Commitments

Localizing the Global

The UC San Diego Community Stations "localize the global" by mobilizing the resources and capacities of the public research university toward urgent issues close to home. The San Diego–Tijuana border region is a microcosm of the many injustices and deprivations experienced by vulnerable people everywhere. While the Center on Global Justice has many projects abroad, the UC San Diego Community Stations enable us to intervene more robustly closer to home, where we have the most familiarity and knowledge, long-term community partnerships, the most capacity to act, and are likeliest therefore to have meaningful impact. The Community Stations enable a proximity and immediacy not typically available to researchers and university students in the US, who often travel thousands of miles from campus to engage sites of global poverty. Our students can be doing fieldwork in the morning in an informal Tijuana settlement, and back that same afternoon on campus in San Diego, enabling a unique convergence of theory and practice.

Co-Producing Knowledge: A New Model of “Service"

The UC San Diego Community Stations redefine what it means for a university to “do service” in diverse, underserved communities. Our work is grounded in long-term partnerships of trust and commitment. We reject a vertical conception of charity or “applied research” — where the university is understood as the bearer of knowledge and resources, and the community as a passive recipient or a mere subject of data gathering. Instead we embrace a collaborative, or horizontal, model of engagement, in which university and community relate as partners both contributing knowledges and resources, and actively participating in collaborative research, learning and problem solving. We co-produce new knowledge, co-produce solutions. Tipping the model from a vertical to a horizontal plane is an ethical move.

Diversity In Situ: A New Model of “Experiential Learning”

The UC San Diego Community Stations advance a distinctive approach to diversity and cultivating a campus culture of respect and decency. We are committed not only to diversifying campus demographics, and campus culture, which are essential, but also to developing new mechanisms of engagement and partnership between the campus and local underserved communities of color, that exemplify today’s most urgent social challenges. Through experiential learning in these environments, we can train our students how to exercise ethical responsibility in an increasingly diverse social and political world. We cultivate skills of cultural sensitivity and respect, of suspending judgment, listening and collaborating. These are skills that are best learned in situ, exemplifying UC San Diego's commitment to experiential learning.

Interdisciplinarity

Today’s social challenges are not confined to disciplines, nor can their solutions be. The UC San Diego Community Stations help students recognize the intersectionality of challenges faced by underserved communities of color—including physical, ecological, social, economic, health, mental health, educational, cultural and urban policy challenges. Student researchers come from majors and minors across the campus—in the social sciences, arts and humanities, the natural and physical sciences, engineering and public health. Working in interdisciplinary teams, they learn to analyze social disparity through multiple lenses, learn to communicate across disciplinary languages, and to collaborate with each other and with our community partners.