Graduate students, community partner, and faculty reflect on critical community engaged scholarship and gender based violence

Abstract

This article reflects on the challenges and opportunities associated with community engaged learning at the graduate level, and challenges higher education to do more to support the teaching-research-service nexus. The community university partnership involved a graduate student class, a faculty member, and a community member from a provincial not for profit association. We examined our principled and collaborative process of critical community engaged scholarship geared toward addressing violence against women, and more specifically, femicide. Our research resulted in knowledge mobilization tools that could be used to inform various audiences (e.g., women's shelter staff, the public, government, and journalists) about how mainstream media sources report and portray the issue of femicide. Our work had an explicit social justice focus with aims to generate a better understanding of the structural causes of violence against women and historically-created gendered hierarchy and its ongoing impacts. This paper offers insights for others interested in pursuing community engaged research within a community engaged learning environment.