus. And I specifically, oops I specifically chose this campus as my fieldwork site because of its long standing tradition of community university partnerships. Through their interdisciplinary research institute I was able to establish a partnership and a collaboration between students, community partners in the neighboring urban hub as well as myself. And so the course consisted of three elements. The first was the design of an intersectional social justice curriculum that was relevant to the Puerto Rican context. The course's intersectional approach centered race, experience, storytelling, testimonials, culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies, and black and decolonial feminisms. During the first three weeks we discussed personal and social identity, socialization, and oppression. And after studying oppression broadly we began exploring each ism every week in the course. Racism, classism, heterosexism and transphobia, colonialism and their intersections. Guest speakers came to class to discuss their texts or give workshops on racial disability and gender justice and language. And in the spring we concluded with the studies of the study of social movements, coalitions, and solidarity. And so I think I have just want to make sure. Okay. And so the second element consisted of the planning, development, and implementation of various participatory action research projects which I will show which were decided upon once the research team was constituted. And these projects were an asset map and structural census of the urban hub of Calle, a virtual community center, a feminist oral history digital humanities project, and the colectivo cascubano de Calle which is the community organization that emerged as a result of our partnership. And so my study sought to document the ways solidarity was expressed and mobilized when participatory action research is combined with intergroup dialogue which I mentioned earlier. Intergroup dialogue or IGD is a critical dialogic methodology that brings together people from different social identities over a sustained period of time to make meaning about their commonalities and differences their nature and impact of societal inequities and to explore ways of working together towards social change. IGD incorporates personal narratives as well and storytelling to promote perspective taking and build competencies and participants promoting a sense of individual and collective agency. And so the seven students the four community core researchers and I were collaboratively on the PAR projects. And so the community core researchers were leaders from from the neighboring community and they were also activists that were committed to changing the living conditions of their town. The students were interested in gaining research experience or wanted to continue doing community engaged work. And so during the workshop this afternoon I will expand upon this and detail the recruitment process of how that happened as well as the four stage process that I took in participatory action research. And so because PAR is a collaborative effort my study examined the PAR process per say. So my dissertation was not a PAR dissertation because there are obviously ethical issues of authorship and so since it's a collaborative effort and the university tells us that we have to defend something that we did on our own my dissertation was not PAR. It was an ethnography and a qualitative study of PAR. And so I also wanted to study those how the power dynamics emerge how we navigated those things and how we move through this process as well as what happened like what emerges from it. And so from September 2019 we met weekly or bi-weekly to plan our projects. And so here we go the first one was an asset map consisting of a structural census of the buildings in the urban hub. The students walked the urban hub by foot and later wrote a report that found that 13.1 percent of the buildings in the urban hub are abandoned. So they split this map into three and the fall I had three students in the spring I had six. So they walked and as you see they numbered each building and then they classified the building and when they wrote a report they broke it down right by residences, commerce, unoccupied buildings, parking lots, cultural centers, service centers, and institutions. And so you can really see the makeup up here and it's also part of the familiarization process of the community that I will talk about more in the workshop and I can answer in the Q and A. So they got to know where the where they were in the community what's out there right what's happening you see it physically and also that starts to establish some sort of investment in the work that's being done it's not an abstract thing it's an actual real thing that you're walking and that you're seeing. And so through this process and through further research we talked to community leaders we had different dialogues to see what was happening we identified the need for social activities for the elderly population spaces for survivors of sexual assault and a space where LGBTQIA youth and adults can meet and create support networks. So we decided on working towards opening a community center and then the pandemic came. So due to the pandemic and at the suggestion of one of the community co-researchers Mercedes we created a virtual community center and I want to show you all a little bit about that of the community center that's okay so can you all see here great so this is it's our website and here it talks about our history how we got together so it was really about showing folks anyone wanted to access it how this research project became a collective later our mission our vision the events that we've held that I'll talk a little bit more about and even in this in this website you can see that we talk about we connect we educate and there's dialogue and here folks actually have access to the report that the students did so you can actually see like how everything that they did and a details sort of that process because part of the participatory action research kind of ethos is to return anything that's done and worked on back to the