Dr. Angela Gist-Mackey’s Research for a More Equitable World
NCA recently had the opportunity to sit down with national award-winning organizational communication scholar, Dr. Angela Gist-Mackey, to discuss her exemplary career in community-engaged research as part of a new Spectra magazine series highlighting such contributions in and beyond the field. Earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism at Ohio University in 2003 and a Master of Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, Gist-Mackey initially pursued a career in strategic communication and advertising for about five years. After gaining this industry experience and reflecting on her previous positive experience in graduate school, Gist-Mackey decided to return to the academy to pursue a PhD in organizational communication at the University of Missouri. After completing her PhD in 2014, Gist-Mackey, now an associate professor, quickly secured a tenure-track position at the University of Kansas, which has been fortunate to have her ever since. In fact, KU most recently honored her with its Community Engaged Scholarship Award, which recognizes faculty members whose research or creative work, involving active collaboration with a community partner, simultaneously advances the field and enhances community wellbeing.
Initially falling in love with ethnographic methods in an anthropology course late in her undergraduate education, Gist-Mackey knew that she wanted to be formally trained in ethnographic and fieldwork methodologies in graduate school and naturally thought of organizational sites and organizing practices as foci for her research. These methodologies necessitate, and situated Gist-Mackey to view, community-engagement as essential and her industry experience also illuminated the direct implications of social scientific research for people’s work, lives, relationships, and communities. She stated, “I know that our work can help people in a very immediate sense and that we are trained to do research well in a way that many folks aren’t, and so that we have kind of an obligation and responsibility to make sure that our work reaches the people it can support and help.”
Gist-Mackey sees community-engaged scholarship as “leveraging institutional resources [(e.g., grant funds, research tools, etc.)] to support individuals, communities, and organizations who are on the margins who need it, who are grappling with communication challenges in their daily lived experience” and demonstrating a strong sense of moral duty to make people’s lives better through her career. Typically partnering with health and human service organizations, Gist-Mackey offers her community expert-level analysis to enhance their programs and culture while simultaneously providing students with opportunities to gain firsthand experience with community-engaged work. In fact, as part of a prospective graduate minor in qualitative methods at the University of Kansas, Gist-Mackey will be teaching a new graduate course during the upcoming fall semester on community-engaged qualitative research. Using Tim Huffman’s Qualitative Inquiries for Social Justice and partnering with one-to-two community organizations, depending on the size and interests of the class, to conduct an interdisciplinary project treating the students as a research team and teach a variety of methods including hands-on fieldwork, participant observation, interviews, and document/textual analysis. Students will also have the opportunity to publish with her, should they remain interested in being involved in the project after the semester concludes.
While conducting her dissertation research, Gist-Mackey first started cold-calling unemployment agencies and entities providing blue- and white-collar job search training, which was her first community-engaged project. Later, at KU, Gist-Mackey partnered with a county planning organization that led to research with a larger, citywide inter-organizational collaboration. This 50-60 person organizational team worked to address issues around welfare and the benefits cliff and also provided Gist-Mackey with great exposure to cultivate relationships and led to one of the projects that she is particularly proud of. One of her community collaborators had started a nonprofit organization that runs a financial literacy program and reached out to Gist-Mackey to request her expertise to evaluate the effectiveness of the program and identify areas for improvement. This collaborator was also in favor of a mixed methods approach, so Gist-Mackey worked with her colleague, Dr. Alesia Woszidlo, a post-positivist scholar of interpersonal and family communication, to design a longitudinal study, partially funded by NCA’s Research Cultivation Grant, from 2019 to 2024, which ultimately yielded evidence, feedback, and critiques on the financial literacy program and a forthcoming book project. Recommendations for the program included feedback on effective andragogy (i.e., educating adults), diversifying their staff and volunteers (especially in terms of race and class), translation of materials into languages other than English, and training to decrease class-based microaggressions. The organization embraced this critiques wholesale and now have diversified their staff—including hiring bilingual case managers, have improved their onboarding and training procedures based on these recommendations, and have expanded the program from serving one to four counties.
While teaching a graduate-level ethnography course, Gist-Mackey reached out to a women’s recovery center that she had connected with to see if they would be interested in partnering with her class to do a research project, which ultimately became another highlight of her career. Gist-Mackey noted that typically when she reaches out to organizations that she would like to partner with she will pitch the project using a 1-2 page executive summary (which she expands and returns to them after the project is completed) to communicate the benefits to organizations who work with academically trained researchers and to set expectations around timelines, confidentiality, her own interests in the project, and communication theory-related goals of the project. She reiterated the importance of transparency and mutual respect in the process and noted that sometimes organizations will develop a memorandum of agreement so that all parties are clear on the end objectives and deliverables for their commitment to the project. Additionally, she regularly engages in member checking, member reflections, and reflexive efforts to account for her own biases that may influence a given project. The women’s recovery center responded to Gist-Mackey’s outreach indicating interest and, noting concerns about racial equity in the organization, requested that the project focus on addressing those concerns.
