Ali Nazar: You’re listening to KALX Berkeley 90.7 FM, University of California listener-supported freeform community radio, and this is Berkeley Brainwaves coming at you from the Public Affairs Department here at KALX, bringing you stories from across the Cal campus. And I’m your host, Ali Nazar. Today I’m here with Lisa García Bedolla. She is the Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Hitchcock Dean of the Graduate Division, as well as Chancellor’s Professor of Education. So thanks for joining me today, Lisa.
Lisa García Bedolla: Thanks so much for having me.
Ali Nazar: We’re going to talk about community-engaged research today, and I wanted to start by asking you: what is that?
Lisa García Bedolla: Essentially what it means is that a researcher approaches the production of knowledge as having to include the people that are most affected. For example, I can’t study water policy without understanding the people that are being affected by that policy. So the idea is that you go into the research process believing that the knowledge you’re going to get from the community is as important as the knowledge that you get from academic journals or books, and that you can’t come to an answer or any proximity to truth if you don’t actually talk to the people who are being affected by the thing that you’re interested in studying.
Ali Nazar: Is the implication that previous types of research methodologies excluded the populations they were trying to serve?
Lisa García Bedolla: That is true, and it’s kind of worse than that. If you think about the history particularly of the social sciences—I’m trained as a political scientist, so that’s my area of expertise—historically, the academy took what we call an “extractive” approach to research in community. Essentially we went in, we gathered information or knowledge—sometimes with the approval of the communities, sometimes not—and we came to our own conclusions separate from them. That was the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario was when we ran experiments that actually harmed those communities. One of the things community-engaged scholars have to be mindful of is that social scientists in the United States have historically done harm with their research.
That process of repair has to be part of the engagement process. The core of it is trust, mutual respect, reciprocity, and honoring the idea that knowledge can’t only be produced at the university—it has to be co-constructed with community.
Ali Nazar: That’s a great description. I want to dive in, but first, I want to get a little bit about your background. Give us a flavor of where you’re coming from as you learned about this type of thinking.
Lisa García Bedolla: I did my undergrad at Cal—Go Bears!
Ali Nazar: Go Bears!
Lisa García Bedolla: As part of that, I worked for an organization called Break the Cycle, which was an ASUC-funded program that took students of color from campus and paid us to work in Berkeley public schools with what were then called “at-risk” youth. This was unique because, at that time between 1987 and 1992, tutors didn’t usually get paid. For those of us who were socioeconomically precarious, it wasn’t possible to tutor for free; we needed to work.
Second, we focused on students who were really struggling. At that time, tutoring was often for AP or college-bound students, not students having a hard time. That was a transformative experience—the idea that the resources of the university could be used to serve the community really stuck with me.
Also, my family is Cuban by background. In Latin America, there’s a tradition of the university being a place of political and social change—a sanctuary where political movements start. The idea is that the “life of the mind” is not just abstract, but in service to getting humanity to be its best self. That is why I became an academic.
Ali Nazar: Then you went on from undergrad to graduate work?
Lisa García Bedolla: Yes, I went to Yale, which seemed like a good idea at the time. It was a bit of a shock to come from Berkeley to Yale. I was a Comparative Literature and Latin American Studies major at Berkeley, and I had only taken one poli-sci class. Doing political science at the doctoral level was a shock. I like to joke that since Berkeley has no advising, I thought if you like politics, you should study political science. For anyone thinking about grad school: that’s not a good reason to study political science! But I brought that ethos of wanting to produce knowledge that makes the world better.
Ali Nazar: You mentioned the word “trust,” which is very important when interacting with a population that might not even know they want help. How does trust get established?
Lisa García Bedolla: It takes a lot of time. It comes through relationship building and not entering an engagement in a transactional way. You can’t just say, “I have a month to write a paper and I need X from you”. It’s helpful to be introduced through someone they already trust, especially in communities with historically negative experiences with research.
Co-construction means getting to know one another and spending time in their offices and communities to understand what they care about. The questions must come from the community, not me. I have a general interest in what makes people political and a normative interest in eligible Americans being able to engage in the political process. But you have to be authentic about why you are there.
I like to joke that I’m a “nerd for hire”. I use my tools to show them different ways to answer their questions. It’s a back-and-forth that requires a “seal of approval” to help the organization accomplish its goals.
Ali Nazar: So it takes time?
Lisa García Bedolla: A lot of time. Berkeley is at the forefront of this. Professor Emily Ozer in Public Health led a process on our campus so that in the merit and promotion process, faculty now get credit for that time. We understand it’s not the same as just grabbing a data set from the Department of Labor; it’s about learning the context. I’m proud that we show our values by giving faculty credit for doing this right.
Ali Nazar: In the age of AI, where quantitative analysis is easier, it seems there is even more value in humans interacting in a trust-based manner to get at the root of things.
Lisa García Bedolla: Absolutely. One of the most dangerous things in research is decontextualized data. You can tell entire stories about populations using numbers without ever speaking to a human in that population, which leads to pernicious outcomes. Human relationships are incredibly important for interpreting what you’re getting out of the data.
