Episode 50: Community-Engaged Social Science with Dr. Felipe Filomeno

1:46PM Dec 4, 2023

Speakers:

Dr. Ian Anson

Jean Kim

Dr. Felipe Filomeno

Keywords:

umbc

community

social sciences

baltimore

dialogue

research

students

talk

participants

podcast

social science

cs3

racial justice

project

immigration

interdisciplinary

program

connect

experience

facilitator

Hello and welcome to Retrieving the Social Sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science here at UMBC.

My daughter, Rosemary is full of surprises. As a vivacious and inquisitive, just recently, two year old, she soaks up knowledge about our world like a little sponge with a big attitude. Recently, as I was driving her home from her daycare, I heard her mumbling something in the car seat. At the stoplight, the road noise subsided and I got a chance to hear what she was talking about. And in fact, she wasn't talking at all. She was singing. We had never heard her do this before, so it was a big story at dinner that evening. And it took a keen ear and a bit of social science to understand what song she had selected. As it turns out, many of the kids in her class are just a little bit younger than she is, which means that over the past few weeks, she had picked up a classic piece of the musical canon. That's right, my daughter had been singing "Happy Birthday" all day long, seemingly to no one in particular. And you know, it turns out her song is actually really appropriate, because here at Retrieving the Social Sciences, we have a really big birthday to celebrate. And that's because the UMBC Center for Social Sciences is turning five, and much like a vivacious and inquisitive five year old human. the Center has been learning so much about its place on campus and in the broader community over that time. It's accomplished a great deal over those first five years and for the programming and events that are on the horizon, it seems like the best is yet to come. So happy birthday CS3.

It's also a fun milestone here on the podcast because today is our 50th episode. And to commemorate both this epic moment in podcasting history as well as CS3's birthday, we thought it only appropriate to talk with the CS3's Associate Director, Dr. Felipe Filomeno, Associate Professor of Political Science. We've been waiting to have Dr. Filomeno on the podcast for quite some time, and now that we have and we're delighted to bring you a conversation that centers on the subject of community-engaged research. While community-engaged scholarship has become something of a buzzword in academia, Dr. Filomeno's work is a wonderful example of how to do this intricate process and just right. And since CS3 has grown into such a strong proponent of linking up the realms of research, student engagement, and the community, we thought it fitting to discuss this important topic as a form of celebration. So let's jump into our conversation right now.

Today, I am delighted to welcome an esteemed guest. Somebody who is very much a long time coming on the podcast and somebody who we're very excited to talk to. Today, I want to welcome our Associate Director of the Center for Social Science Scholarship, Dr. Felipe Filomeno, to the podcast. Dr. Filomeno, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you, Ian. Pleasure to be finally here with you.

It really is an incredible, sort of fortuitous occasion that we're able to have you on finally to celebrate the 50th episode of this podcast. I will talk a little bit about that later. And about all of the wonderful support that you've put into helping this podcast become a reality, but I want to talk about your research, right. This is a podcast about the social sciences and you are an eminent social scientist, and so we want to hear, before we talk about CS3 itself, about your work. So obviously the the topic of this episode focuses on your community-engaged research, and I wanted to ask kind of a broad question about this because community-engaged research is something that is talked about a lot right now. Certainly people who are at various universities across the country in the world are hearing this sort of phrase come up more and more. And I wanted to get your take on this idea. How do you envision this kind of research being successful? A link perhaps between the social sciences and some kind of community engagement or community service? Is this an easy thing to do, Dr. Filomeno, or are there challenges inherent in this linkage?

I don't think it's easy, but it's very fulfilling. There are institutional barriers to that type of work in many universities. Thankfully, that's not so much the case at UMBC. We are a community-engaged university according to the Carnegie Classification. We have leadership at the university that supports this kind of research that is recognized in our promotion and tenure policies. So here we have that support, but in other universities, not as much. And there is also a challenge involved in how you do that kind of research. On one hand, it is it gives you some benefits to be inside the community and be able to understand the reality that you're trying to understand from the inside, not as much as an outsider. But that requires some relationship building, trust building work, that you don't have to do in other kinds of research. So if you're doing social science research, relying on data that you can just download from the US Census, or archives that are already available online in digital form, you don't have to go to the to the field, go to community and meet people and build trust. And all that takes time. And I have, over time developed an approach to community-based research that actually starts with community service, because I've learned that to build those relationships, you have to give first. If you just show up in a community, and start asking questions and ask for people to give their time to collaborate with your research, that will not be great. It's a type of approach that doesn't, in my experience, doesn't yield good results. So you have to first give to the community, know the community so that the community can trust you, open the doors, and so that the community can approach you with whatever problems they're facing that you might think that research could help with. So that that takes time. And also in the end of the process, when you're publishing the results, you sometimes you face a trade off. Do I publish the results first, for the community in the form of a policy brief or a research report that can, that is written in a language that is very accessible to the community? Or do I prioritize writing an article for a scientific journal, right? And I usually prioritize the community. So building the relationship and then serving the community tends to slow down your research. And of course, we need to have policies and leaders that can see that, right, can understand that, of the nature of the research.

