All-In: Co-Creating Knowledge for Justice Conference

The two-and-a-half-day “All-In: Co-Creating Knowledge for Justice Conference” will be hosted by the Institute for Social Transformation at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Urban Research Based Action Network (URBAN), a national network supporting university-community partnerships. Participants will include 150 scholars, community leaders, graduate and undergraduate students, and funders. Participants will share knowledge on community-engaged scholarship and explore how research evidence generated by community-engaged projects can be used by community groups and other stakeholders to reduce inequality. This interdisciplinary convening will also deepen efforts to build toward equitable partnerships focused on social justice and explore the use of critical youth participatory action research (YPAR) to improve outcomes for first-generation college students, low-income students, and students of color. Planned sessions include a keynote speech by a university leader with experience in institutionalizing university-community partnerships; a breakout session to advance the work of a national network of YPAR researchers focused on reducing inequality in security and safety for youth of color; and a discussion on how community-engaged research can shape changes in policy and practice. Lessons learned from this conference will be shared with the field in a special issue of the open-access journal Civic Sociology, featuring a selection of conference papers and an essay by the conference organizers that will address the effectiveness of community-engaged research and student participation in this work.