Lauren Martin
I
am a Cultural Anthropologist, deeply interested in community-engaged
research conducted with respect and integrity and directed towards
social justice. I received my Ph.D. in Anthropology in
2004 from the New School for Social Research in New York, NY. My dissertation was entitled:
“Domination and The Domestic: Witchcraft, Women’s Work and Marriage
in Early Modern Scotland.” While
looking for an academic teaching job in History and Anthropology I began doing
some part-time community work in north Minneapolis. The work and commitments I made to the residents of the Northside
changed the course of my career trajectory from a traditional academic career
path to community-based participatory action research.
Between 2004
and 2007 I directed research at two community-based organizations,
where I designed and conducted high-impact, community-driven research,
most notably on prostitution with over 450 stakeholder participants,
including 155 sex workers. Our
goal was to reduce the harms of prostitution for people involved
in prostitution, their families and their communities using accurate
knowledge, a coalition of committed stakeholders, and targeted
prevention/intervention efforts. The prostitution data has allowed me
to: build lasting collaborations between unlikely partners (i.e.,
sex workers and police); write numerous reports, presentations,
and policy briefs; drive systems change and on the ground intervention
and prevention efforts related to prostitution; and write scholarly
articles. My new research project in this area is called, “Children
of Women in Prostitution.” It
was developed from interviews with women who trade sex and adult
children of women who traded sex. In
2006, as a community-based researcher, I began working with colleagues
from the Center for Early Education and Development (CEED), Hennepin
County, the Youth Coordinating Board, Way to Grow and others to
develop Five Hundred under Five (FHu5) focused on children and
families in poverty on the Northside. Our goal is to improve school readiness and health outcomes
through research, intervention and systems change. In November 2007, I joined CEED and moved from the community
to the University of Minnesota to manage FHu5 research efforts
and help build community engagement capacity. Representing
FHu5 and CEED, I am a steering committee member and chair of the
Standards and Accountability Subcommittee for the Northside Achievement
Zone (NAZ), an exciting re-visioning of the Harlem Children’s
Zone for north Minneapolis. Since
moving to the University of Minnesota, in addition to FHu5 and
the NAZ, I continue to conduct prostitution research, intervention,
prevention and policy.
I am committed
to developing, using, and promoting forms of research that utilize
the knowledge and wisdom of participants in research design, questions,
methodology and conduct. Children,
Youth and Family Consortium (CYFC) and the scholars program is
a perfect way for me to learn and contribute methodologies and
participatory research strategies more broadly and further
my on-the-ground research and work on school readiness and health
with Northside families. The common thread of all my work is collaborative,
community-based research that drives policy and intervention for
social justice and change. My
long-term goal is to continue this work and honor the commitments
I have made to research participants to “do something” with
the information they provided me. I am thrilled to conduct “Kids,
Communities and Researchers: A Study of Research on the Intersections
Between Education and Health Disparities” with CYFC and the
scholars’ cohort. We have a great deal to learn from and
share with each other. I
believe we will develop ways to better serve and learn from our
research participants, create trusting connections between researchers
and communities, and generate accurate and reliable basic knowledge
about reducing health and education disparities.
