What is GKP?
POST BY: Tiffany Puett, PhD
Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity and Civic Life
Welcome to the Grounded Knowledge Project blog! For the inaugural post, it seems only fitting to say a few things about what this initiative is all about and what we mean by grounded knowledge.
The Grounded Knowledge Project is an initiative to create gathering spaces, resources, and networks for scholars engaged in community-driven research and public scholarship. It has grown out of conversations with academics doing community-driven work. Through the past several years of social and political upheaval, many scholars have found ourselves trying to figure out how to best respond to this moment in time and meet the needs of our communities.
I’m the Founder and Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity and Civic Life (IDCL), an independent Texas-based nonprofit organization with a mission to build more democratic public spaces through storytelling, research and education. We’re building on a vision of a multireligious, multicultural Texas that works for all its people. And we’re doing so in a moment in time when many Texas communities are increasingly under threat by coercive anti-democratic movements.
IDCL’s work is community-driven and public facing. But it’s also informed by academic training and scholarship– bridging academic and public discourse. We aim to produce grounded knowledge– knowledge that’s rooted in relationships, grounded in lived experience, produced through a collaborative process of meaning making, and attentive to the urgency of our times.
Yet the trajectory of this work isn’t always clear or straightforward. Through our conversations with colleagues, we’ve discovered that many of us find our academic training hasn’t fully prepared us for the complexities of working collaboratively with community partners. Community-driven scholarship calls us to rethink what it means to be a scholar. Many of us have been trained to see the normative scholarly role as one in which we work in isolation to produce a single-authored academic journal article, typically published for other academics and located behind a paywall. Community-driven scholarship turns this norm on its head. It asks us to rethink our objectives and outputs and to reassess our positionality as a researcher along with our relationship to data. In doing so, we may find ourselves rethinking all the ways in which we approach scholarship.
The Grounded Knowledge Project creates spaces where we can explore the multifarious roles we may play in community-driven work. I hope you will continue to come back to this space to engage in discussions about methods, ethics, strategies, and tool, to find resources to enhance your work, and learn about model projects that will inspire your endeavors.