Wow. So I'm really struck by the notion that this is seemingly a process that just has so many more layers to it that you need to be cognizant of, that you need to think about. But it's also at its core, something that everyone in the social sciences is trying to accomplish, right? I mean, we're trying to better understand people's lives, right, or their lived experience. And it's incredible to think about the ways that that particular mode of research allows you to do that on so much of a deeper level. Because it's not just observing people, it's participating in their lives, right, like you're describing. And so I wanted to ask just a quick follow up on that is, so obviously, you're working mostly in the community of the city of Baltimore, right? So is that something that you were able to sort of dive into right away? Like, what was the actual experience like of meeting people in the city? How did you kind of get into the communities that you work with?

When I arrived at UMBC, I was, I arrived as a Latin Americanist, someone who does research on Latin America, and I was settling in Baltimore, trying to not have to travel so much after so many years of international field work. And I thought, well, how can I bring my interest in Latin America here to Baltimore? Is there any way that I can do research about Latin America in Baltimore,\? And I came across some news stories about Latino immigration growing in Baltimore, and the city of Baltimore trying to attract and retain those immigrants as a way to repopulate the city of Baltimore. And I thought that was so interesting, and an opportunity for me to study the Latin American diaspora here in Baltimore City. So I've done that in the form of a study of local immigration policy initially. And for that research, I had to interview policymakers, interview leaders in the civil society. And I noticed that it was really hard to get a place in their schedule to to do interviews I was maybe my next research project should emerge from the community so that when I approach people to participate in research, it doesn't come as a burden to them, you know, as time that they have to carve in their calendar to give to me. And so I started to attend community events. And every time that I saw, I started to follow social media accounts connected, of people connected to the Latino community. So I started to go to church fairs and community events and health fairs, just to be in the community participating in those meetings, introducing myself to people. And with time, people will start recognizing me, seeing me over and over again, they will know my name. And eventually I started to volunteer with one of those organizations. And from those relationships came my next research project.

You cued me up perfectly, because I want to get into this project. Tell me a bit about this most recent book project, and how perhaps it speaks to the specific communities of Latin American immigrants to Baltimore, which is, as you might imagine, a very unique context for immigration, right. As you mentioned, some people might call it a rust belt city, it's a city that experienced rapid deindustrialization and decline and is experiencing very sort of patchwork rebirth, I guess you might call it. And certainly policy has a huge impact on it. But also, you know, the people that come to live here are doing so for a variety of very specific reasons. And so tell me a bit about this book project and about how it might inform our understanding of these communities.

