| Description |
In the United States, public universities must negotiate public responsibility with market interests, and are often under suspicion of being businesslike and detached from local community issues and concerns. Campus-community partnerships are gaining traction as a preferable way for public universities to bridge campus and community concerns. This dissertation is a qualitative case study of UPartner (UP), an organization that creates campus-community partnerships between a large public university and a community system identified by that university through a statistical analysis of zip codes that indicated underrepresentation at the university. In this dissertation, I explain my methodological perspective as an engaged advisor. Through in-depth interviews, participant observation, and historical research, I engaged with UP to understand how participants characterized their activities and strategized ways to change the university system. Using structuration theory as a framework, I explain how UP participants structure their activities and characterize the systems of campus and community. I discuss several discursive patterns and practices including Connection, Hopeland, Confusion, and Not Service/Outreach. I also discuss these patterns in light of their enabling and constraining qualities, and the extent to which they echo larger discourses concerning democracy and the market. I give particular focus to the activity of partnership, which is structured as Reciprocity, Sustainability, and Difficulty. Finally, I extend structurating activity theory's notion of contradictions to discuss several contradictions that UP participants encounter when trying to change the university system, including Deficit Discourses, The Marginalization of Community Based Research, and The Containment of UP. I explain each contradiction, and then show how UP participants attempt to overcome the contradiction through desired new discursive patterns. |