community so folks can access this these tools and do whatever they want with them and just gain better knowledge of what's going on in the community and so besides featuring who we are our projects and our events there are resources to very various community organizations and nonprofits and we also did short videos during the pandemic like we had folks do like exercise videos cooking videos to help people cope in and have something to do because in Puerto Rico there was an extreme lockdown so people were like really stuck at home and so in the spring the students worked on a feminist oral history project and oral histories have been used in PARA as a tool for collective memory recuperation through the construction of a counter archive from below in line with feminist approaches to participatory action research the students and I decided to focus solely on the stories of women in the local community and the project presented oral histories for women of different ages sexualities religious affiliations and class backgrounds among other identities and the community co-researchers assisted us by identifying interview participants and Mercedes as I mentioned was also one of the interviewees the questions were developed by the students and oral history participants and cover topics such as forced dispossession through expropriation of low-income neighborhoods gender violence and harassment occurring in the town and the role of the university in relation to the town so I want to also show you quickly a little bit of that so you can see what that looks like we worked with a museum curator who helped us take the photo of the map that you saw and kind of did do a more creative rendering of it so let me see here so it has an audio it's in Spanish of course but it has an audio and then it has the transcript there this one doesn't have a photo but it talks about the the moving like the forcing out of folks in in the community that's an example there I want to see if I can give another one so this is about this place called the house of music they do cultural events and talk about how important that is for the urban hub and so they you know the the women that were that were being interviewed talked about what was going on in the culture what was going on in the economy what what did the town look like as they were growing up the church right which is one of the most the oldest churches in in Puerto Rico so as you connect with the map as you can see the map starts turning and changing color so it has like that interactive component and so the students recorded so the page that was right when the pandemic began they did um with the exception of one over the phone interviews with a rev recorder which is an app they uploaded them they edited them they transcribed them and they put them here they chose the clips that they wanted us to see so it was just a really really cool experience and they got to learn about something that's that was made very easy technologically so if anyone wants to ask anymore I can I can address that in the Q&A but those are just some of the of the examples and so the final project that emerged from our partnership was the Calle Urban Hub Collective or Colectivo Casculano de Calle I'm going to explain the work of the collective in more detail a little bit later but wanted to note that the collective continues to be active to this day and has two main initiatives and that's our logo and the first of the initiatives is the solidary pantry and the other one is a solidary garden so these two are actually one is in front of the other and you see on the right where the flag is there's like a little the gate that's the other side of this one here and so I'll get into that a bit a bit further down but my study found that merging IGD and PAR along with an intersectional social justice curriculum facilitated social identity knowledge and awareness relationships across difference and gave participants the tools to develop and enact expressions of solidarity and as a result the group was able to navigate multiple challenges and constraints fostered a sense of collective agency and were able to mobilize collective action as you saw there from the organization and so to ground the findings I developed a model a sort of methodological model that I call the collaboration solidarity continuum and I hope that others will be able to draw from or use this model in their own work so I will present a little bit about that and so we have the first kind of stuff it's just not meant to be a linear process but it kind of it's a scaffolded process that takes us towards building these relationships that result in a mobilization towards community change and so the first one is social identity knowledge and awareness and here we really work with students to build that intersectional social justice education curriculum breaking down oppressive scripts talking about socialization as they grew up and in institutions then we looked at complex collaboration how do we work across difference employing intergroup dialogic techniques and then we really started at that point thinking about how we're building solidarity defining solidarity which I will do as a relational and political as well as ethical act and also grounded in an anti-racist decolonial feminist praxis that solidarity was able to be mobilized towards the creation of a community organization with the initiatives that you saw as well as that feminist oral history project and so first on that continuum is that social identity knowledge and awareness understanding socialization processes and social identities was crucial for setting the foundation for the course as well as working with urban hub community however it was in the class setting that most of this work was done because of my ability to assign content because I couldn't impose that content in the community space colonialism was frequently identified by students as the root of other oppressions in Puerto Rico so it operated as sort of an organizing logic of power that establishes hierarchies in terms of race, gender, sexuality, class ability in religion among other identities moreover the students recognize