Yeah, so I volunteered with, I started volunteering with the Latino Racial Justice Circle, which is a small nonprofit organization in Baltimore devoted to immigrant integration with a focus on the Latino community in 2017. And I arrived there just attending the meetings, just making myself available to help them with their work, whatever it was, right? And after a number of months, collaborating with them, supporting their existing programs, I heard from their leadership, that they wanted to create a program of faith community dialogues on immigrationn, that they wanted to call "Honest Conversations on Immigration." That group, the Latino Racial Justice Circle, they emerged as a sister organization to the Racial Justice Circle, which was a group connected to the Baltimore Archdiocese. They were not a part of the Archdiocese, but they were members of local Catholic parishes that were concerned with racial justice within the Baltimore Archdiocese. So they formed this circle to discuss issues of racism in the Catholic Church as it pertains to African Americans. So the Latino Racial Justice Circle was the Latino version of that. And they wanted to create a program similar to the program that the Racial Justice Circle had created about race. They had a program that is still going on, called "Honest Conversations on Racism." And that was a program that had some success in different parishes, different congregations in Baltimore, so they wanted to do something related to immigration, and I thought, well, I'm used to facilitating focus groups as part of my research. I'm used to facilitating class discussions as part of my work as a professor in the classroom, so I think that could be, I think I could take care of that and organize that project as a community-based research. So I designed, implemented, and analyzed several dialogues on immigration in faith communities. A total, since the first dialogue was a pilot program in southeast Baltimore, in a Catholic school, we invited people from several local congregations, Catholic and non Catholic as well, but all Christian congregations, to participate in an ecumenical workshop on immigration, and the very last activity of this workshop, which was day long, the last activity was a dialogue on immigration. So based on that experience, I already did research on that, I had a focus group with the facilitators of that dialogue. We had about 28 participants that were divided into small groups. So each group had a trained facilitator from the Latino Racial Justice Circle. I interviewed them, everyone completed questionnaires at the end of that dialogue. So that was my first research that was fully community-based, right. And the evaluation of that pilot program then informed an expanded version of this program, which we call the "Honest Conversations on Immigration." And the bulk of the book is about that experience, and that started in 2019. From 2019 to 2022 we had seven dialogues, involving 14 congregations, and a total of about 100 participants. And each of those seven dialogues were three week long, so participants would meet once a week for three weeks for about an hour and a half, to talk about immigration, share their feelings, concerns, stories about immigration, talk about tensions about immigration that they have experienced in their neighborhoods, in their congregations, in the country as a whole, and talk about similarities and differences between immigrants and people who are born here, and then the third session, they would deliberate on a collaborative project that they would undertake after the dialogue. So it was conversation for action. So the goal of the program, in terms of community service, was to build mutual understanding and collaboration across differences in faith communities. My goal as a researcher was to analyze that process, that civic experiment, to understand to what extent and how that type of dialogue, deliberative dialogues on immigration in faith communities, could unleash what I refer to as the cosmopolitan potential of Christianity, right. So Christianity, as a religion, as an institution, it has a cosmopolitan potential, right? You have many principles in the Bible that call us to welcome the stranger and to connect across differences and to promote unity in the diversity of the Body of Christ. And the idea that the kingdom of God has no, no, no walls, no barriers, and, and everyone belongs in the kingdom of God. So is it possible to translate those principles into practice and use Christianity as a way to build bridges across differences of race, ethnicity, nationality, language? And so that's the big question that I tried to answer in this, in this study by analyzing all those dialogues.

Wow. So very lofty goals, obviously, an incredible outcome, if we're able to apply this broadly. I speak as a resident of the city of Baltimore that it would be fantastic to be able to use these kinds of tools to implement these outcomes in our city. And certainly, I'm sure that there are listeners who are listening in from other communities around the state of Maryland or around the country, even the world, that are thinking about how impactful these kinds of programs might be in their own communities where divisions might cause friction in the world of politics and elsewhere. I wanted to ask just a brief follow up. So using your methodological tools, right, so you talked about focus groups, talked about some of these questionnaires. So how did you analyze these for a methodological perspective, and how did that analysis inform the evaluation of the actual results? Did we see this worked, and how do we find out?

The bulk of the analysis is based on what I call a thematic relational analysis. So qualitative analysis of the dialogue transcripts, focusing not only on the substance of what participants were saying, so the thematic portion of the analysis, but also on how participants were interacting. So the relational portion of the analysis. Traditional, conventional thematic analysis looks at just the substance of what participants are saying, the patterns of information that they are revealing. Now, I was interested in understanding if people were connecting through dialogue. How they were interacting with each other. Was the dialogue promoting mutual understanding collaboration? So I had to pay attention as well to how people were interacting. So all the dialogue transcripts, I coded not only for themes, not only for topics, but also for how people were connecting to each other, how they were interacting. So if there were moments of agreement, exchanges of disagreement, or moments in which people were giving perspective, or taking perspective from another participant, all that was coded. And in the transcripts, I also used a notation to identify the participant by a number, their gender, and their nationality, race, ethnicity. And that means that I was able to trace variations in the themes according to participant, race and ethnicity. And also I was able to analyze those interactions, considering participant ethnicity and race as well. So questions like Is agreement more likely between Latinos and African Americans than Latinos and white Americans? Do African Americans tend to talk more about competition in the job market with immigrants than white Americans or not? So that notation allowed me to trace those variations and a lot of the conclusions that I present in the book are tracing those patterns of themes and those patterns of interactions to those identities.