Ali Nazar: We’re talking to Lisa García Bedolla, Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Dean of the Graduate Division here at UC Berkeley. You’re listening to Berkeley Brainwaves; I’m your host, Ali Nazar.
How have you implemented this concept across academic disciplines at Cal? How do you advocate for change across such a vast institution?
Lisa García Bedolla: It has been an effort among many people, including Emily Ozer and La Sue in the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, as well as Chris Gutierrez in Education. They did a seed grant to support community-engaged work in engineering, public health, and other areas.
What I appreciate is that many graduate students are coming to Cal specifically wanting to do this kind of work. The “ivory tower” model is not how they want to live academic life. We have the American Culture Center and the Public Service Center, which convene an activist scholar group to talk about how to do this well. Interdisciplinarity helps us stay out of silos.
We also created a summer course called Data Science for Social Justice. It’s about being mindful of where data comes from and who is missing so we don’t erase populations. As an academic, you need to feel like you’ve found your people, and that happens in many places on campus.
Ali Nazar: Is Cal leading the way here, or is this a broader academic movement?
Lisa García Bedolla: I think we’re leading. We’re not alone, but our public mission really helps us. The faculty and students who come here want to serve something greater than themselves. The traditional vision of research was often individualist—just me writing papers. Now we recognize research is a social product.
In the humanities and social sciences, there was an old idea that you had to be separate from the world to be objective—that engagement was frowned upon. Our purpose is to serve the public good, the state, and the world.
Ali Nazar: Is there a worry that objectivity could be lost because deep emotional ties might color the research?
Lisa García Bedolla: I’m going to say something that is heresy: I don’t think objectivity exists. This came out of the feminist turn in social sciences. There is a “positivist” frame that believes if you remove the researcher, you find truth. I don’t believe human beings have that capacity—we have biases and lived experiences.
If you read a book with someone else, you see different things. That’s why we need the academy to reflect as many life experiences as possible. If you triangulate wisdom across all those experiences, you might get close to truth, but an individual cannot reach it by claiming objectivity.
The researcher just has to “name” who they are in the work. I come to this because I believe people should feel empowered; that is my bias and my goal. As long as people know what I bring, they can interpret my words. We are all products of our context.
Ali Nazar: Does that mean in the social sciences there is no truth?
Lisa García Bedolla: I think truth exists, but I don’t know if human beings have the intellectual capacity to see it. All we can do is be as proximate as possible by triangulating information. I think there’s an incredible amount of hubris in imagining you have the final answer to a social question. These things are not static. We’re doing our best with limited brains to understand complex processes that have gone on for millennia. Having humility is core to research.
Ali Nazar: Humility would go a long way in our current society. You talked about the “tools” of community-engaged research. How do you arm people to execute this?
Lisa García Bedolla: There are tools for researchers and practitioners. For researchers, it starts with epistemology—what we think knowledge is. We are trained to think only peer-reviewed books are “real” knowledge. The first step is understanding that emotion, lived experience, and generational trauma are also knowledge. It requires a bit of deprogramming.
The second thing is the humility piece. This is not “service learning” or me helping them. It’s me saying: I can’t do the work I need to do without you. Some people honor that by giving co-authorship to community partners.
Ali Nazar: Academic publishing might not be valuable to a community member. Are there other “currencies” of respect?
Lisa García Bedolla: Yes. Can I help you run a program? Most community organizations I work with have 17,000 spreadsheets made by 150 different people with different structures—can I clean that up for you? Offering your skills to do what they don’t have the bandwidth for is one way to demonstrate reciprocity.
Practitioners also need to be empowered. Funders often require an evaluation as part of a grant, so organizations have to work with a researcher. If a practitioner has a “gut check” feeling that a project design isn’t right, they need the vocabulary to push back. Both sides need to respect each other enough to say, “Hey, this doesn’t make sense”.
Ali Nazar: Is there an example of this research at Cal that you’re proud of?
Lisa García Bedolla: I’ll give two from my own work. We worked with the Fresno Table, a consortium of organizations advocacy around clean water and air. In Fresno, there is a 10-year gap in life expectancy between white and Latina folks, even controlling for socioeconomic status.
We found redlining maps from the 1950s. If you layer those over current air quality data, it’s clear the neighborhoods where Latina folks were forced to live are much more contaminated than even where poor whites lived. They took that information to the City Council and State Legislature. It helped to have a Berkeley professor say, “Yes, this is real,” and they got movement on policy.
Second, we partner with Communities for a New California in the Central Valley. Community organizing often gets funding around elections but not in between, so they have to fire and rehire canvassers. We use their bilingual canvassers to do the phone calling for our surveys during off-cycles. It’s a win-win: they keep their jobs, and we get great data.
Ali Nazar: That’s amazing. We’ll end it there. We’ve been listening to Lisa García Bedolla, Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Dean of the Graduate Division. Thanks for coming in.
Lisa García Bedolla: Thank you so much for having me.
Ali Nazar: You’ve been listening to Berkeley Brainwaves on KALX Berkeley 90.7 FM. I’m your host, Ali Nazar. Have a great day, everybody