that quote the Puerto Rican colonial system implies that education in large part favors inequity and oppression as they said in their final report through the PAR projects they quote made reality visible and began building a horizontal community partnership away from university bureaucracy as they wrote in their final report and so connecting situated social identities to broader sociopolitical processes was also an important element of collaboration across difference because of the dialogic and collaborative nature of both the classroom and the PAR project space it was important to establish a foundation that allowed the students to create shared understanding and that could mobilize their critical consciousness and combine theory and action for one of the students Malena learning about social identities and their relation to privilege and disadvantage was useful in working with marginalized communities and not only did students understand their oppressive conditions but they were able to understand the conditions of those who held different social identities and so second is a complex collaboration within this continuum and so complex collaboration across differences for students for community partners and myself as a faculty member were also due to a variety of factors communication equitable participation and consensus decision making validation of opinions and contributions based on strengths and clear goal setting and so in my conceptualization of complex collaboration as a pathway towards solidarity I draw from Afroborigua decolonial feminist Joe Maida Figueroa Vasquez's methodology of complex coalition building or relationality across difference according to Figueroa Vasquez this entails quote learning one another's histories and understanding why difference can fragment communities in search of liberation and quote and so knowing each other's histories as well as valuing each other's ancestral subaltern or community knowledges allowed us to build relationships that went beyond that research partnership so how do we look at differences in ways that don't fragment us but that support and mutually reinforce one another so the students found that practicing the principles of IDD allowed them to collaborate communicate and build trust with one another because we had more structured time together the students rather than the community partners were able to explicitly incorporate the IDD building blocks into their collaborative relationship and these building blocks are deep listening identifying assumptions suspending judgment voicing respect and reflection and inquiry we discuss these elements in the classroom and practice them through different dynamics such as speak and listen gallery walks group conversations and deep listening was something that students always really resonate towards because they don't and they're not used to having those experiences where folks are just actively listening so it was really cool and within the PAR project space we did some of those exercises as well we did brainstorms we also did speak and listens and different collaborative exercises to kind of foster that effective communication with one another all felt that their opinions would be respected and validated no matter how small and so as I mentioned at the beginning of this presentation the study emerged out of my preoccupation with solidarity and its ubiquitousness in the Puerto Rican lexicon and so that word came up quite frequently over the course of my fieldwork in the classroom and during the PAR project meetings students and community co-researchers mentioned solidarity whether they were talking about how people came together after Hurricane Maria or in their experiences in the student movement or when working with communities the word came up very frequently and so the students mentioned that some of the ways they built solidarity in the classroom and throughout the project were through reflection and language justice when students or community partners mentioned solidarity I asked what does that mean to you and so see these are some of the meanings that they gave they talked about compassion they talked about action unconditional support changing the world being healthy to show up for others survival love and liberation and so from survival to liberation solidarity or denotes an action for the collective benefit and some of the ways that this concretely manifested in the party was through the sharing of resources knowledge and even sustenance with one another solidarity also took the form of providing intangible forms of support as a group navigated the compounded crises they face and continue to face one of the most salient elements that catalyzed collective agency and action was knowing that we could not rely on the government of Puerto Rico because it had failed its people and particularly the most vulnerable in our meetings we frequently discussed and assessed our individual and collective goals and vision for the project shared commitment towards these goals maintained the team's motivation and the face of our constraints and the constraints that we faced all affected us and impacted us in very different ways because of each of our contacts advantages and disadvantages and some of these constraints are the colonial status and fiscal crises that really do affect everyone we had a change of original community partner site there was a lack of public community space there was a global pandemic austerity measures plaguing the university and also differences in our individual circumstances and so the main example of how solidarity can be mobilized as collective action is the emergence of the correctio cascubano the calle itself this was not an end goal or anything that we had planned it was actually it happened at over the course of the year the collective lives on after the course and the first initiative of the solidarity the solidarity pantry was the idea of one of our community co-researchers Gavriel all of these are pseudonyms by the way Gavriel became unemployed during the pandemic and began redistributing the surplus food he received from government benefits and he gave them to the homeless