That is really cool to think about the ways that rigorous social science methods can be applied to these extremely practical questions with real impacts for communities that are actually out there in the city of Baltimore. I'm delighted to hear about the ways that this book has been successful. And I really hope that we're able to read it in the near future. I had one question for you. So I often ask questions of our guests that deal with advice that you would give to students. But I wanted to ask a slightly different question of you. Given that your work is very amenable to bringing students into the process, I want to ask what that looks like for you, how you envision bringing UMBC students into the process of community-engaged research.

I think students are usually interested in this kind of research because they can see a real world application that is very immediate, right. And they also like to do research that is blended with service, with community service, right. We have at UMBC, we are very lucky, because we have many students who are very academically talented, and they want to use that talent for the public good, right. So those are students that are smart, but also very oriented to the public good, and that draws them to community-engaged research of the kind that I and others at UMBC do. In the case of this project, I had students doing the more traditional work of transcribing all the dialogues, and helping me conduct some analysis, including qualitative analysis of the text and also quantitative analysis of the text, but also participate in the actual dialogues, not dialogue participants, but as observers. So I had students there, assisting me with the logistics of those events, of preparing those sessions, making sure that everyone had their pen and piece of paper, that everyone received the questionnaires. And also taking notes and observing the process. And I asked the students, take notes about what people were saying, take notes about how they are interacting with each other, and please take notes about my own work as a facilitator. And after those sessions, we would usually have a debriefing moment in which the students would share with me their thoughts, their reactions to that conversation. And that would be really, that was really helpful for me, because the students would allow me to see things that sometimes had escaped me. I remember, for instance, one student that had facilitated a dialogue that was mostly between white American men, and there were other immigrants present, but mostly, the main ones that were more active were to Latina women. And after one of those dialogue sessions, one of the students who was observing that dialogue, talked to me later and said, "Professor, I think that you were letting those those men talk to much. Much more so than those women. And, and I wonder if that if there's anything you can do in your facilitation to prevent that." And I thought that was a great point, and that led me to some critical self reflection. And I know that from the literature on dialogue, I already know that people who occupy dominant social positions, be them positions of gender, class, race, ethnicity, they tend to dominate conversations as well, right. So that was a learning moment for me very early in the process. That was one of the first dialogues that are facilitated. And I had to learn to, as a facilitator, observe when that was happening when we had some participants who tended to dominate a conversation. And as a facilitator, you have to intervene to have their, to limit their comments, to limit the amount of time that they take, to give opportunity to other people, to make sure that we are not arriving at false consensus, to make sure that everyone has a chance to speak and can share honestly. And that was something that I realized, thanks to the comment of a student. And later one other student actually did a quantitative analysis of the text, including of the transcript of that dialogue session, and we could see in the numbers how those men actually had dominated that, that time in that dialogue, right. The number, if you if we look at the number of words that they had uttered, in comparison to all the participants, there was a difference. And that led me to pay attention to that kind of discrepancy much more, so the students can make a really impactful contribution to a project like this.

Wow. So Dr. Filomeno, what you're telling me here, this is really exciting stuff. Because you're bringing students meaningfully into these projects. They're making contributions far beyond just holding a clipboard, right? They're actually doing original research sometimes on aspects of this, that you're not focusing on in your own work and providing opportunities for them to perhaps work on this in a realm that would lead to presentations at conferences or publications. You're doing this research in a rigorous way that's producing meaningful social science contributions, and you're also giving back to these communities right in our backyard. That, in my mind, is very much the future of the social sciences right there. It sounds like an incredibly great way to integrate sort of all of our different roles as faculty, as people who are interested in performing service, people who are interested in contributing to the scholarly community, people who are interested in serving our students. That is really awesome. And on that note, thinking about the future of the social sciences, we only have a little bit of time left, but I also wanted to talk to you a bit in your capacity as the Associate Director of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. Tell me a bit about your view on CS3, the social sciences at UMBC, and perhaps the future of these programs.

