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Hosted and sponsored by: Department of Geography, Club Geography, and Graduate Association of Research Geographers (GARG)
The term ‘engaged scholarship’ has emerged in reference to community-university partnerships in which three components are central: the participation and benefit of the community, the rigor of the research process, and the provision of hands-on learning opportunities for students.
Drawing from her own experiences working with children and youth in Buffalo, NY and Northern Vermont, Cope demonstrates and critically discusses some of the challenges and rewards of working with communities, teaching service-learning classes, and employing mixed methods. The hazards are many, ranging from no-show community members to service-learning flops, from researcher gaffs to data gaps, but the potential productive outcomes of occupying the spaces between (between town and gown, between quantitative and qualitative, between PowerPoint and critical pedagogy) have outweighed the negatives for Professor Cope. This gives her hope for the future of Geography, communities, and places, as well as for our capacity for understanding them with critical research approaches.