In Conversation with Sam Mejias

“It’s not enough to be critical and self-aware; you have to be motivated and willing to let that critical reflexivity guide how you act in the world.”

Dr. Sam Mejias is the Dean of the School of Art, Media, and Technology and an Associate Professor of Social Justice and Community Engagement in the School of Design Strategies, at The New School. Working primarily as an ethnographer, Sam’s research focuses on young people, the arts, and learning, and also on the cultural politics of social justice and civic engagement. In this conversation, he encourages us to approach social justice and community engagement work through the lens of inclusion and equity, using reflection as an anchor to influence our actions in the world. This interview was conducted as a part of ‘Community Engagement 101,’ A project by Evren Uzer (PI), Cynthia Lawson- Jaramillo and Michele Kahane. This interview took place on 20th July,2022 remotely over Zoom with interviewer Angelica Calabrese.

Can you tell us about your professional background and the work you’re currently involved in?

Hi, I’m Sam. I am an Associate Professor of Social Justice and Community Engagement at Parsons School of Design at The New School.

What do you see as the relationship between social justice and community engaged teaching and learning?

For me, social justice is the lens for doing community engagement work. We approach community-engaged teaching and learning with the mindset of advancing justice through the work. It’s really the “why” for me when we think about why we want to engage communities in the first place.

How can we, as practitioners and professors, effectively communicate that our community-engaged research and teaching are grounded in and actively working towards social justice?

Well, first, it’s about understanding the relationship between social justice and community engagement. How do we want to engage communities in the first place?

If we look at The New School’s framework of equity, inclusion, and social justice, we can draw on these individual concepts as anchors for our work. We recognize inequities in different communities and actively work towards equity for underrepresented and marginalized groups. Are we looking at research and teaching as opportunities for the promotion of equity?

It’s the same with inclusion. How does the idea of inclusion ensure that everyone’s contributions and voices are meaningfully included in the conversation? How does that idea underpin how we approach research and teaching? 

So, it’s like a lens: if we’re thinking about inclusion as a vital element of how we approach community-engaged teaching and research, we’re giving ourselves opportunities to prioritize and embed it in our methods and approaches.

So, it sounds like social justice and the values of inclusion and equity are the foundations, the groundwork, for what community engagement means in this context.

For me, yeah, and I think one of the challenges is that we throw these words around so often—diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice—that you have to unpack what each of these phrases and terms mean. You need to really think about the fact that equity is different from inclusion, and both can act as strong anchors for taking forward any work you do in a community.

How is what I’m doing with this community advancing equity? How is it being inclusive? When we start to engage communities, we are taking a positive step towards meaningful inclusivity.

What are the habits, dispositions and skills that you would identify as being at the core of effective community engagement and effective social justice?

For me, there are two really important qualities. The first, I would say, and I bang this drum all the time, is critical reflexivity or critical self-awareness. You have to be able to recognize how your identity and circumstances differ from other people’s or other groups, but also recognize when those differences lead to realities or outcomes where people are either not included or they face inequities. So, that’s sort of the first important quality for me.

The second quality is the willingness to act. Here, I think empathy is particularly important. It’s not enough to be critical and self-aware; you have to be motivated and willing to let that critical reflexivity guide how you act in the world. 

I think humility and patience are also really important. No one has all the right answers, and it’s important to approach collaborative spaces with openness and especially deference. Everyone has expertise, and when we engage communities that we’re not a part of, rule number one is recognizing how that outsider status means that we are fundamentally less knowledgeable than the communities we’re engaging with. 

So, keeping these things in mind are really important dispositions for doing this kind of work.

How do you think we can best cultivate those dispositions in the classrooms or with the students we’re working with? How do we set students up to effectively practice collaboration and partnership?

I think it’s tough. There are lots of different ways to teach people about the importance of values guiding the way they engage with communities. A lot of it comes down to critical reflective work. So, how do we teach these skills around analyzing and understanding the world beyond our own reality?

It’s easy for us, instinctively, to say, “These are the things that matter; these are my values,” and these biases can shape how we see the world. Sometimes, it’s challenging, especially if we’re privileged, to truly understand someone else’s vastly different and potentially inequitable experiences.

Activating this understanding is crucial, both in the classroom and in society at large. It extends to how we engage with social media, popular culture, and politics—all avenues through which we learn about justice and community engagement.

In the classroom, my focus is on fostering reflection. How can we deeply engage in reflection to approach community engagement, equity, inclusion, and social justice work? By anchoring ourselves in reflective practice, we can genuinely transform our actions in the world.

To me, the best teachers are actively building community through their teaching. They’re actively modeling the ways in which we should engage with communities and the values that underpin these interactions. In successful classrooms, you see this manifest through the connections classmates make with each other and how we collaboratively work together. It’s about creating that culture in the classroom, even on a shorter timeline.

How can scholars and professors use community engagement to create more inclusive and just institutions?

When we engage community members in our work, we are creating opportunities for expanding inclusive and just approaches and for changing institutions. But it’s not enough simply to engage communities; our approach needs to show that engagement is equitable and not extractive, and guided by collaborative, mutually beneficial processes. 

It’s really important to be mindful of power dynamics. Professors and researchers often cast a long shadow of influence, and this can often frame community members who participate in your work as mere audience members or even research subjects alone. 

So, for me, using an equity-centered community engagement approach means asking the question: What’s in it for the community? As a first step, rather than an afterthought. 

To come back to the initial question: creating more inclusive and just institutions through community engagement is really about working with communities to first identify the prevailing issues. This can help to build a shared understanding of how to collaboratively change institutions for the better. 

Again, it starts with conversation, right? It starts with understanding that there’s equity work that needs to happen in the approach to the relationship in the first place. Once that’s established, then you can start to think about the problems that institutions have, with different perspectives coming in. But when you prioritize the communities that you’re engaging with, you’re taking a position that prioritizes justice.

What are some ways in which we can enable leveraging university resources towards the needs of the community?

So, I think there are lots of ways to engage with communities, not just through research but also through teaching. For example, using a course as a platform to bring students together, like we did with a class that welcomed students from Mexico who had been deported from the US. This class became a method to integrate these students into our learning environment. I was actually in this class, and it was really impactful to see it happen.

When considering courses like this one and other ways we collaborate with communities, we can offer spaces, material resources, degree programs, and even compensation to co-teachers. How can we best support you in answering these questions? 

And our partnerships, fundamentally, are about understanding what the communities we engage with want to achieve from this collaboration. How do we leverage our resources? I think this happens on multiple levels. As a researcher with a private grant, I can actively empower the community I work with. All our participants are paid; everyone who completes a survey or interview receives compensation. Every organization collaborating with us receives a stipend or honorarium. We establish partnerships that are co-directed by the organizations we collaborate with and our research team at The New School. This ensures that our research outputs truly serve the missions and goals of each organization we work with.