folks in the urban home in calle decades of accelerated urbanization and expansion produced a dramatic shift in the urban hub landscape suburbanization became a phenomenon not only in calle but in most of the archipelago and so gated communities welcomed many affluent or upwardly mobile town center residents while government expropriations erased largely poor and racialized communities from the city landscape the divestment from the urban hub is seen in the abundance of unused unoccupied or abandoned buildings as I mentioned while at the same time a high number of people living on the street the collectives initiative seek to engage the broader community in mutual aid practices that benefit anyone experiencing precarity which led us to launch the second initiative and this was the urban garden as I showed you the solidary garden and we are currently working with various agroecological workers in calle and in neighboring towns to build a sustainable garden that provides food to the local community as well as a means to sustain the collective and food insecurity is a big issue of Puerto Rico we import over 85% of our food and so this is kind of a widespread thing happening in Puerto Rico as well and so we continue to meet bi-weekly and I continue to be part of the collective from the diaspora and as of now two of the community core researchers and myself remain from the original founders and we have five new collective members from the town of calle and we're also collaborating with other mutual aid organizations such as feminist the feminist pantries and we are also part of a broader network of feminist pantries that are all over Puerto Rico and so I conclude by offering some closing thoughts some offering some lessons or whatever I can to you all and my hope is that during our time together today I have offered these insights to the ways that research can be mobilized for social action and change at the heart of this is the belief that research should serve a social justice purpose the ways we engage with differently situated folks in terms of power privilege and oppression merits particular attention that is every step of the partnership should be horizontal reciprocal and as mutual as possible this means not privileging academic knowledge over community ancestral or other forms of knowledge that are outside the academic space and furthermore the ideas the direction and the decisions are made by all those within and outside of the academic space and equally important to our methodology or the power process was creating spaces to break bread to socialize and to get to know each other outside our roles in the project the topic of Puerto Rico's overall political and economic situation came up and we were able to connect through our shared colonial subjectivities however differently situated in terms of race class gender sexuality and ability we talked about how our identities position us in the face of the state marking some of us as more vulnerable than others in the group and I explicitly discussed my own role and the power dynamics that being a university professor creates and while these dynamics cannot be completely erased I tried to counter this differential by assuming more risks in the tasks and placing myself as a buffer between the group as well and the university and the government institutions so this methodology of solidarity was able to create a sense of trust within the group collaboration across difference and effective communication that allowed us to work through conflict on the only one occasion that it arose and so my intention today was to present the kinds of anti-colonial moves as shifts that can be enacted although the university is an inherent colonial enterprise my hope is that I've highlighted some pathways that interrupt coloniality or relationships of domination and community university partnerships as well as in the classroom and mutual aid is not a new thing as many of us know and we are seeing more and more the decay of our current economic and political global order and there's an urgency for to rethink how we relate to each other not only on an academic or an activist plane but on an everyday basis and I extend an invitation to think about the ways we can pay attention to our differences of strengths engage in critical dialogue about structural inequities and enact other forms of being and relating anchored in solidarity and these acts provide us a glimpse into what decolonial futures look like in the present so thank you very much great and I'll just repeat what Joe said that if you're online you can ask questions in the chat and we'll have a way to communicate them here so thanks for a wonderful seminar I really learned a lot particularly appreciated kind of the theory like the discussing the model and then how it was implemented my question is about the ethics of what comes before and what comes after we talk a little bit about that you're sustaining the enterprise and that was really interesting to see and how one thinks about that as part of the project and then also just the ethics of the goals of the project itself the ethics of the roles of the project the goals of the project like how that has come together a little a little bit about that I enjoy hearing some more about thanks thank you and so in terms so there's so much to talk about here but in terms of before and after the setting of the classroom did create power dynamics whereas students had to well first I had to consent to being in my study to enroll in the course although they could they could stop participating in the study at any time and that would not affect their grade that would not affect their participation in the course community co-researchers when they consented to being part of the research team they also had to consent to being part of that study so I they knew that I was also studying the process and there were many moments where I was very clear about you know I I am a facilitator in these processes but these all of the decisions were done through a consensus-based model so it wasn't it was just everyone talking for a very long time most of the time to try to figure out our