Critical Feminist Practice and Campus-Community Partnerships: A Review Essay

© 2015 by the board of trustees of the university of ill inois As the introduction to this special issue makes clear, our analysis of dozens of essay proposals suggests that the work of feminist community/campus collaboration is vibrant, necessary, and challenging. Although feminists have transformed what counts as research to include more collaborative and reciprocal knowledge-making, our work is hardly over. Feminist scholars Jackie Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch argue that “[i]n broadening the nature and scope of rhetorical subjects, sites, and scenes, we [feminist scholars] have set in motion the need to renegotiate the terms by which visibility, credibility, value, and excellence are determined” (133). This review examines how feminists continue to engage in this profound negotiation, in part by understanding how feminist community engagement is made not simply visible, but also legible, to a range of stakeholders. This ever-shifting and growing legibility is the focus of our review as we address two initial questions: What is engagement? How can feminist and community-engaged scholarship find points of intersection around that question that can productively interrupt dominant practice? In seeking to engage these questions, we noted some significant absences in scholarly intersections where we felt sure we’d find them. Perhaps this reflects historical developments: community engagement scholarship often originated inside the university before it found its footing in the larger community, whereas feminist practices were rooted in the community before finding validation in academic forums. Or perhaps this reflects that community engagement and feminist work have been on parallel but distinct tracks as the simultaneous coming of age of contemporary transnational feminisms, critical race theory, and intersectional theory each embrace ethical community engagement without explicitly claiming servicelearning affiliations. Whatever the reason, understanding where, how, and why the areas of community engagement and feminism converge and diverge can help us more thoughtfully design communitycampus partnerships. We open with a brief description focused primarily on institutional markings of legibility—the structurally recognized value of community engagement in general and of feminist community engagement in particular. We then address a central Review Essay Critical Feminist Practice and Campus-Community Partnerships: A Review Essay