Meet the scholars working with real people on real problems

From boosting high school attendance in economically depressed parts of the United States to managing waste in Ghana, the 2023-24 recipients of the Engaged Scholar Award span the globe and represent enormous diversity in their areas of focus. All are united by a commitment to using their scholarship to make an impact outside the classroom.

The Engaged Scholar Award is part of the ‘Amplifying the Voices of Engaged Researchers Around the World’ programme, an initiative created by the Open Society University Network (OSUN) and implemented in partnership with the Talloires Network of Engaged Universities.

As understood by the Talloires Network, engaged research involves community and university participants at various stages of the research process. It strengthens community-university partnerships in order to respond to emerging social issues, while contributing to the development of active citizens with the capacity to address complex challenges.

In 2022-23, the Engaged Scholar Award has provided US$198,000 to 24 projects in 14 countries. Again this year, projects led by graduate students will receive US$6,000 while those led by professors will receive US$9,000 to support 28 projects in 16 countries (totalling US$205,000).



Founded in 2005 by the heads of 29 universities, the Talloires Network now includes 431 universities in 86 countries, and is hosted by the Jonathan M Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, in the United States, which provides some project leads with logistical support and training.

Collaborative approach

According to Tisch College Dean Dayna Cunningham, engaged research is important because it enables communities to examine and address pressing social problems.

“It is a collaborative approach to public problem-solving that seeks to balance unequal power dynamics and make research more impactful. This growing global community of engaged researchers are not only working with their communities; they are also working with one another across geopolitical boundaries to share best practices and to educate and inspire the next generation of scholar activists.

“The network seeks to promote human rights and further the free exchange of knowledge, ideas, and practices by amplifying the voices and lived experiences of marginalised groups, while also sharing the technical expertise and resources of universities around the world. From Ethiopia to Chile to Bangladesh, the network elevates these vibrant examples of engaged research so that we can imagine more creatively what is possible,” Cunningham said.

A different version of US history

Jazmin Puicón’s ‘Innovative Newark: Creating Engaged Citizens in the Global City’ project has led to a marked increase in high school attendance that has translated into an 8.7% increase in the graduation rate among 100% of the 64 students who have opted for this elective at the Bard High School Early College Newark.

Graduates of this publicly funded magnet school receive both their high school diploma and an associate bachelor degree that allows transfer into four-year BA programmes.

To engage under-represented minorities, almost all of whom are first generation college students, in a liberal arts education, Puicón, assistant professor of history at Bard High School Early College in Newark, reconceptualises the teaching of history, turning Newark, the third poorest American city, into a resource that tells a very different version of American history than that symbolised just across the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan, the home of Wall Street.

What Puicón calls the “brown and black perspective” alters the narrative of, for example, what most Americans recall as the Newark race riots of 1967. Puicón’s students hear from people involved in the events during those hot days of July, examining primary and secondary resources, and they visit (as well as beautify) the memorial to the fallen a mere four blocks away from the school.

Through these experiences, they learn that the four-day battle that saw 700 people injured and 26 people killed was less a race riot than a rebellion by the oppressed black majority triggered by the beating of a black cab driver by two white police officers.

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are built into Puicón’s course. Rather than SDG 6 (Clean water and sanitation) being an abstract issue, it is studied in relation to the presence of lead in Newark’s drinking water. She takes her students to see abandoned industrial sites contaminated with arsenic and even Agent Orange, the carcinogenic defoliant used during the Vietnam War.

For their capstone assignment, Puicón groups the students based on the SDG they care most passionately about, such as education or pollution. They have to do research on the issue they want to solve. They present their solution to a panel of community members who choose a winner, she told University World News.

Resisting extraction in Colombia

Miguel Angel Castañeda Barahona is a Colombian studying for his masters in human rights at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (160 kilometres north of New York City).

His project, ‘Human Rights and Arts: School-Seeding of Cañaverales Defenders’ (‘School-Seeding’), is designed to develop the capacity of indigenous black Colombian farmers in the country’s Cañaverales region to bring their fight against the opening of another coal mine by Turkish company Yildirim Holdings to a wider audience using video and audio arts.

Angel Castañeda’s project mounts a trenchant critique of the Western economic rhetoric and model of progress, and dominant research methodologies.

He dismisses the argument that developing the mine will produce jobs needed by this poor region by saying that promised development never occurs, even as these developed regions suffer. In addition to polluted streams and land, the movement of single men from elsewhere leads to skyrocketing rents, and the proliferation of prostitution and alcoholism.

The ‘School-Seeding’ project does not intend to produce a frozen moment-in-time sociological study of, say, marriage or dietary rules in the manner of the works of anthropologists like Claude Lévi-Strauss.

“We are not researching from an objective perspective without getting involved in the community. On the contrary, it is a new perspective or new methodological approach in which you work in the community to build a methodology,” Angel Castañeda said.

Built from within the community, this methodology is rooted in ancestral knowledge that differs from Western science because it is not focused on a “thing” but on the continuance of living on the territory in a sustainable manner that “reproduces human life”.

Accordingly, Angel Castañeda says that as an alternative to mining – and to further the transition from an energy intensive economy – the Cañaverales Defenders propose that the area, which can grow four crops a year, remains agricultural.

