Abstract:

Many community-based or collaborative studies of the universities are being conducted, though not all cases have worked satisfactorily. It is difficult in such attempts to share knowledge on how to manage a project because researchers tend to consider such information as peripheral and hesitate to describe the process in detail in the article. However, it is very important and valuable to examine various cases and extract general knowledge from a theoretical viewpoint.
The aim of this study was to point out how to find the essential actors (human/ non-human) to maintain the collaboration. Socio-technical network analysis which was based on the Actor Network Theory (Latour, 1987;2005; Callon, 1984) was employed to determine the essential points for constructing and maintaining a project under a university–community collaboration.
In this study, the author especially paid attention to the cases in which the university researchers added academic research interest to a project. Such a trial seemed to impede successful collaboration at first sight; though it invigorated and stabilized the collaboration dynamically, when it was planned deliberately.
Three different types of university–community collaborations were surveyed to illustrate the socio-technical networks and their temporal change. The first project was one for junior high school curriculum in Japan (placed in the formal education) for disaster prevention which continued for eleven years (2007-2017). The author was involved in the whole project. Data were obtained using participatory observations of the author and undergraduates, quantitative survey data from the junior high school students, and interviews with the teachers. The second one was a media literacy project for local children in Japan which was hold for ten months every year since 2009 and continues operating today. Data were obtained using participatory observations of the author and undergraduates, as well as survey data and interviews from the children in every year. The third project was an after school project in the United States, that is called the Fifth Dimension Project of University of California, San Diego. Data were collected at three of the project sites over the span of five months, and interviews were conducted with the professor and the students during 2010.
Data were used to figure out the related human/non-human actors and to illustrate the constellation and change of the socio-technical networks of the each project.
The result of the study showed that 1) Collaboration programs had considerable effects on undergraduate students. They were also highly evaluated by their communities. 2) It is important to understand each project as a more complicated network of actors rather than just as a simple relationship between the university and its community. There were conflicting interests between the university actors and the community ones. There also were conflicts within both sides. 3) Sometimes it made a lot of difference to call forth and mobilize various actors including “non-human actors” such as information and communication tools, school curriculum rules, and the physical and socioeconomic traits of the community. 4) When the collaboration was at a risk of termination because one of the actors left the network, it could avoid the extinction by reorganizing the socio-technical network (add a new actor or change the mutual relationship within other actors).

Keywords:

Socio-technical network, university, community, collaboration, Fifth Dimension Project.