Public Engagement

Yesterday afternoon I participated in a Public Engagement Day workshop on "Community: A Partner in Knowledge Production". Let by Elder Atun Azzahir of the Powderhorn-Phillips Cultural Wellness Center, the workshop examined "questions that are central to community-university collaboration in the production of new knowledge. What are community cultural knowledge systems? Is academic knowledge cultural? How can academic knowledge systems and community knowledge systems come together for scholarship, and to solve real world problems?"

The participants came up with a list of characteristics of community cultural knowledge systems, including:
* Based largely on oral tradition
* Transmitted from elders to the young
* Treasured within the community
* Binds the community together
* Grounded on unspoken assumptions

I was struck with how well these describe academic as well as community culture. Not culture at a particular university, but rather academia in general. Not something that undergraduate students are a part of, but something that is inculcated in graduate school and takes some years to become firmly fixed.

I think it would be helpful - perhaps even necessary - for productive community-university engagement to recognize that both sides are coming from deep cultural assumptions, and that it is just as necessary for community to acknowledge academic culture as it is for academia to acknowledge community culture. First to acknowledge, then to understand, then to get behind the uniformities or stereotypes of the culture to the complexities and individualities that lie below.