Yet even here, when I suggest that at the end of each season someone would have to count what was available from a crop for export, he pointed out that I was thinking in Western economic terms. Los Negros de Cañaverales (and the practitioners of the ‘School-Seeding’ project) think in terms of food security, in maintaining the land and their relationship to it and not totting up a bill of exchange.

Waste collection in Ghana

Nearly 13,000 kilometres due east of Cañaverales, in Accra in Ghana, Professor Austin D Ablo, who teaches geography at the University of Ghana, leads a project to enhance a business practice indigenous to this storied city: informal waste collectors, who, as explained in the project’s proposal, ‘Valorizing Informal Solid Waste Sector in Low-Income Communities’ (VISWS), collect almost as much waste as the formal sector (1,313 versus 1,486 tons per year).

In the formal collection system, waste of all kinds is heaved into trucks destined for sorting centres where metals, glass, plastics and paper, which can be sold to buy-back centres, are separated from the organic waste that is sent to landfills. In reality, however, much of this material ends up going to the city’s rapidly filling landfill.

The informal waste collectors Ablo’s project focuses on sift waste more efficiently because they deal at the household level and sort the waste into receptacles on their tricycles. However, he explains, they work in extremely hazardous conditions that are difficult to ameliorate.

“Because Ghana is hot and humid, and they work under the sun, it’s not practical to wear a nose mask to do their jobs. Our project gives the opportunity for them to at least use gloves and protective shoes.”

Equally important is the public education aspect of the VISWS project, which will involve creating what he calls a ‘people’s dialogue’ in which individuals in the La Nkwantanang-Madina, a municipality in Accra with a population of 244,676 where the pilot project will run, will come together to brainstorm issues related to solid waste management, recycling and other waste management issues.

While some in La Nkwantanang-Madina who are well off understand the importance of improving waste management and working towards the SDGs, Ablo told University World News, for the majority of the area’s residents, indeed, for the majority of Accra’s 2.7 million impoverished residents, SDGs are “not something people prioritise because they just want to survive”.

Power for refugees in Ethiopia

Seyfe Tareke Woldehiwot, Aregawi Kidanemariam Gebru and Goitom Yisfa Alemu, each of whom is an electrical engineer at Mekelle University in Tigray, Ethiopia, are applying their electrical engineering expertise in a camp for some of the more than two million internally displaced persons (IDPs) 10 kilometres from Mekelle’s city centre.

Their project, ‘Solar-Powered Charging Stations for IDPs in Tigray’, will, via solar-generated electricity that powers charging stations, allow the IDPs who have cell phones or tablets, to access communication, vital information, news and banking services.

Woldehiwot and Gebru are involving the IDPs in the project: some are being trained to maintain the stations, for example. Additionally, Woldehiwot and Gebru are working with IDPs to work out arrangements for guards who will ensure that the solar panels are not stolen and the level of the administration fee that will be charged. (The proceeds of the fee will go to paying for upkeep and the guards.)

Women entrepreneurs in Bangladesh

The fifth word (in italics) of the title of Sabrina Nourin’s project, ‘Role of Intersectionality in Empowering Marginalised Women via Entrepreneurship’, will surprise given that intersectionality is usually used as a lens to isolate the various identities an individual has – racial, ethnic, religious, gender, sexuality, social status – that explain their marginalisation.

For Nourin, a researcher with BRAC University in Dhaka, Bangladesh, intersectionalities also explain how women come together in Bangladesh’s informal economy.

“Most marginalised women join the informal sector first. Then they continue their entrepreneurial journey as they enhance that space, especially in the context of Bangladesh where patriarchy is still there and there remains the gender [wage] gap,” she told University World News, drawing on her research and interviews with a dozen women.

The majority of marginalised women in Bangladesh work in the agricultural sector, which is why micro-loans targeted at these women are so important.

“They were given small loans so that they could do something at a very nominal level. A woman would say, ‘If I can borrow 1,000 taka for a week, and I can sell 10 eggs … I can have at least 20 taka profit at the end of the week … I can have maybe 80 taka profit [for the month]. Maybe my interest rate was around 10%, so that’s a very small amount of savings for me’.”

While it’s true that it is difficult for the owners to pay back their loans, they still make some profit, a small amount that they themselves can control, according to Nourin.

Nourin’s research does not focus solely on the economic improvement of the women and their families, as important as that is. She shows that this improvement results in important social and psychological gains.

“We see that when the women have earnings of their own, the community starts to support them [presumably lessening the feelings of marginalisation]. They are achieving some sort of well-being by reducing negative emotions and limiting the identity traits [that contribute to marginalisation, such as economic deprivation] and validating their emerging identity,” Nourin told University World News.

Public problem-solving

Taken together, these projects exemplify the essence of engaged research, which involves community and university participants at various stages of the research process. Each in their own way strengthens community-university partnerships in order to respond to emerging social issues and at the same time contribute to the development of active citizens with the capacity to address complex challenges.

According to Cunningham, recipients of the 2023-24 ‘Amplifying the Voices of Engaged Researchers Around the World’ awards have shown how the co-creation of knowledge, shared new theories, strategies and frameworks for public problem-solving are important “first steps” in the formation of cross-cultural learning environments that are needed to navigating complex matters of human survival.