Newkirk Center for Science and Society fosters deep relationships between researchers and local advocates
It takes a community to raise a community-minded research center. That applies to the UC Irvine Newkirk Center for Science and Society’s community of scholars across multiple disciplines and their partnerships with community organizations dealing with vexing social and environmental issues.
The Newkirk Center was established in 2001 thanks to a generous donation from Martha Newkirk, who earned bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. degrees in social ecology from UCI, and her husband James Newkirk, who was named an honorary alumnus by the UCI Alumni Association.
“Our goal there is to connect the professors and their wonderful research with the outside world,” Martha Newkirk has said. “It’s a mechanism to introduce UCI to the community and to bring more people to the campus.”
Community mindedness extends to the Newkirk Center’s director, Steven Allison, a UCI professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, who says he strived since stepping into the position in 2021 to “help change the way research is done on the campus to be more inclusive and community focused.”
Allison had a strong foundation to build on. The Newkirk Center is home to the Research Justice Shop, “where we actively try to connect with community-based organizations pushing for social or environmental justice,” Allison says. The RJS develops authentic research partnerships with diverse and uniquely situated community members while training university and community-based researchers in participatory, emancipatory methods. By building relationships based on mutual trust, the RJS supports research that’s relevant and meaningful for community-based partners.
The RJS story begins with Connie McGuire and Victoria Lowerson Bredow. McGuire was a postdoctoral scholar with a Ph.D. in anthropology from UCI and Lowerson Bredow was a graduate student when they began collaborating with numerous Orange County-based non-profit organizations in 2009. They fostered and strengthened those relationships, working to make connections with UCI researchers (students, faculty and staff) more accessible and useful.
In 2018, McGuire and Lowerson Bredow approached the Newkirk Center with a proposal to fund their innovative vision. Former Newkirk Director Simon Cole supported their Community-Based Research Initiative, which was later renamed the Research Justice Shop. McGuire is now director of community relationships, and Lowerson Bredow is director of engaged scholarship at the Shop.
McGuire and Lowerson Bredow got to work upgrading an existing Newkirk-funded graduate fellowship from a dissertation award into an early career training program in which cohorts of students are matched with local community-based organizations (CBO) to collaborate on co-designed research projects for 13 months, and who receive training and mentorship from CBO mentors and RJS staff.
The “shop” part of the name borrows from the science shops that were established in the Netherlands in the 1970s and spread across Europe to increase public awareness and provide communities and nonprofit organizations access to science and technology. True to those origins, McGuire and Lowerson Bredow founded the RJS to facilitate equitable research collaboration between UCI students, faculty members and community advocates.
Since 2019, RJS has partnered with Orange County Environmental Justice, a nonprofit organization that works to identify environmental problems and advocate for mitigation, especially in disproportionately impacted communities in central Orange County. A recent success story was with Orange County Environmental Justice’s Communities Organizing for Better Water, which confronts water inequities in the region. Graduate students met monthly with their community counterparts to design the PhotoVoice project, which collected images of residents dealing with brownish tap water and murky runoff to document water pollution in central Orange County. This research has been conducted over several school years with fellows and OCEJ staff piloting the PhotoVoice program, and then expanding it to several cities, and ultimately using the data gathered to inform a water policy brief.
Beyond building trust during the research phase of projects, RJS provides an enduring institutional connection with UCI staff who can support ongoing projects with community partners. Such relationships continue after students end their 13-month fellowships or leave campus. Lowerson Bredow and McGuire consult extensively with their local CBO contacts, scholars working in community-based research, and graduate students interested in conducting community-based research. The key component of the RJS fellowships, says McGuire, “is to have relatively long student engagement with the organizations and continuity among the cohorts.”
She explains that fellowships overlap so a soon-to-be-departing student can “pass the baton” to an incoming student, and together they can meet with their community partners to reinforce the notion that nothing will fall through the cracks.
The RJS seeks to end a problematic practice in academia where students, postdocs and faculty members working on a grant swoop into a nonprofit, collect data for papers, projects and dissertations and then leave, according to Allison.
“We don’t want to come in and go, ‘Here’s your problem, see ya,’ or, ‘We want to know about your problems so we can advance our own research and scholarship and then not help you solve them.’ That’s, unfortunately, how it has gone at some places in the past, because in an academic setting our rewards and incentives are different than they are for a community nonprofit,” he says. “We don’t want that kind of relationship. We need to align those incentives and rewards and interests. We want a relationship where we are working in the communities for many years.”
The key to doing that, Allison says, “is maintaining long-term relationships between our staff and our community partners’ staff. Even though the students are rotating in and out, we know on a broader level what projects need to be done, who the right contacts are and what the most-effective communication channels are so we can maintain that long-term trust. It’s identifying the problems, identifying the needs, and applying for funding together” with our community partners.
McGuire sees similarities between scholars from multiple disciplines across campus and nonprofits and community groups addressing the same issues.
“Collaborating together toward common goals seems obvious, but we know within the university’s often siloed disciplines that is really challenging,” she says. “It’s similar in the nonprofit world. You have organizations that have aligned missions, but they are also kind of set up to be competing with each other.” The RJS is working to create institutional structures that reward and recognize the value of collaboration both within the university across disciplines and across the university-community divides as well.
Like the RJS it houses, the Newkirk Center’s influence is wide. Finishing up their 2023 Newkirk Faculty Fellowships in the fall will be professors from the UCI schools of the Arts, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Education, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Nursing, Social Ecology, and the Program in Public Health.
Fortunately, Allison says, “It turns out that most people who are interested in the Newkirk Center want to reach out to different disciplines. They are interested in these big scale, societal problems. A lot of them are interested in environmental issues like climate change, which is an area of interest for me. Others are thinking about the interface between environmental issues and public health or emerging diseases, or how you express the environment and those connections through art. We find that if you get a group of people like that together, they have a lot in common. The overall point is to interact and find new ground and new ideas across disciplines that you wouldn’t necessarily encounter by just working within your discipline.”
Such people possess minds that are not only open to new, unexplored ideas, they encourage them.
“We’re all creative people,” Allison says, “and I think we tend to put ourselves in a box like, ‘I’m a social scientist’ or ‘I’m a clinician’ or ‘I’m an artist.’ But we’re all humanists. We’re all academics. We’re all driven by creativity. We’re all asking questions, trying to make sense of the world. Some people do it with artworks and some people do it writing, and some do it with drama and film. When you get people in the room to think about someone else’s creative process from their perspective, you often find surprising, interesting points of collaboration.”
— Matt Coker