decisions and in terms of the aftermath and it's kind of what we've done to guide our work is we we've had conversations where we're very explicit about defining roles like who does what according to what they can do so for example when the pandemic happened a lot of the I don't want to say burden but a lot of the weight was carried by the community in the beginning because they had to do a lot of I'll call it onboarding for lack of a better word but explaining of a lot of the dynamics to the students so they took on roles of educators and the students were quite intimidated also by the community because they were very active you know in different social movements etc so they were really more absorbing and listening to what the community had to say when the pandemic happened the roles really reversed because a lot of the folks in the community space were not had not used Zoom before we did all our meetings virtually so we continued meeting every week or every two weeks virtually with the students every every week for three hours so so that did shift and in terms of like the website that you know the students took on more of the of the creation of the things so that's also it was kind of a balance in that sense because they also had class time allotted community you know they're there volunteer I can't really you know say assume this burden they work you know broader responsibilities etc so and in terms of now we still meet every every two weeks now and in terms of the roles that can be can be assumed and can be done they're always negotiated and talked about like who's able to do this and one of the biggest things that we had is that when we talked we were like what are you good at you know around the room we were like what are you good at one of the students said I'm great at at power points so that was that was the person who did a lot of that another person did flyers so she did that another student the community core researchers had a lot of contacts I will talk to this person this person I'll get a space for us to meet or or different things so it was really about negotiating roles and like who could assume what sorts of roles and in completely voluntary ways and that's how we continue negotiating the process of who can do what you know nothing is imposed and really we didn't even know this would continue when the pandemic started we didn't eat we the ways that had happened like none of the outcomes were planned and coming into the projects the outcomes weren't planned either except the the feminist or history project because we had a little bit of support in doing that so those are sort of the forms of like how the ethical anything that worked for the the well-being of the group you know collectively is what we really focused on thank you and here today I had two questions and they're more just to hear more about what you mentioned one I think you or you mentioned several times and I wanted you to talk more about the ethics of having students with differently situated identities putting them in conversation encouraging conversation actually and creating a space in the in the study or research framework or research ethic where you have students who are able to speak and create from their situated identities but you mentioned several times that they were able to do that for others they understand the conditions of is what you said other students without needing to embody their put that person's positionality and I feel like that was that's an important ethical outcome qualitative outcome of the study and of this work that you presented today so I wondered if you could give explicit examples maybe again without naming but explicit examples of how that worked and then the second I wanted you to speak to the another way ethics I feel like mattered in your presentation today which is around the visual mapping of the feminist oral history project which I think takes voice and visualization very seriously as an ethic of community which which is similar I feel like to the research findings that you had for students explicitly but community sort of writ large I was wondering if you could talk more about ethics of voice and visualization as well and how that worked in particular for you for your community I didn't want to mispronounce so I didn't know oh no it's all good thank you thank you so much Anrika yeah okay great awesome thank you so much for those questions so in terms of within the classroom space and the students they re-engaged in various exercises and really we took a long time to scaffold that process so in the beginning where they had various exercises where they were talking even talking about activism and talking about you know their personal identities before talking about social identities right before going to the macro a lot of the students felt that that was very powerful because that started to break preconceived notions that they had of each other because I had students from biology from sociology and from natural sciences so I don't know it said it was an interdisciplinary course I don't know how it works here but like there's stereotypes around like the people that come from this and this and they have those stereotypes of each other and the sociology students were seen as the more rowdy hippy that's how that's how it's seen in Puerto Rico like you know the unruly ones the ones that are always at protest which is great and then the ones in natural sciences are seen as more conservative so them being putting them into conversations they said it like I would have never talked to this person if I didn't have this time in the room to talk to this person and it really shattered a lot of those preconceived notions and narratives because you also have to I also want to tell you that the university is under like attack you know like strict budget cuts 500 million dollars and all of these austerity measures so there's a feeling of great scarcity right and that's also why I wanted to do this because I want to document the importance of these partnerships and what the university needs to be for the outside space and vice versa because the part of the mission is to contribute to the