Join us for this inspiring and thought-provoking discussion. Adam and Joe sit down with three members of the Restorative Community Solutions (RCS) team based in San Francisco: Earl Simms (executive director), Kezia "Zia" Martinis (community engagement lead) and Couper Orona (community engagement operations). RCS is a nonprofit founded in 2022, led by a group of dedicated professionals with a deep history of direct service, dedicated to “support[ing] those experiencing the transition back into society from institutional settings, homelessness, prison, jails, and treatment facilities” through peer support.

[00:02:27] We first learn about each guest and how their life experiences inform their work as well as [00:05:16] learn more about Restorative Community Solutions’s (RCS) mandate. [00:08:35] Adam asks our guests to describe the challenges of doing peer support in a non-profit context. Zia discusses the challenges of representation of all community voices. Earl talks about dynamics of contracting with government agencies in San Francisco with extractive approaches and the risks of policy violence—when policy makers are “10, 000 feet above the problem” they can’t “see the nuances and the different intricacies that are happening on the ground.” Couper ties it back to the importance of a trauma-responsive peer support approach.

Our hosts ask the team to reflect on their work through the angle of action research. They discuss the importance first of bringing that qualitative part that humanizes and works toward accountability, [00:20:02] “mak[ing] sure that people’s solutions are grounded in reality.” RCS’s action research question asks, “What is one thing that San Francisco can do to change your life?” [00:23:34] Earl reflects on how participatory action research came into the methodology of their work, and they describe how co-researchers co-create survey questions, help with focus groups, use different tools to synthesize data, and then formulate recommendations to different organizations. [00:28:47] As Couper argues, there needs to be “more guts” in city government and the way things are done because “there's so much uncaring… so much distance between folks.” [00:30:51] Earl discusses balancing different hats and [00:32:20] Zia emphasizes the importance of paying people a living wage and giving folks the agency to vote on policies that directly affect them: “The stipend that I received was more than I had pretty much made in my lifetime” and “I never knew three years ago that I'd be voting on a commission where I have a say in allocating all that proxy money.” [00:35:48] Adam asks the RCS guests “Where can you take this movement? How can you get involved with policy in such a way where your day to day grind is going to be what gets it there?”

Jump into this episode to benefit from the nuances of their important insights and the rich variety of concrete examples they share from their research experiences.

[00:52:10] Finally the team plugs a few things which we cite below. [00:54:26] RCS is looking for volunteers, “anybody that wants to be boots on the ground or has any kind of compassion towards this work we've done to help support that.” They are looking for lawyers, as well as any students. Just reach out to them! Or, as Couper throws in [00:54:49], “if you have a million dollars laying around or something, that'd be great.”

Thanks Earl, Zia and Couper for sharing your work with us.

You can subscribe to our podcast on most major podcast distribution platforms, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Action Research Podcast, created by Adam Stieglitz, Joe Levitan, Shikha De Walker, Cory Legasic, and Vanessa Gold.

How have you found yourself in the world of action research? Want to be...

Guess what? It’s summer, July 2024, and the team is distracted doing summer things. So we are taking a little break this month before we sit down and get back into recording conversations with our upcoming guests for the episodes ahead. We also realized that we are in our fourth season, and we can now do what seasoned podcasters do: look back and share with you one of our team’s favorite past episodes.

With more than 30 episodes under our belt, this episode stands out to us from our first season that we recorded back on November 5th, 2020, during the height of the pandemic lockdown. And summer is a great time for reflection. With that, we give you, once again, Adam and Joe in Season 1 Episode 6’s discussion on “Reflexivity in Action Research with Dr. Lisa Starr”.

Thanks for tuning in, and now, onto our hosts.

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In this episode reprise, Adam and Joe have a conversation with Dr. Lisa Starr about the role of reflexivity in action research. To understand this complex topic, they discuss two chapters Lisa wrote using reflexive and autoethnographic methods. It just so happens (or was it more than a coincidence?) that Adam is working on the chapter in his dissertation in which he reflexively discusses his positionality, so he asks Lisa to share her expertise (12:34) on how to approach reflexivity in Action Research (15:51). Later in the episode, Joe asks Lisa about the frameworks to reflexively understand one's identity in her chapters (25:11).