So the Center is celebrating now five years of existence. So we are in a process of transition, we will start a strategic planning probably in the spring. And I'm very optimistic about the social sciences at UMBC. I think we are a powerhouse. And actually I just spoke a few weeks ago with a new faculty member at UMBC, who was recruited for the job that she now has at UMBC. And she told me that this podcast was one of the reasons why she accepted the offer, because she listened to all of the episodes and she learned that we have a vibrant, collaborative, interdisciplinary, social science community on our campus, thanks to the podcast. So that was great to see, right. I almost told her "Can I record you saying this now?" (Ian laughing). And, and I agree with her. I think the podcast does reflect who we are as a social science community. When I arrived at UMBC, I am as you know, a professor of political science in Global Studies. Global Studies is an interdisciplinary undergraduate program. So from my very first semester, I was in connection with faculty from many different departments, not just political science. And to me, that was a pleasure because my major back in college was in economics, my master's was in economic history, my doctoral degree is in sociology, and I ended up as a professor of political science. And so my trajectory is already interdisciplinary. So it's a pleasure to me to be able to connect with faculty, not just from my own department, but from across the social sciences, and even across the university, if we think about cross-college, interdisciplinary collaboration with the STEM fields, for instance. And at UMBC, we are a mid-sized university, we're not we're not a small liberal arts college, we're not a huge, sprawling university. So we have that perfect critical size in which, you know, we can do research with other people, we can collaborate, we are not isolated. And so we can know everyone by on a first name basis, and do good research together, and UMBC faculty just like our students, I said earlier, they are talented, and they are also oriented to service and public good. Our faculty is like that, too. They are very smart, brilliant, and also mission driven. So in my position as Associate Director of CS3, my, the favorite part of my job is to engage, connect with all these faculty members from different departments and programs.

Dr. Felipe Filomeno, I could not agree more with your sentiments. It's a really exciting time to be in the social sciences at UMBC. And I want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today, and to just really, I think, cap off a great celebration of our 50th episode, and also the fifth year that is of the CS3 program. Yeah, there's a lot more to come and a lot more in the next five years and a lot more in the next 50 episodes. So thanks for celebrating with us, and again, thanks so much for all of your insights today.

Thank you for having me.

Now it's time for Campus Connections, the part of the podcast where we connect today's featured concept to other work happening on UMBC's campus. And as it turns out, our production assistant Jean has a connection that leads us right back to the ongoing work of Dr. Filomeno. Jean, what is a CoLab, and what does it have to do with our guest?

Hi, Dr. Anson. I can't believe this is the podcast's 50th episode. I've learned so much from working on this podcast and I'm excited for what the future holds for Retrieving the Social Sciences. For this week's Campus Connection, I will be talking about the UMBC Interdisciplinary CoLab Program. So the CoLab Program is a collaboration between the Provost’s Interdisciplinary Activities Advisory Committee, the Dresher Center for the Humanities, and Summer/Winter Programs where students can participate in a team-based, applied-learning opportunity through a three-credit paid internship in narrative-based research. In these interdisciplinary teams, undergraduate students work with a faculty member to utilize diverse research methods, modes of analysis, and technical tools to produce public-facing final projects. Last year, one of the CoLab 2023 projects was actually led by our guest Dr. Filomeno and entitled "A Narrative- based Curriculum for Writing and Civic Engagement of Youth." The project created a writing and civic engagement workshop for Latinx youth in Baltimore to bridge the opportunity gap. The workshop consisted of oral histories by local Latinx community leaders, news stories about the local Latinx community, writing prompts, and discussion questions. The Latino Racial Justice Circle, a local nonprofit, even runs these workshops in public high schools for Latinx students. It's making a real impact. There are a diverse array of projects which all provide a professional research experience while learning to tell effective stories and amplify voices to the general public. If you're interested, be sure to visit the CoLab's page on UMBC. And keep an eye out for the application which will be released in spring. And that's all for this week's Campus Connection.

Thanks for explaining CoLabs, Jean, and for providing us with such a great Campus Connection as always. I'd like to extend a special thanks to you, the listeners, as well for supporting this podcast over its first 50 episodes. Candidly, I started this podcast during the depths of COVID in my basement as a way to reach out and connect to other scholars, and I'm so delighted to know that it's helped so many folks learn more about the social sciences here at UMBC. And so for the 50th time and certainly not the last, I hope that, like all of us at CS3, you will keep questioning.

Retrieving the Social Sciences is a production of the UMBC Center for Social Science Scholarship. Our director is Dr. Christine Mallinson, our Associate Director is Dr. Felipe Filomeno, and our undergraduate production assistant is Jean Kim. Our theme music was composed and recorded by D'Juan Moreland. Find out more about CS3 at socialscience@umbc.edu and make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, where you can find full video recordings of recent CS3 sponsored events. Until next time, keep questioning.