socioeconomic well-being of Puerto Rico right that's very explicit through partnerships as well so having these conversations where they started to kind of break those and break those oppressive social scripts also by talking about one of the big one of the examples what were the messages around gender and around race in school and we started breaking down these messages and talking about how curriculum like in public schools is deeply deeply racist right and how representations of enslaved folks even if you see pictures you see the Spaniard on top then you see the Indigenous person here and then you see the the black person on the bottom so even talking about that how hair is talked about all of these experiences right and not in ways that would exploit the experiences of the students but connecting it to the re because everything I assigned was about Puerto Rico like about the content mostly research stuff wasn't right but the the essence of the theoretical content stuff we were talking about in historical was about Puerto Rico so that's an example and they also at the end of the semester at the end of the year when they had already felt comfortable with one another they wrote a testimonial so they wrote about their experiences in three moments in the hurricane in the earthquake swarm because we went through a lot of earthquakes while we were over there and during the pandemic and they at the end of of that experience they read it out loud to each other like and it was voluntary if you want to share and everybody shared and they said that they had never had an experience where they could share that kind of emotional because a lot of the times when you're living in in in in this in this colonial context you're always go go go you don't have a moment to process a lot of these things and these things can be deeply traumatic but they found that it was healing because they all shared so they all connected even though they had different experiences they talked about it so students talked about being very privileged middle class having access to things I talked about my privilege as well so it was very it was very transparent space then in ways that we really it was it was a humanizing space it wasn't like you're an abstracted category of a social identity group you come with these identities but you're a person so I think that was also very very important and very powerful and then ethics of voice and visualization the the person that I worked with to do the rendering she's a museum curator but she has a social justice focus so she was also very vocal about not putting names on maps not identifying spaces to protect communities as well especially vulnerable communities so that's how the map was also designed and thought of as as a place and not only that you know Puerto Rico is undergoing a crisis of gender violence and femicide so we really wanted to highlight the experiences of women create these counter narratives and to use it as a tool for popular education an archive of experiences so people can share it too so we really tried to gear everything towards like a public focus anything that's produced benefits the community right so and so hopefully that visual it came across with the visualization you know and not and having their voices in it we wanted we wanted them to have their voices in it and they're all not anonymized except one person is anonymized because they wanted to they said that they wanted their names so I hope those were some answers to your questions thank you so much so you you sort of got at this question and your answer to the previous question but I'm just struck by your career and how many how deeply indebted you are in interdisciplinary spaces interdisciplinary journals and I was wondering if you could say more about what that commitment to interdisciplinary does for your your work particularly in terms of ethics and I think you know you mentioned this concept of epistemic disobedience and I'm wondering if if interdisciplinary and a commitment to that is related to yeah to that concept of epistemic disobedience and just to hear you think more about that thank you it is a double-edged sword you know because it makes me unlegible in a lot of spaces especially in the job market but it's to me the only way that I can do this work is I cannot isolate you know myself in terms of like like hard disciplines because the way that I need to answer the questions that I want to get to necessitates right and social justice education is an interdisciplinary field and it draws from the lessons of the new left in the 60s the activism and work of you know folks like the company River Collective like the Young Lords like the Black Panthers and a lot of their work is actually very much connected to the work that's happening now mutual aid community programs food programs things to improve the conditions of the health of communities so to me I see that is like that from where I draw from as well and then in terms of epistemic disobedience it's really having theories and having bodies of knowledge that respond to the conditions that we're in and I'm not saying that I don't draw from from European scholars that you know there are scholars that are very helpful in the work that I do but if you're you know building a theory from the flesh as Tiana scholars write about it's about the experiences of marginalization and oppression and how we can think about those things right in very concrete terms they're not limited to the abstract so it's like what kind of frameworks respond to the work that we're doing the answering the answer of the questions that we want to ask and I think and I feel that being an inter or transdisciplinary scholar allows me you know the richness of exploring different fields to answer my question you know such as like gender and women's studies and not only education but sociology political theory so and even the construct of solidarity that I explore draws from many different disciplines I looked at the term in philosophy American studies Native American studies education so it's to be able to develop a textured and kind of nuanced concept of solidarity I also had to look to many