Universities claim to value community-engaged scholarship: So why do they discourage it?

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Abstract

With current crises of academic relevance and legitimacy, there is a need for epistemic equity inherent to community-engaged research. Scholars in science communication and science and technology studies have analyzed, advocated for, and conducted public engagement in pursuit of this goal. However, despite desires to celebrate public engagement, US academic institutions and organizations often present barriers to meaningful community-engaged research. From tenure and promotion requirements, to lack of recognition and resources, universities in the American academic landscape are not currently organized to support such work. In this article, we offer a conceptual framework to examine the complex structural dimensions of academic institutions that have systematically discouraged and devalued faculty participation in community-engaged scholarship. We outline four such structural dimensions: interrogating epistemic biases, neoliberalist tendencies, gendered norms, and colonial-racist defaults. Our goal is to illuminate processes that could inform interventions to bridge the gap between academic aspirations for community-engaged work and current actions in the academy that undermine it.

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The weirdest people in the world?

Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, Ara Norenzayan (2010)

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.