When beginning a new project and partnership, Gist-Mackey begins formulating goals for the project around communication theory and which theories she would like to test and advance through the work. This, however, is typically of less interest to community organizations that will also provide topics of interest (e.g., racial equity, support, coping) and all parties will negotiate the development of the research methods and materials based on everyone’s goals for the project. Gist-Mackey elaborated, “I’m always asking … what do you want to know? How can this research serve you, your mission, your vision, your objectives as an organization?” For example, the women’s recovery center disclosed that they were situated in an inner-city location, but their community did not reflect the diversity of the surrounding area, and they had tried and failed to identify why this was the case. This organization wanted to work with Gist-Mackey and her students to identify why they were experiencing such racial inequity and what they can do to change this.
Through this project, the team managed to uncover that this organization had a reputation in the larger community for not being racially inclusive and their referral partners were intentionally not sending them families of color and that people who were underrepresented in the community did not feel comfortable celebrating their racial and ethnic cultures and identities so would default to other social identities such as motherhood and recovery. The research also identified strategies and recommendations to diversify referral partners, structurally change systems of recruitment and admission to the program, and make the daily cultural practices of the organization more inclusive. Gist-Mackey said that as long as the relationship between researchers and community partners are imbued with respect and all parties stay focused on shared goals to improve the organization’s ability to serve marginalized populations better the organizations are generally open to critique, no matter how harsh or intense, and the project will likely yield effective results. In fact, this organization used the recommendations from the project to develop their strategic plan for the next year and invited Gist-Mackey to review the plan and see if it was in line with the results of the project. She said:
Moreover, this organization has since achieved its goals and is thriving. People involved underwent numerous trainings and workshops, developed sets of community standards, doubled their occupancy, and have been formally recognized for their positive impact in the community. Gist-Mackey’s students also got hands-on experience in field work and community-engaged work that resulted in a complete dataset by the conclusion of the course and ultimately a published academic research article in Human Communication Research, one of the field’s premiere journals. Community-engaged research, however, also presents unique challenges and these projects, albeit largely successful, were no exception. Gist-Mackey said that the global COVID-19 pandemic disrupted both her projects with the women’s recovery center and the financial literacy program. For example, the financial literacy program shut down completely for a period of time and then moved fully online, so data collection had to be extended and Gist-Mackey had to renegotiate the terms of the study with the Institutional Review Board and the scope of participant compensation with the partner organization that had budgeted for a shorter timeline prior to this disruption. During the project with the women’s recovery center, Gist-Mackey’s team had a “messy learning opportunity” of a different nature. Given that the focus of the project was on race and racial equity, Gist-Mackey was intentional about pairing clients of color with students of color and white clients with white students for interviews, but these matches broke down on the staff side. Gist-Mackey said: We need to be very intentional about creating what we’re hoping is a safer place for people to really disclose their concerns. Things always don’t go according to plan and you just have to account for that. We’re definitely naming those things in our limitations for the project and being very just transparent about what didn’t go well. Gist-Mackey also mentioned that even her dissertation took a year longer than anticipated because she had originally planned to collect data for three months, felt that was not enough to do the project and herself justice, and extended the data collection to seven months. She said:
She went on to highlight the opportunities that we have as communication scholars to better understand pressing social issues through community-engaged research rather than learning about these issues through third-parties that lack nuanced understanding of the day-to-day challenges that people face who are directly impacted by social disparities. One of the things that Gist-Mackey is most proud of is that her work has allowed her to push back against oppressive systems and dispel myths, assumptions, and stereotypes about marginalized groups in ways that have fundamentally shifted the approach of organizations that she’s worked with who seek to better serve these individuals and communities. For these reasons, Gist-Mackey would like to see community-engaged scholarship become more prevalent in the field but also acknowledges that challenges such as the increased resources and time required to do this work well are unfortunately in conflict with mechanisms of tenure and promotion and timelines for graduation. She also noted that her institution is particularly supportive of community-engaged scholarship through their understanding of how necessarily increased time, rigor, and resources impacts the productivity of community-engaged work demonstrated in tenure review processes, institutional awards for community-engaged scholarship, internal monetary support for community-engaged projects, and institutional efforts to broker community-engaged partnerships (e.g., service learning opportunities).
Finally, Gist-Mackey encourages scholars who are interested in community-engaged scholarship to pursue it, even if it might not be their main program of research, because the work is worthwhile despite its challenges. She said: