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By Maggie McNulty
Sept. 11, 2023

Diane Austin is a research professor in the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA) at the University of Arizona and is also currently serving in an administrative role as the Director of the School of Anthropology. As an applied environmental anthropologist, Austin’s research is at the interface between people and communities and the environments within which they live. 

How did you first get started/interested in community-based collaborative research projects?

“I actually returned to the university for my PhD after spending a number of years teaching K-8 and also directing and working in youth programs and volunteering for advocacy organizations. So when I came back into the university, I was struck by the often significant disconnect between theory and reality, especially in looking at the academic and the public spheres as those can be quite far apart. As I was studying and learning about different approaches to research and the different work that people were doing at that time, that would be in the early 90s, collaborative community projects and research really offered a way to bridge these worlds for me as well as for the students and the communities that I was working with, even as a graduate student, and really allowed me to make use of my knowledge and expertise in a way that I felt made sense in that I was returning, but returning with a certain set of experiences myself.”

How do you integrate your community work into your teaching?

“I really enjoyed teaching K-8 before I ever came back to the University and I had the good fortune to work in schools that allowed for experimentation, for flexibility. In my classrooms we did a lot of project-based learning and so coming into the University, again early to mid 1990s, the lecture style of the University education that was dominant at the time was limiting for much of what I taught and what I wanted to teach. By limited I mean that in terms of the opportunities that students had to learn but also to meet student needs and the kinds of things they need to learn. In other words, people come into a classroom, and in a typical classroom with a syllabus everybody is expected to meet these learning objectives and to do it in these ways and a lot of what you find is that you have students are coming in with a lot of different experiences and how do we help create spaces so that everybody can learn wherever they are at. Yes, we have common learning objectives overall, but we have ways to tailor the learning more specifically. So, what I found was as I was starting to work with students and with community organizations who were approaching me or that I was coming to be aware of in the community here in Tucson, Arizona or southern Arizona broadly because this expanded pretty quickly, that there was this way, I needed to come up with a way of how we can meet community needs while also engaging students in learning. Collaborative community research, literally starting from the community organizations and their needs and then matching those with the identification and cultivation of student knowledge and skills, really came to be this space where I felt like I could work well and that the students and the collaborators could all join together in a space that really was designed so university and non-university partners would have opportunities and expectations for learning.” 

As a researcher in BARA, Austin and her colleagues respond to requests from community partners and work to get students involved and give back a quality project to community organizations through the BARA internship program—following a scaffolding model of learning from someone one or two steps ahead as a way of working within teams. At BARA, Austin tailors research projects to meet both the community and student learning goals.

How do you go about receiving feedback from the communities that you are working with?

“The first thing I would say is to start with focusing on the relationship with the community collaborator and that means setting clear goals and expectations for all collaborators both at the organization level and at the individual level. I rarely will start a collaboration with somebody approaching and saying, ‘We just got a $500,000 grant and we want you to do this for us’ if I’ve never worked with this group before because there’s a lot of trust building that needs to happen. So we might start with a small project and say, ‘Let’s start with this piece and let’s learn to work together, let’s learn how do we set goals and our expectations for everybody.’ And we learn to understand literally the organization’s dynamic, our dynamic, people who have never worked with the university before [come to] understand that academic timeline, what it means when students sign up for this internship they have to have X done by a certain amount of time.” One example of incorporating feedback from community organizations is the yearlong timeframe in which student interns participate in a project—as opposed to a few months or semester timeline.  

In addition to starting with strong communication, Austin stresses the importance of continuing to have regular and open communication throughout an entire project including goals, what and why the project is taking place, and the level of involvement and time commitment of all participants. “And once we have that down, we have a basis to then be able to assess as we’re going along, ‘Is this working, do we need more energy over here, do we need more time over here, do we need more expertise?’  

We’ve had community projects where we have community collaborators who want to be involved in framing the research and helping us set up the questions and everything else, and then they would like to receive the findings and share them with others. But, they don’t want to get in the mess of how you get the data and look at the raw data et cetera. Other times we’ve had collaborators where the people who run or are active in the organization want to learn how to do this work internally so they can do it with their own staff and themselves. They get on board for not only how we frame the project and what it’s going to look like, but they’ll help identify who we interview and help with access to those people.  

Let’s take an example, when we’re doing interviews [and deciding] who we would be interviewing, part of the agreement when somebody comes to me is that they will help us get access to the people who are needed. This is very different from doing research where we are testing fertilizers on plants and the plants can’t run away, they’re there when you want them to be, when you show up and put the fertilizer, as opposed to we need human beings who will participate in these interviews. That’s one of the key things the collaborators do is they help as part of the understanding and make sure people are aware that this is going on. We work with human subjects and no coercion and all of that, but the fact that here’s access to how to reach our folks.”

Austin notes if a strong foundation is built in a working relationship, if a project needs to change for a variety of reasons, open communication allows collaborators to change their expectations and plans if need be and discusses the role of feedback in communicating about project findings. 

“Every project evolves and changes and some, given I do environmental anthropology and I work in areas with hurricanes and oil spills and borders that close, some of them change dramatically over the course of projects. If you have a good relationship, you can say, ‘We were planning to do this, [but] given what’s going on now we're going to have to make a shift.’ and we can have those kinds of conversations. And sometimes that links into this whole issue of both regular and open lines of communication that allows us to evolve expectations, plans, if there are immediate changes.  

Another piece of this is communicating about the project findings and having everybody have space and the opportunity to do that, and to do that within their communities as well as conferences. There’s a lot of focus on who is a co-author, on presentations, and conferences, and papers, but are we also making sure there are spaces within those communities and that means presentations to advisory boards and community leaders, to the staff of the organizations involved. We’ve had articles in local newspapers, websites, videos, all kinds of different ways to make sure that the findings are not kept in this rarified academic sphere, but they are immediately translated and that’s where the community collaborators are just critical for us in the kind of feedback they give us.” 

What does a successful collaboration/project look like to you? 

“Well, the first thing is you have to agree on the criteria for success. I would say I think about it in three different ways: process, outputs, and outcomes. For some programs and groups, process is really what they’re after, continuing to learn together, learn with each other, learn with us, learn with their community partners and others they work with in their community. And for others sometimes the focus really is on those outputs—we need a video, we need a report, we need composting toilets built, whatever those are. 

And so the process is key, you need a solid process in order to get a good output, but they really are focused on that functional output. And then outcomes would be, building on the composting toilet model, would be a change in policy to allow for composting toilets to be permitted in the state and moving that process forward. So that was a longer-term project, building and assessing those toilets. 

But again, generally projects evolve. Sometimes you think a project is going to take over a year and then people get excited, and it grows into the next project, and you keep shifting what success looks like. But I’d say the key to success is to think about what your criteria [are] and to make sure everybody understands what they’re looking at and [how] to determine whether things are successful. And knowing when to quit, that can also be a success.” Austin references a project that BARA put on pause for a while and stated “at the end of the day, we weren’t giving them a lot of information they didn’t already have so we finished, we did what we were going to do. A lot [of projects] do continue year after year, but success can be knowing when one is done.” 

 When creating community-engaged research, teaching and/or art projects, how do we avoid imposing an overarching narrative that stems from our own personal biases and viewpoints at the expense of honoring the complexity, messiness and interconnectedness of the subject at hand?

 “Well, this is what ethnographers do. Our goal is to help communities understand things will get messier and more complex. One of the things everybody hates to hear from the Anthropologist is, ‘Well, it’s complex,” but it is. So how do we still move and do something out of this? It really starts from those very first conversations about the collaboration between the people from the community and the university because at that point as the ideas are developing it’s important to be clear and honest about the reasons folks are coming together. 

And I would say one of the things I feel is critical here is that everyone involved must truly believe that they’re privileged to be working in this environment with amazing collaborators. Whether it’s the university people and how they feel about their collaborators or the community collaborators and how they feel about their university partners because otherwise why do it? Often you see this [approach being adopted], as it’s becoming more popular, but if I don’t believe I have a lot to learn from my community collaborators and they don’t believe they have a lot to learn from me, we don’t need to be spending time together. Everybody’s busy, everybody’s got a lot of important work to do. And I have to say I’ve just been privileged to have so many outside community collaborators who do everything from teachers, educators, people who run NGOs, work at food banks, the folks who started the Diaper Bank of Southern Arizona, just amazing people.”