Notice Board

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many community-engaged practitioners struggled with how to build, maintain or sustain pre-existing relationships, partnerships, or community-engaged projects in meaningful and ethical ways. COVID-19 introduced many ethical complexities for those working with communities such as privacy, equitable access to technology, safety and confidentiality.

In response, a team of community-based and academic community-engaged practitioners came together to launch "Community Engagement in COVID-19" – a participatory study that explored how community-engaged practitioners (community artists, participatory researchers, community facilitators, and participatory visual methods practitioners) were adapting their facilitation practice to online and remote settings during the pandemic.

This presentation will share study findings and open up a dialogue about participatory research during a pandemic. This study was led by a larger team of academic and community based community-engaged practitioners, out of the Youth Research Lab at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Neighbourhood Arts Network and The Centre for Community Partnerships (University of Toronto) were key partners on the study. For more on our team and the project: www.beyondthetoolkit.com

**The research was completed as part of a SSHRC post-doctoral fellowship at OISE, University of Toronto.

Zoom link: https://uleth.zoom.us/j/93939429611 

Speakers:

Sarah Switzer is an adult educator, interdisciplinary scholar, and community-based participatory researcher with 20 years of experience supporting community-based approaches to social change and health equity. This study was completed during a SSHRC post-doctoral fellowship at OISE, University of Toronto. She currently lives in Tkaronto, as covered by Treaty 13, and is a senior researcher at the Centre for Community Based Research.

Andrea Vela Alarcón is a researcher, illustrator and community educator based in Tkaronto. She holds an MA in Adult Education and Community Development from OISE and is currently pursuing her PhD in Communications and New media at McMaster University. Her professional background involves a diverse range of community-engaged projects entangled with popular education and cultural production with communities in Peru and Canada. Her current community-engaged research invites participatory cultural production processes to reflect the relationship between resource extraction and gender violence in the Peruvian Amazon.