My scholarly vision focuses on several interlinking areas focused on equitable civic and community engagement and the various forms they may take, specifically examining equitable and anti-racist community engagement in higher education, civic media, political communication, and media activism by historically marginalized groups.

With an interdisciplinary research team, I have helped advance cutting-edge scholarship on best practices in civic and community engagement in higher education through the development of an equity-based community engagement framework: Critically Engaged Civic Learning (CECL). CECL shifts service-learning from a student-centered pedagogy to an equity-based framework that views all constituent stakeholders (students, community members, community organizations, universities) as invested partners in the co-design, implementation, and evaluation of CECL initiatives, and is founded on redistributed power and authority to promote civic learning and social change. CECL is structured upon six guiding principles, social justice, power dynamics, community, civic learning objectives, reflexivity, and sustainability, which connect to outcomes needed to cultivate engaged citizens in the 21st century. This area of research has been published in the Michigan Journal of Community Service-Learning and presented at the Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement annual meeting, AAC&U’s annual meeting, and the Eastern Sociological Society annual meeting. This research is supported by the Salem State University Center for Civic Engagement.

As a founding steering member of the New England Equity & Engagement Consortium, I have collaborated with a diverse, interdisciplinary team to secure two Massachusetts Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) grants ($100,00 and $132,000 respectively) focused on equitable anti-racist community engagement. The first grant, received in 2019-2020, focused on diversifying the professoriate by providing professional development workshops operationalizing newly added community engagement language to the Massachusetts State College Association union contract regarding tenure and promotion, and promoting support for faculty undertaking community-engaged teaching and research, which research shows is most likely to be faculty of color and of marginalized gender identities. The second grant, received in 2021, focused on understanding the effects of community-engaged teaching on minoritized students and ensuring community-engaged teaching moves beyond “service-learning” frameworks that reify racist practices and have negative impact on students of color and communities of color. Since the completion of the grant work, current research projects through this consortium include an edited volume entitled, Anti-racist Community Engagement: Principles and Practices (Stylus), and an article published in Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice. My contributions through this consortium have been presented at the International Association for Research on Service-Learning & Community Engagement (IARSCLE) virtual gathering, AAC&U annual meeting, and Campus Compact conference. In recognition of the importance of this work, my colleagues and I have been selected to be Campus Compact Equity & Engagement Fellows for 2023-2024, and have received the IARSLCE Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion award.

As an offshoot of the HEIF grant work, I am also engaged in a Centering Equity Initiative focused on the necessity of centering equity in community engagement practices for community engagement professionals working in higher education. Stemming from a central argument of our CECL research, this initiative also argues that the term “service-learning” is problematic as it invokes inequitable power dynamics that inherently privilege one group over another, with more privileged groups providing “service” to marginalized groups. This initiative seeks to weave together a larger national conversation among community-engaged faculty and practitioners to de-center the idea of service from our language and practices, recover the multifaceted histories of deep and rich approaches to community engagement, and uphold a central lens on equitable practices that not only benefit students and universities, but also community partners, community members, and communities overall. This area of research has been presented at the IARSCLE virtual gathering, AAC&U annual meeting, and Campus Compact annual conference.

Within my disciplinary subject matter expertise of media and communication, my research area has examined civic media (media created with the intent of civic participation) to facilitate self-empowerment, agency, and civic engagement within historically marginalized populations. This focus has threaded through my master’s thesis, doctoral dissertation, and most recently through an initiative entitled the Salem Civic Media Project. Implemented through a collaboration with the Salem Public School District, this project brought Salem State University and Salem Public School District students together to create digital multimodal narratives (e.g., AR, VR, websites, videos, digital comics, etc.) to address civic and social issues within the Salem community. This research uses a mixed-methods (participant-observation, semi-structured interviews, and pre-test/post-test), UX, and critical theoretical approach to better understand how civic media processes engage youth in civic practices and shape how they understand themselves as agents of change within their community. Through this project, I have also examined how the convergence of media literacy, civic education, and experiential learning can help higher education students apply their media literacy education in a real-world context that builds their civic capacity and understanding of themselves as engaged community members. This area of research has been presented at the National Communication Association, Boston Civic Media annual conference, Northeast Media Literacy Conference, and Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement annual meeting. This area of research has received grant funding from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, the National Communication Association, the Council on Teaching and Learning, and Salem State University.

A subset of my civic media research specifically focuses on political communication and social movements. Within this area, I have examined topics like the digital public sphere, resistance journalism, disinformation and fake news, and structures of dissent. An example of this, entitled, “Structures of Dissent: Social Media, Resistance Journalism, and the Mobilization of Poverty Activism” was presented at the Western Communication Association annual conference and published in G.W. Richardson (Ed.), Social Media and Politics: A New Way to Participate in the Political Process. This study investigated spaces of dissension and the negotiation of political power through civic media for dissent, with a focus on how poverty experts (those who live the experience of poverty in the United States) produce and disseminate experiential knowledge through community media organizations. This research found that social media are but a few pieces of a larger democratic mosaic that help historically marginalized groups galvanize dissent by distributing affectively laden and provocative images, videos, and words. Social media also help bridge the digital divide by disseminating the experiential knowledge of poverty experts to highlight contradictions in dominant poverty discourse and challenge systemic oppression. This area of research has been presented at the International Communication Association Conference, the National Communication Association Conference, the Western Communication Association Conference, and the Annual Conference on Civic Learning and Engagement.