Place-based Research Approaches to Local Communities (Online)

This one-day course will be offered via Zoom only. Course schedule is 9:00am – 3:00pm, with a 1 hour lunch and (2) 10 minute breaks (1 in morning and 1 in afternoon). Attendance is required as it will not be recorded.

This course will provide researchers with qualitative tools and perspectives to authentically conduct community-based participatory research. Participants will learn how to center community perspectives and marginalized voices. Community groups often lack resources and platforms to alleviate narratives about emerging and systemic social and public health challenges. Researchers are often challenged by lacking community partnerships to gather narratives and resources within these communities.

Participants will learn how to:
• identify synergies that foster long-term relationships and mutual commitments to social change that can develop research agendas and inform interventions and policy.
• authentically capture community perspectives
• understand how different stakeholders view a social challenges;
• learn how communities organize themselves to address these issues; and
• identify how social science researchers can support these efforts through the collection and analysis of various sources of data.

Additionally, participants will learn how to establish trust, gain entry, and maintain relationships and reciprocity, adjust to data collection changes by being malleable and learning from failure, develop strategies to help community members’ narratives and experiences get to decision-making tables, and engage in strategies that reflect community-academic partnerships focused on institutional and community level change.

This course will count as 6.0 CSS short course credit hours.

Instructor: Dr. Rashawn Ray

Dr. Rashawn Ray is a Rubenstein Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Executive Director of the Lab for Applied Social Science Research (LASSR) at the University of Maryland, College Park. Ray is also one of the co-editors of Contexts Magazine: Sociology for the Public. Formerly, Ray was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in racial and social inequality with a particular focus on police-civilian relations and men’s treatment of women. His work also speaks to ways that inequality may be attenuated through social policy and racial uplift activism. Currently, Ray is working on a series of research projects creating innovative virtual reality experiments that focus on policing and other social outcomes.

Registration fees:

• UNC Chapel Hill Students: $0, with a $35 deposit to hold your spot (deposit is refundable upon your attendance for at least 66% of the course)
• UNC Chapel Hill Faculty/Staff/Postdoc/Resident/Visiting Scholars: $80
• Non-UNC Chapel Hill University Student/Employee (must have active university email): $105
• Government/Non-Profit/Corporate: $130

Additional course information:

• Cancellation/ Refund Policy: A full refund will be given to those who cancel their registration no later than 10 days prior to the course. If you cancel within the 10 days prior to the class, no refund will be given. Please allow 30 days to receive your refund.
• Registration must be made at least 1 day prior to the course date to receive the Zoom link.