Centering Social Justice in the Scholarship of Community Engagement

Abstract

Our partnership with MJCSL to produce this special issue was based on the premise that exploring the roles and promise of higher education in working toward social justice was a critical imperative. The past year has made the urgency of this issue even more clear. When we began the work to plan this issue— sending out the call for proposals, thinking through the timeline to publication— we had not yet heard of the novel coronavirus. As we were all trying to navigate the COVID- 19 global pandemic, the disproportionate impacts of the pandemic cre-ated a stark picture of economic stratification, the disparities in health care access, and the racial realities of both. As institutions, engagement centers, and instructors were thinking about how community engagement work might need to change to be responsive to the COVID- 19 pandemic, the inequities laid bare made clear the need to center social justice in this work. Then, the multiple killings of unarmed Black Americans— Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Elijah McClain, Rayshard Brooks, Tony McDade, George Floyd, to name only a few— due to the actions of law enforcement, inspired a series of social protests but also commitments from higher education leaders to move their institutions toward racial equity, another signal that community engagement should center social justice. The deaths, in the United States, of over 600,000 from COVID- 19 (Allen et al., 2021); the loss of more than a dozen Black transwomen in 2021 (Yurcaba, 2021); the increase in the food insecurity of more than 40 million people (Feeding America, 2021); an insurrection attempt on the U.S. Capitol led by individuals with ties to anti- Semitic and white nationalist movements; efforts in 43 states to reduce access to voting in ways that would disproportionately affect Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities; increased inci dents of violence targeting Asian and Asian American communities, including the murders, in March of 2021, of six women of Asian descent in a mass shooting at three spas in Atlanta that took eight lives in total— we are living in a moment that requires attention to and action