A research partnership for good
A core feature of the Community Research Initiative is the opportunity to carry out a collaborative dissertation project.
Through this collaboration, you will partner with voluntary & community organisations or community groups . You will plan and carry out a research project that will benefit the organisation and serve as your dissertation project!
We have several ways for you to find a community partner that connects with you and your research goals. You can choose from existing ideas, submitted by our community partners, through our Community Noticeboard or we can approach community partners on your behalf -- this is our brokering service.
Our values
The Community Research Initiative has three core values:
- There are valid perspectives and ways of knowing besides academic knowledge.
- The highest quality knowledge and information is multi-perspective.
- New knowledge should lead to positive social change.
Our practices
Following from our values, we strive to:
- Emphasise power sharing and knowledge democracy: we are not ‘academic saviours’ of our lesser local communities and citizens. We acknowledge gaps in our own knowledge and seek to find out more from experts within the community and voluntary sector.
- Act as a bridge: a bridge into the university of grounded, experiential, lived experience from citizens and citizen groups while at the same time, a bridge out of the university of academic perspectives and skills.
- Promote the creation of useful and useable products from student research: we challenge our students to always ask ‘why?’. Why does the work that they are doing matter? We not only give our students space to work out the answers to this question, but we help them equip each other to work with their partners to answer these questions together.