Emerging Question: How do we honor community-based knowledge alongside traditional scholarship?

A profound and important tension emerged around the conditions of academic institutions who support the scholar to both enable and constrain the work of community-focused research. Fellows found themselves wrestling with systems that, at times, pulled researchers away from the deep, slow work of relationship-building toward productivity metrics and funding cycles that prioritize outputs over connection. Through the relational research community, scholars found relief and possibility in an academic-adjacent space that complements traditional research practices and explores embodied relational practices—a manifestation of the Middle Way that neither rejects nor fully adopts conventional academic structures.

Sarah Oh (Theological Studies and Community Development MTS/MA, Vanderbilt University) placed particular value in the openness of the space to explore spirituality, relationships, and community building beyond reaching objective research or evaluative goals. Drawing from her unique background growing up as the daughter of a pastor in Korean immigrant Christian congregations, this experience attuned her research to the complexity of religion's role in both facilitating and stunting the growth of authentic relational communities. Sarah's time in the relational research community allowed her the time and space to deepen her complex understanding of how institutional structures can simultaneously enable and constrain organic relationship-building.

The methodology Sarah uses to create her distinctive wall collage pieces demonstrates recursive integration in practice—the spiral pattern of returning to earlier elements with deeper awareness that characterizes an integrative relational approach and captures exactly this foundational integrative relational lens from which to practice community-engaged research.