UC Berkeley

Using ethnographic methods, this research explores how two multicultural groups of young people encounter and understand each other. One group consists of 18-22-year-old university students from a prestigious public university in Northern California; the other group of 14-18-year-old high school students from economically disadvantaged urban high schools located near the university. This research draws upon extensive participant observation and interviews to capture complex processes of negotiation between two groups of young people differently positioned on educational trajectories, yet bound together through university-community partnerships.

This study offers a theoretical intervention in the literature on service learning and university-community partnerships by adding a racialized and classed analysis, and by situating the research within broader conversations about educational inequality, discourses of urbanity, and geographies of youth. The research contributes racial, linguistic, and spatial analysis, exposing the ways in which two particular service-learning programs operated through bodily, linguistic, affective, and spatial practices.

The research reveals, through an analysis of field notes, interviews, and written materials, that for undergraduates and inner-city youth, perceptions of urban spaces, educational opportunities and inequalities, as well as understandings of racial, ethnic, and classed identities shift over time through participation in educational programming. However, for undergraduates and youth, perspectives evolve in divergent ways. This study also finds that assumptions about places are projected onto populations of people, and those constructions exert influence in forming conceptions of schools, neighborhoods, and the people who make up those sites, illustrating the role of the imagination in maintaining borders. Larger discourses about urbanity, education, race, and class, which circulate in society, shape the contours of the conversations, movements, and meanings in between groups of young people. However, this research suggests that far more continuity between university and community populations exists than homogenizing categorizations such as "university" or "community" would indicate. Finally, this study asserts that, while ideals of hope, humanity, and academic excellence are often fostered at the individual level through university-community partnerships, colorblind ideology, meritocracy, and institutionalized borders may be perpetuated as well.

Furthermore, this research produces new knowledge about how relations of power shape young people's educational routes, assumptions about the world, and understandings of difference, revealing how institutional and individual experiences within educational sites are intertwined and play out through bodily, linguistic, and spatial practices. It contributes theoretical and practical insights related to ways that university-community relations might be strengthened and re-imagined. While university-community programs work to intervene in patterns of educational inequality, they also potentially reproduce colorblind ideologies and discourses that circulate in schools and society. The research concludes with a set of pedagogical and curricular recommendations aimed at achieving greater collaboration and interdependence at institutional and individual levels. With curricular support that offers socio-cultural guidance, this study suggests that partnerships can be theoretically rigorous, multidirectional, and serve as sites of re-imagination about people and places.