The Academic-Practitioner Collaborations for Social Change (AcPrac) project was launched in January 2022 to investigate the drivers, impacts, and challenges of building and sustaining collaborations between academics and practitioners working on inequalities.
Over the past 25 years, the interest in, practice of, and research on academic-practitioner collaborations has significantly expanded. The practice itself is known by different names, such as participatory action research (PAR), pracademia, and transdisciplinarity, to name a few. The unifying factor amongst these approaches is the shared understanding that collaborative research is central to addressing the multiple challenges facing our societies and planet. A core dimension of the AcPrac project, whics is not necessarily shared by all the other approaches to academic-practitioner collaborations, is a commitment to advancing epistemic justice and exploring the relationship between knowledge and power.
The AcPrac project has directly contributed to the design and implementation of AFSEE’s curriculum, pedagogy, and initiatives. A range of outputs, including academic articles, blogs, global case studies, a good practice guide, podcasts, and reports, have also been created by AFSEE Fellows, members of the AFSEE team, and colleagues from across the globe who have worked with us in collaboration to share their knowledge, experience, and perspectives.
Project highlights:
- Tahnee Ooms and Barbara van Paassen created a short guide on how to make academic-practitioner collaborations addressing inequalities work. The guide is available in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.
- AFSEE Fellows were invited to write about their understandings and experiences of academic-practitioner collaboration as part of the AcPrac Case Studies series. Each of the case studies explores a different country context and dimension of collaborative work, including the challenges involved as well as the rewards, opportunities, and lessons learned.
- Armine Ishkanian, Tahnee Ooms, Barbara van Paassen, Aygen Kurt-Dickson, Ishita Puri, and Branwen Spector wrote an academic paper exploring the potential of academic practitioner collaborations in tackling knowledge inequalities. The paper is available open-access here.
