Posted: September 8, 2021
Watch our conversation with Justine Lindemann about her community-engaged research with Black urban growers in Cleveland, Ohio.
Session Description
In this discussion, Justine addresses learnings from over four years of living, working, and researching in Cleveland, OH. Her positionality as an educated White woman working in low-income Black spaces forced her to navigate relationships, power dynamics, and outsider status. She sees her research as a partnership and a collaboration, and she will discuss the process of developing trust within the communities where she worked. Her research sought to understand the implicit and explicit political strivings of Black growers, how they relate to and understand their activism, and how this work impacts communities as well as the city as a whole. Her methodological approach represents a claim that recentering spaces of poverty and racialization leads to a better understanding of local governance, the state and its relationship to marginalized groups within civil society, as well as of civil society as it confronts and negotiates an intensely globalized and neoliberal economic structure.
Storyteller Bio
Justine Lindemann is an Assistant Professor in Community Development and Resilience at Penn State University.
About the Series
Stories from the Field is a conversation series on community engagement and applied research. The series is designed to bring academics and practitioners together for informal discussions about the challenges and opportunities of doing work with communities, businesses, and the public sector. Stories from the Field is hosted by Penn State's Center for Economic and Community Development, an applied research center dedicated to strengthening local and regional development in Pennsylvania and beyond.
