Seminar: "The Powerful Potential and Persistent Conundrums of Community-Engaged Scholarship", by Dr. Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza

Dr. Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza, from Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, will be giving a seminar at ICTA-UAB.
 

Seminar: "The Powerful Potential and Persistent Conundrums of Community-Engaged Scholarship: Theory, Practice and Current Trends"

Speaker: Dr. Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University
 

Date: Thursday. February 13th, 2025
Time: 12pm
Venue: Room Z/033 ICTA-UAB

Recent movements within academia have argued for greater engagement with and inclusion of relevant local communities in the process of research and of knowledge production more broadly. These calls are driven by both ethical concerns of the often-extractive nature of research involving communities who have been marginalized and a pragmatic awareness of the value of situated, local knowledge and world views for understanding systems studied. Deriving from a wide range of academic disciplines, these have included decolonial, pluriversal and inter-epistemic approaches to research practice based in critical theory and liberatory frameworks to the more instrumental focus of such methodologies as human-centered design and implementation science. However, to date there has been little dialogue among these various movements to promote community-engaged scholarship nor awareness of many similarly motivated previous sets of theories and methodologies. This talk will provide an overview of current calls for change to the institutions and practice of academic research on and with communities who have been marginalized. Drawing on both relevant literature and on specific examples of community-engaged scholarship in the environmental and natural resource fields, it will explore points of synergy and tension among these approaches, their potential power to enact social and environmental change, but also their persistent and pervasive challenges and limitations.
 

PROFESSIONAL BIO

Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza is an Associate Professor of the Practice of Environmental Policy and Management at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. She is Human-Environment Geographer whose research explores the ways in which human communities interact with environmental initiatives and approaches meant to influence their management practices and behaviors and the role that broader economic, political or policy trends, as well as inequality in access to power and resources, play in those dynamics and outcomes. Shapiro-Garza has over thirty years of experience in community-engaged work and scholarship in Latin American and the United States and serves as the Director of Community Engagement for the Duke University Superfund Research Center, the Co-Director of the master’s program in Community Engagement and Environmental Justice at the Nicholas School and served as the Faculty Director for Engaged Scholarship for Duke University 2020-2024.