Community engagement takes researcher from Brazil to Blacksburg and back again
Increasingly, Virginia Tech faculty members are finding that community engagement — whether it’s 5 or 5,000 miles away — can help them be part of real and lasting change while also allowing them to access new data, develop a fuller perspective, and ensure that their work is addressing pressing community issues.
“In my view, the purpose of research is for it to be socially — and politically — relevant,” said Desirée Poets, a Brazilian native whose work frequently merges community activism and political science. “It then becomes the trigger for much larger conversations.”
Poets, assistant professor of postcolonial theory in the Department of Political Science and a core faculty member of the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought (ASPECT), was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro. While studying at Aberystwyth University in the United Kingdom, she became increasingly interested in social movements and community-led development and change, later continuing that work at Virginia Tech.
“There are a lot of diverse ways that communities around the world have organized to have an impact on policies or an impact on the narratives told about them that shape policies,” she said.
For several years, Poets has collaborated with the Brazilian nonprofit Redes da Maré, which works to improve the quality of life for the 140,000 residents of Complexo da Maré — a group of low-income, majority Black and Indigenous neighborhoods often beset by military, police, and criminal violence.
Poets works with a research group that includes members of ASPECT, the Community Change Collaborative, the Institute for Policy and Governance, and other faculty members and graduate students from across the university as well as several alumni who are faculty members at the University of Tehran in Iran and the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.
Projects have ranged from examining how Redes da Maré has been mobilizing to prevent state and gang-related violence, building community through the arts, looking at the role of community journalism in community development, and most recently investigating the impact of an initiative to reduce the harm of drug abuse in Maré.
“We don’t want to just produce academic papers. We want to have a real impact and be able to offer our findings to others who do advocacy work so that they can take that to policymakers and demand better public policies and social services,” Poets said. “Community engagement is a process of trying to combine the research interests here at Virginia Tech with the research interests and needs in Brazil.”
Although community engagement can be a challenge, Poets said her work in Brazil includes deep collaboration with the community. While she helps design the project, train survey takers, and prepare the staff for data collection, Redes da Maré has been involved at all stages of the research design and engages local residents as researchers, hiring them to do interviews, data sorting, and analysis.
Back in Blacksburg, undergraduates and graduate students work as research assistants. It’s particularly beneficial if they are fluent in Portuguese to help with data analysis or literature review.
Poets said funding can also be a challenge for community-engaged projects. “There is not always a perfect match between what the scientific or academic community values and what local communities value.”
The Engagement Scholarship Consortium, a national organization that works to build strong university-community partnerships, awarded Poets’ project an Engaged Scholarship Research/Creative Activities Grant this year. Poets said that funding is unique because it focuses especially on work that engages communities at all levels.
Susan E. Short, associate vice president for engagement in Outreach and International Affairs and vice president of the consortium, said finding ways to connect university experts to diverse communities is an integral part of Virginia Tech’s mission as a land-grant university.
“Hokies are helping create real solutions and positive impacts across the commonwealth and around the world, and membership in the Engagement Scholarship Consortium helps faculty members and students to seek support for projects that are meaningful to both the university and communities,” Short said.
