Centering Education in Collaboration and Community

Communiversities as Education Without Walls

The Communiversities Grand Research Challenge project, led by Drs. Asif Wilson (University of Illinois Urbana Champaign), Rachel McMillian (Indiana University Indianapolis), and Aja Reynolds (Wayne State University), is a multi-sited collaborative initiative that convenes communities to critically read and rewrite their worlds in three Midwestern cities:  Chicago, Cincinnati, and Detroit. Communiversities builds on a model from the 1960s that emerged out of the Black Power movement in Chicago where parents, teachers, professors, and community organizers came together to create alternative education sites to imagine and actualize freedom.

While each of the Communiversity initiatives are different, they all are born out of deep relationships with people in the sites where they are rooted. In Cincinnati, Dr. Rachel McMillian has longstanding relationships with five exonerees, who are and have been working on curriculum deliberation and development. Close relationships in Chicago with Dr. Asif Wilson and Black parents, Black students, and Black teachers who have been impacted by school closures led to the launch of the Chicago Communiversity. In Detroit, Dr. Aja Reynolds and the organization D.A.Y.U.M. (Detroit Area Youth Uniting Michigan) have been working together to conceptualize and actualize abolition in the Detroit metro area through zine-making. Wilson emphasizes the centrality of relationships to the project, explaining, “Relationships brought these initiatives to fruition—relationships with our communities, and between the three of us, Dr. Reynolds, Dr. McMillian, and myself. We’re all scholar activists. We’re all Black. You might think there’s a large community out there, but it’s actually quite small. We’ve known each other for quite some time.” These long-term partnerships aren’t always exclusively centered on doing research, but focus on working together to think, imagine, and actualize freedom as the foundation of the work, leading to the development and submission of the Grand Research Challenge proposal in 2023.

Methodologies of Reciprocity & Redistribution

The ways that critical, community-engaged, and participatory scholars work to flatten hierarchies is not new, but has not always been visible or prioritized with university systems. For a long time, the neighbor-relationships between communities and universities have been shaped by hierarchy, with the university on top and extracting time and labor from communities without meaningful regard for their own needs. This is also known as interest convergence, as coined by Derrick Bell. These predatory relationships are built on extraction and exclusion, prioritizing capitalistic ideals over deep connection and lasting trustworthy relationships. Methods of reciprocity work to change those narratives, recognizing the harm done to communities and leveraging resources in service of creating a world where institutional walls are dissolved and hierarchies are flattened.

Building such a world is easier said than done, but reciprocal and redistributive relationships are important steps in getting there. Working in the academy’s system as a faculty member comes with access to certain types of financial resources which are important for research of all kinds, but reciprocity goes beyond that and helps shape understandings of what exists beyond capital resources—emphasizing the value of resources such as knowledge bases, connections to places, and networks of people across the world. Reciprocity helps people see and understand one another through interactions and exchanges in networks of inquiry, analysis, and action. Reciprocity also requires redistribution alongside it as it puts resources back into the hands of communities. “Ideal redistribution is working to get rid of the things and systems that exploit and extract, and then answer, through reparations, for the historical violence that has taken place. In the meantime, we have to be mindful and hold institutions in departments and colleges accountable and make sure as much is going back to the community as possible,” Wilson noted. Reciprocity gives life, and so does redistribution, but redistribution gives life as the cost of ending the lives of things that have been perpetuating harm. Then, we can start to build something new and equitable together.”

Skill Building & Knowledge Sharing

Wilson, Reynolds, and McMillian are not new to community-engaged research, and in the last few years, one of the most significant contributions of the Grand Research Challenge to their ongoing endeavors has been the time and space allowed for realizing the conceptual work of the Communiversities—that is, the chance to dwell in the process rather than simply emphasize the product. Wilson noted that of the $10 million in grants he has been awarded over the last five years, this is the first multi-year funding stream he has had for any kind of community engaged project. With a multi-year grant, the relationships and work progress without the pressure of an impending end date, and the time and flexibility allows room for more skill building, knowledge sharing, and relational growing. “People are busy,” Wilson said, “and this work takes time and energy. As a professor, it’s a privilege to have a job that affords the time, space, and intellectual fluidity to think and create, but this isn’t most people’s day job. They’re doing this on top of everything they have going on in their lives. It’s beautiful and challenging at the same time, and it ebbs and flows, but there are deliverables attached to the project so having the time and space to let the process happen really matters.”

An important part of the Communiversity process is intergenerational engagement. Bringing people from different life stages and experiences together to share and learn from one another is one way the Communiversities project prioritizes making space for tension and nuance within conversations about and action toward actualizing freedom. Conceptually, each of the three Communiversity sites are rooted in abolition, but all in different ways. Wilson described a conversation among the three communities where the younger members from Detroit asked everyone in the room to imagine what a world without prisons would be like, sound like, and feel like. The exonerees from Cincinnati responded, “Chaos!” Wilson called attention to different understandings of abolition shaped by different objective realities and how it led to conversations about the tension between applied abolition in theory and abolition in practice. This brought up questions like “what does it mean to truly imagine a world without the systems that harm us?” and also “what does it mean to really do that building toward the world where these institutions that harm us don’t exist?” For youth in Detroit and exonerees in Cincinnati, the answers are very different, and the variety of perspectives is vital. Thinking through questions like these are reminders of the ways the realities of the world influence ideas created.

In another participatory research initiative in Chicago, Communiversity members coded, analyzed, and made sense thematically of over 1,000 paper questionnaires. Wilson described the initiative, saying “They didn’t have research backgrounds. They weren’t qualitative researchers, and no matter how much quantitative researchers might diminish our discipline, our way of building knowledge, they were doing complex things here because they had the innate ability to critically read and write the world. They were already analyzing the world around them, so analyzing data was no different. They developed language and vocabulary around it, but the practice was already there.”

He explained the value of working slowly in the process of going through the questionnaires, not because it couldn’t be done quickly or through a more automated process, but because the Communiversity members wanted to engage deeply, think critically, and process carefully. In doing so, they developed understandings of different kinds of analytical processes and the skills to determine what process best fits the data to be analyzed. 

Looking Forward

“We’re trying to figure out how to keep the Communiversities alive and well,” Wilson said, “but we know it will continue. Rachel McMillian, Aja Reynolds, and Asif Wilson are never ever going to stop engaging and working in this way because we’ve been doing it since long before the GRC, and we’ll keep doing it long after.” Pop up education initiatives that take place in a community site and are driven by the people’s needs, wants, urges, aspirations, speculations, and actions are sustainable because they are adaptable. Part of cultivating that sustainability is facilitating a communal leadership mindset among participants so that the whole initiative isn’t dependent upon one person’s presence, knowledge, connections, and resources. The faces, structure, and funding mechanisms may change, but the drive to share and build knowledge in community remains strong and urgent.