Social scientists center their research on helping the community. To do this, they need community partners to achieve their scholarly goals. However, building and maintaining community partnerships comes with its challenges and rewards. This workshop will focus on the different forms of community partnership, recruiting community partners into scholarly activities, navigating challenging partnerships, and maintaining community partnerships.
The invited panelists brings together research from various disciplines. They will discuss how to recruit community partners and what has gone right, and wrong in their partnership. Panelists will also discuss items such as when and how to initiate partnerships and working with community partners within the UMass research infrastructure.
ISSR PI Workshop Series: Engaging Research Teams & Community Partnerships
This panel is the first event in ISSR's three-part workshop series designed to help you build strong and effective collaborations in your research projects. Join us on March 27 to gather lessons on forming research teams, and on April 24 to discuss working with undergraduate researchers.
Moderator: Sofiya Alhassan - is a Professor in the Kinesiology Department at UMass Amherst. She organized this series in her service as Director for Faculty Research at ISSR, and now serves as the UMass Graduate School's Associate Dean for Inclusion and Engagement.
Kathryn Derose - is a Professor in the Department of Health Promotion and Policy, and the Acting Director of the Center for Community Health Equity Research (CCHER) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is adjunct Policy Researcher and Professor at the RAND Corporation and Pardee RAND Graduate School, respectively. Her research focuses on understanding and addressing health inequalities in the U.S. and in Latin America using community-partnered approaches.
Joseph Krupczynski – is a Professor in the Department of Architecture and the Director of Civic Engagement & Service-Learning at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. As an educator and public artist/designer, his scholarship and creative work explores reciprocal community engagement, spatial justice, Latinx identity, and restorative creative place-making as he builds participatory platforms for meaningful engagement—especially in collaboration with underrepresented communities. He is also one of the founding directors of the Center for Design Engagement (CDE)—a non-profit community art/design resource center in Holyoke MA that is dedicated to bringing participatory design, public art and civic engagement strategies to local communities and community-based organizations in Western Massachusetts. As the director of Civic Engagement and Service Learning (CESL) at UMass Amherst he supports programs and courses that allow students, faculty and staff to work collectively with communities for a more just world. He co-edited the volume (in collaboration with Mari Castañeda), Learning from Diverse Latinx Communities: Social Justice Approaches to Civic Engagement (Lang, 2017). He is currently working on an edited collection exploring strategies for anti-racist community-engagement in higher education.
Kirby Deater-Deckard - is a Professor in Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is director of the Individual Differences in Development Lab, a senior peer mentor in the Center for Research on Families Faculty Research Scholars program; a mentor to students in PREP, Lee-SIP, and LSAMP; and steering/advising committee member at the Center for Research on Families (CRF), Center for Community Health Equity Research (CCHER), and Institute of Diversity Sciences (IDS). His community-based scholarly work examines child, adolescent, and adult development in family systems, exploring how biological and environmental factors interact to influence human development. He has collaborated with teams of researchers and community partners for 25+ years—currently, in Springfield MA and in a large international collaborative in nine countries.