If you are interested in the chapters mentioned in our podcast citations are below:

Starr, L.J. & Mitchell C. (2020, accepted for Publication). Traveling in Circles Along Roads Less Traveled in Awe of Open Spaces. In Mitchell, C, Giritli Nygren, K, Moletsane, R. (eds.) Where am I in the Picture? Researcher Positionality in Rural Studies. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press

Starr, L.J. (2019). Locating who (I am) in what (I) do: An autoethnography encounter with relational curriculum. In T. Strong-Wilson, C. Ehret, D. Lewkowich & S. Chang Kredl (Eds.), Making/Unmaking Curriculum through Provoking Curriculum Encounters (pp. 103-115). William Pinar/Routledge for the Studies in Curriculum Theory series. New York, NY: Routledge.

In this episode, Adam and Cory co-host while Joe joins as our guest alongside Dr. Catherine Potvin. We learn about Catherine’s career as a biologist working on climate issues in solidarity with Indigenous communities. Together, Catherine and Joe explore their collaboration doing action research in both culturally grounded health care and education.

First, [2:50] Catherine and Joe center relationship-building with the Emberá community at the heart of their collaborations in Panama: it’s about persistence and long time presence. [5:02] Catherine shares an overview of her history working with Indigenous communities along with the deep shifts and re-orientations in her career: [6:24] “I realized I had everything wrong, like completely everything wrong. [...] I understood that if you want to keep the forest, you need to care for the people.”

Adam and Cory ask [7:50] about the contexts that inform the focus on reforestation and community empowerment and [11:27] the role of social scientists in working alongside biologists in these collaborations. [12:02] Dr. Potvin talks about the notion of reflexivity as “a total social science thing” and the importance of researchers positioning themselves in the work they do. She also talks about how important it has been to look at reforestation from an economics and training perspective, what Joe calls “learning for capacity building”. Their collaboration also helped support [16:20] a community-based collective decision-making process, and Joe names a few examples of its outcomes.

At this point, Joe [19:56] spends some time walking us through an understanding of culturally-grounded education and healthcare: It’s a “phenomenological pragmatist perspective” that asks [20:53] “How do we start from who we are and our experience, and then identify what matters to us?” Potvin [23:02] shares a few anecdotes from her experiences over the years of learning to approach climate science from a more culturally grounded approach, and some of the colonial systemic barriers that students and community members face.

Adam’s last big question [29:45] asks our guests: “To what extent are you identifying or acknowledging economic empowerment for the communities that you're working with in Panama as a way to conserve and preserve the community's Indigenous lifestyles and knowledge?” Potvin discusses [33:37] the need to “find a number of different economical pathways for women, for men, for youth, for elders that will allow them to live a decent life.” Joe brings the reality of “using resources from outside of the community, but also thinking about how to do that in a way that's circular and self-directed.” They both offer examples of projects from recent years.

Wrapping up, Cory and Adam share some takeaways and use the final moments to congratulate (and challenge) Potvin’s upcoming retirement. To which she responds, and we wanted to quote at length…

“You know, in ecology, when a tree falls, that's where the diversity of a forest gets recreated, right? Because there's all these new trees that will take the space of the old big tree, because the old big tree sucks up a lot of resources. And when it disappears, it creates opportunity for new trees, more adapted to the new reality to grow. So I think I see retirement that way, it's supporting and creating opportunities to go further than where I've been.”

Thank you both for sharing your work with us, and congratulations Dr. Potvin on your retirement!.

You can subscribe to our podcast on most major podcast distribution platforms, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Action Research Podcast, created by Adam Stieglitz, Joe Levitan, Shikha Diwakar, Cory Legassic, and Vanessa Gold.

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