Understanding the Assemblage of Community Desire: Progress, Challenges, and Tensions in Establishing a Community-Based Health Justice Science Education Curriculum Collaborative

Community-engaged research partnerships are increasingly used in education research to promote equitable and relevant educational outcomes. One key challenge of such partnerships that is rarely documented is the pre-partnership relationship development phase. This methodological paper reports on the early partnership exploration and formation efforts of an interdisciplinary research team working to build a community-based curriculum materials collaborative for health justice science education in a rural Midwest town. We explicate how we have approached this phase through an epistemological orientation of desire-centered research by integrating methods and stances from community-engaged ethnography with commitments from community-based participatory research. We articulate three main activities shaping this phase of work: (1) Learning about communities’ well-resourced networks; (2) Progressive refinement of project foci; and (3) Gauging, establishing, and negotiating trust and capacity. Our situated accounting provides an illustration of how interdisciplinary teams might draw from and navigate across multiple methodological traditions in context-specific ways in working towards equity in education research.