Extractive Knowledge: Epistemic and Practical Challenges for Higher Education Community Engagement

Extractive knowledge is prevalent in higher education community engagement. It is a type of epistemic injustice that is harmful to the historically and systemically minoritized communities and community nonprofits that many universities, particularly predominately white institutions, seek to engage. Extractive knowledge results from what we can think of as transactional relationships with community members or community nonprofits. These are largely superficial but impactful relationships perpetuating injustice in higher education spaces that imagine themselves working to create greater justice. In this article, we make two primary arguments: a.) Extractive knowledge is an epistemic injustice prevalent in community-engaged higher education, and b.) The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's model for transformative community engagement and the Fitz Center for Leadership in Community's Practice Principles provide strategies and models for more epistemically just approaches to community engagement that shape knowledge in epistemically responsible ways, in partnership with communities and alignment with communities' goals and outcomes, this paper finishes with the Fitz Center's Health Equity Program and a community-led partnership as examples of these Practice Principles that lead toward reciprocal, responsible, community-driven, and transformational community engagement.