Engagement

Abstract

Community engagement, an often-repeated phrase across academic and government sectors, is a deceptively simple, pretty phrase. Frequently it is discussed as a practice anyone can do and a nice add-on to an existing project. However, practicing community engagement in research in a meaningful way requires a perspective shift in the way the research is done, a series of commitments to ethical relations with the communities involved and impacted by a project and its outcomes, and the solo and collective work of reflection. This article offers a look into community engagement from the perspective of a graduate student learning what it means to do this kind of work in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. I outline how community engagement is defined and practiced by scholars in anthropology and other fields and discuss the performance and institutionalization of community engagement. Guided by Juanita Sundberg's concept of homework, I reflect on lessons learned in the process of conducting community-engaged research that can have an impact.