Engaged Scholars: Townsand Price-Spratlen

November 2024

Engaged Scholars is a series highlighting Ohio State faculty who have made an impact in our communities through their community-engaged research and teaching.

Townsand Price-Spratlen
Professor
College of Arts and Sciences/Sociology

My scholarship engages community in several ways. I have done participatory action research in much of my work (PAR; i.e., emancipatory, community-based). This began when, as an undergraduate, I volunteered and interned at a work release facility. It continued in my first job out of undergrad working in an adult literacy program, and in grad school research projects with unhoused persons who had health challenges, and through disease and suicide prevention initiatives. As a faculty member, my earlier published research showed how historical community engagements of NAACP activism, religious and labor organizing, and "race papers" (newspapers directed at an African American readership) shaped urbanization, collective efficacy and the improved health/well-being of the African American "Great Migration." More recently, I have collaborated with prisons, returning citizens, Black church coalitions, addiction recovery and faith-based health organizations in several U.S. cities. My books (Reconstructing Rage, Nurturing Sanctuary, Addiction Recovery and Resilience) and recent articles (e.g., Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly) are products of these PAR projects. In them, I analyzed community contributions of returning citizens, how urban religious coalitions nurture the health of African American and other minoritized adolescents, and how persons in long-term sobriety maintain a healing organization and help reduce health disparities.

Why is it important to engage the community in your research and teaching?

I am the product of blood family and other social ties going back generations, who did community engaged activities within and through whatever their life station and place of actions were. By engaging the community in my research and teaching, I am able to honor those women and men, and the foundation(s) their good works built. I contribute to the living legacies of W.E.B. Du Bois, Audre Lorde, Paulo Freire and other scholar-activists whose lives and good works I admire, and have been in dialogue with, as I do my work. I am able to mentor others in community engaged scholarship, not as a convenience trope, or self-aggrandizement. Rather, as a life praxis, a means of contributing to stability, growth and beneficial transformations of marginalized persons, and caring others, through the organizations, communities and society I am a part of. The classroom and university are in a reciprocity (i.e., Sacred exchange) with the rest of the community and its members. How I and others individually and collectively share our time, energy and craft of care, with community members within and between caste and strata, is perhaps the most foundational measure of a life worthwhile.

What led you to the path of engaged scholarship? How did you get started?

My path began by being raised in a household where a phrase like "community engagement for greater opportunities and a broader justice" was never stated, yet was repeatedly demonstrated. Being the youngest of five children, one of my earliest memories is being amazed when one of my older sisters collected money for UNICEF (United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund) as we trick or treated for Halloween. My sister's calm, patient presentation of the little orange container, and the donations she collected, were more important to her than screaming "trick or treat!" at the door, and any candy she received. Though she never said that, it became clear to me as a life lesson for the pre-adolescent child I was. Seeing her be of service to a mission to help people she did not know, and would never meet or interact with in any way, led me to be curious, and to want to do the same. So I did so in the following years. From that early life lesson, within and beyond charity alone, I was attentive to other, similar family and community examples. Finding my voice as an agent of change and how community engagement could be expressed in my life, went from being an unspoken parental expectation, to a sibling affirmation, and into an understanding of what quality scholarship is, and can be.

How has your scholarship benefited from engaging with community partners?

My scholarship has benefitted in many ways I can only begin to summarize here. It has been made richer, more thorough, and "thicker" (in the Clifford Geertz' "thick description" sense of the term) by the voices, anguish, triumphs and possibilities of each person, organization, and community with which I have been in contact; from the work release returning citizens during my undergraduate volunteer experience, to the current Medicaid enrollees whose isolation and loneliness we are helping to reduce now, my scholarship is reflective of a nuanced "fund of necessary polarities," as Audre Lorde described, or diversities of beneficial difference and community. From that fund, however much phrases like "has been made more credible," "creative and insightful," "authentic and emancipatory," have any meaning in my life, I work for them to be relevant as answers to this question.

What has been a highlight of your community engagement experience?

The professional highlight is being nominated by a colleague for, and then receiving, a 2024 Community Engaged Scholar Award from the College of Arts and Sciences and Ohio State University. The communal highlight is having been present at a remarkable meeting of Reconstruction, Inc., a returning citizen-led, capacity building organization in Philadelphia. During the meeting, everyone present "checked in," sharing a brief reflection on the personal, familial, and communal aspects of our lives. This included reflections of a returning citizen's family member who had just turned four years old, and of a different returning citizen's family member who was 89 years old. The equity, power, and restorative justice capacity building, of that moment of shared mission across generations, was among the special moments of my life.

What advice would you give to faculty and students who are interested in engaging the community in their scholarship?

1. Start from where you are, and nurture relationships with people, organizations and communities you respect
2. Start small, and give yourself and the organization(s) the opportunity to grow relationships between the achievement of the organization's mission, and the refinement of your research intentions and contributions
3. Wherever possible, prioritize and sustain equity between the researcher, organizational leadership and rank and file affiliates, at every process stage; i.e., in the development, design, sampling and data collection, analyses, and research deliverables
4. As you progress, in whatever ways possible, contribute to expressions of "The Beloved Community" Professor Josiah Royce first described during the early 20^th Century era of the Social Gospel, and that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. popularized and gave deeper meaning to, during their lifetimes.

Sample Engaged Scholarship

Publication, book 1 Addiction Recovery and Resilience: Faith-Based Health Services in an African American Community. (2022). New York: State University of New York Press.

Publication, book 2 Nurturing Sanctuary: Community Capacity Building in African American Churches. (2015). New York: Peter Lang.

Publication, book 3 Reconstructing Rage: Transformative Reentry in the Era of Mass Incarceration. (2012). New York: Peter Lang.

Publication, report 2024 Ohio Medicaid Released Enrollees Study (OMRES) Chartbook and Report. The Medicaid Pre-Release Enrollment (MPRE) Program, Medicaid Enrollment, and Recidivism. Earlier project data collection and analyses included sociotherapeutic focus groups and in-depth interviews with 142 returning citizens, assessing their return to community experiences throughout Ohio. I have co-authored this and other reports, assessing Medicaid access as a trust institution among two cohorts of Ohio returning citizens. We have shown how early Medicaid enrollment improves personal stability, reduces the risk of criminal participation, and improves public safety by significantly reducing both long-term (three-year recidivism; N=15,051) and short-term (arrest within 1 year of release; N=6,738) criminal justice outcomes.

Teaching Sociology 2367.02: Urban Social Problems. I teach this as a service learning course where students explore the theory and practices of restorative justice and community capacity building. Students engage in participant-observation activities at a local nonprofit organization to understand how the organization(s) address local urban social problems and achieve their community mission.