different fields in areas so in terms of my work for me it works right you know I'm not telling everybody to be interdisciplinary but in terms of the way that that I think and that I write that kind you know interdisciplinary scholarship is really fruitful for me yeah because as you see if you see my background and my trajectory coming from film law and now being in education or in in an interdisciplinary field all the all the experiences really helped me to get to where I am and if something had been different in the past I probably would not have been here and in my current role as a postdoc I'm working in the School of Information Science so working on a project that is building like a socio-technical infrastructure for folks in Latinx migrants in Lexington, Kentucky and how that infrastructure can help facilitate the flow of information like during COVID-19 and we're doing a mapping project we're doing community dialogue so the the methodologies come in it doesn't matter really the the discipline but like those methods I want to bring into different spaces and are really helpful for the work so thank you Cecilia we have a question from Sarah Mancada who's joining on the YouTube she asks what are recommendations you have for changing or shifting existing projects when funding or organizational support is closely tied to a less equitable or reciprocal engagement model well at least the work that we do we were able to get a fiscal sponsor that works with abandoned homes in Puerto Rico so they kind of helped us with that framework we also work with a very little budget like with a very little budget and we've done a lot of guerrilla like fundraising for the the structures for the pantries and things like that to the first part of the question I would say like collectivizing decision-making but if the funding source is from a less equitable place is there any way to not do that and start by that if not really leveraging those funds to to serve the best purpose that they possibly can and that whatever purpose that they serve is done with the leadership of the communities that are that stand to benefit from that so that would be my recommendation but it's it's tricky it's very tricky I have a question of my own it's not from the folks watching online but we do a lot of work with graduate students around community engaged work and you mentioned that you could not publish as your dissertation as participatory action research because of the way rewards and publishing works in your field where it has to be independent work I'm wondering what recommendations you would make sort of to academia of writ large around institutional change that we could make in order to better encourage just kind of ethical participatory action research I think there have been very few like very few maybe less than 10 I think that there have actually been allowed like collectively published dissertations on par I'm not sure though but what I've done is that I'm working with some of the researchers the students and the community partners we're working on an article together so that's coming out I think this year with curriculum inquiry it was a dialogue about solidarity so opportunities like if they want to if folks want to participate in publishing I've also done public events with the people with the folks to bring bring you know have us all there to present our work the undergraduate students presented in a conference as well for example I know you meant graduate but different ways to be able to because the dissertation is done you know but like now what do we do right so I think there are various ways of doing collective you know knowledge production and creating either through publications conferences or public events ways that folks can come in into the conversation presentation the question I have you talked about par being about giving back to the community and I love your website and how you made it interactive and creative I'm wondering if you talk anything about that or you write about that as a best practice for other people so that's the one thing and the second is how do you assure that the people in the community actually own computers or have access and know how to use the the website yeah those are super important questions because they were part of the conversations that we had constantly so during the pandemic like when the pandemic happened we had to we had to think about what we were going to do and like you know whether how we were going to work on this project and we knew that that this website was not the best way you know because you are excluding a lot of other folks but we did this as something for the moment for those that could access it and so our conversations about opening a community center are still very much happening what you also realized is that these things take a long time like all like the pantry we started doing every every month July, August, September, October of 2020 we did pop up pantries so we set up a tent and folks would drop off like food, clothing, books also like PPE stuff like masks and sanitizer gloves and for other folks to come and get if they needed it so it was sort of the ethos of take what you need leave what you can and that's how I did and then so we started fundraising to be able to buy the actual and now we have a second one just for clothes so we always knew that we that there were shortcomings to this like there were limitations right and I do I do talk about that in the dissertation where when you promote events on online you're leaving out a whole bunch of people and then there's also the thing where a lot of the folks from the community don't have time to do a lot of the outreach so another thought in terms of like what I'm looking towards in the future is to re-teaching this course to have students continue even if it's in the summer for a shorter term but like have folks do more of that outreach so people can find out but we have we've done flyers QR codes like so people can like scan we've talked to people around and dropped off flyers but I think that that takes a lot of labor and when it's a volunteer organization of seven people it's really and when one is not even in Puerto Rico it's really hard so I do most of the the financial stuff and also the social media so I promote that you know from what I from the place where I can right do that and when I go we meet in person usually and like you know do different events and stuff like that but they keep meeting you know and the point isn't for me now the point is for the people from the university to become redundant so we're not needed but I very much believe in the organization and I do like being in that space and I do like being in community with those folks so so yeah it is it is real it is a limitation and our hope is to be able to have the capacity to do more of that direct in person and we did like little workshops before the pandemic but like people also are scared and with much reason of being in person and all of that so but I hear you thank you so curious I mean you're sort of straddling all these faces and trying to figure out where to best integrate yourself and what you can do what you can contribute that they maybe can't you know like do without you I mean and I'm wondering I've been wondering about like the when it comes to publicly engaged work about the division of labor I guess like what for you after having all these experiences like what and this will differ I think depending on what kind of an institution someone is at and all those sorts of things but what is the role of the scholar in this kind of work versus when when can you step back like what you know what types of people like there are people out there that can do things probably better than you can right totally you know so like who you know where who do you look for what are you looking for how do you pull them in you know just any thoughts I guess on the division of labor when it comes to doing this kind of work I mean I think that in terms of what's already happening is that we're broadening like so I mean all of the initiatives that are being done are being are chosen by the folks that live in the space right they know their their their community best right they know what that landscape looks like bringing in folks that are working in agriculture or agricultural work to bring their expertise so obviously they can do that much better than I can because I can't even plant cilantro you know but like I can't I can't and I am basil like it's sad but but you know these are initiatives that are and we're at the point where we have all of these plants we are actually now being able to pay someone to go water the plants who works at the nearby school so like those are some ways that we're like continuing to broaden our reach and have folks come in right things that happen also is like people get very task oriented you know the ways that we were before we had the time to talk and the class and you know two-hour meetings about process are not as much as it's more like let's meet what's the agenda like we have things to you know like tasks to do and how are we moving along with that so in terms of the role of the scholar I don't have a scholar role in the organization I have a role of I assume tasks that are needed to be done so you can call that more administrative I do take on the role of note-taking because it's tedious and really no one wants to do it and that's also a way where I can try to contribute more in certain areas because I'm not there physically so yeah so just I mean I'm not a role of the scholar anymore because I'm not the professor anymore I'm you know just someone who lives in the U.S. and still continues I'm a member of the collective so it's no longer that like that's not what it is at this point so I don't have time for questions but one that I thought might be a good one to end on is thinking about current graduate students grappling with these ethical challenges that you've raised and that's what I'm talking about and thinking about their own work what suggestions or advice or thoughts of wisdom kernels of wisdom do you have for current students to stay motivated in a really challenging time to do this type of work and I know you might get into this more during the workshop this afternoon but just curious if you have some concluding thoughts in that vein to leave students with so I would I mean concluding thoughts or offerings for graduate students to do something that you sure that you really want to do in terms of the work and because if it's not your passion it's going to be uncomfortable to say the least and I always knew I wanted to do community university partnerships for my studies I started thinking about service learning first and what I really wanted to write about is programs like AmeriCorps and sort of critiques to that but graduate like I was very I had also very great advice when I came into my graduate studies where everything that I did and wrote about helped me like think about these partnerships and the article that was actually published in Michigan was my first year seminar paper and so I already had that so you know I'm really putting in on my reading my writing and my thoughts into the project or the kind of work doesn't mean that I knew what I wanted to do in my first year but the sort of broader issues and the broader sort of topics were things that I sought to understand in depth as I began my studies and obviously I'd be happy to talk to anyone who's wanting to do anything that's community based or engaged and also knowing that this takes a lot of time that's why I did a year long course not a one semester course because I wanted the partnership to really be meaningful and not superficial and like you know have that space to to do the work um so that would be another advice and like something that someone told me who passed away um and may he rest in peace was that you know you're not going to do a par a dissertation you're going to do an ethnography of par and Antonio like really helped me visualize like what that would be and so having good mentors too that support that process is very important and also talking to other folks cohort community outside of the department wherever you're at is also important so just being able to do that so thank you I hope that ended well