Urban Research Based Action Network

Meeting of the L.A. URBAN core group at the UCLA César E. Chávez Department for Chicana/o Studies. Photo by Patricia Molina Costa.

Now in its fifth year, the Urban Research-Based Action Network (URBAN), is a field-building network incubated at CoLab that supports collaborative research between universities and activist communities seeking institutional and policy change. URBAN is a joint effort among scholars -- at the City University of New York Graduate Center, CoLab, University of Massachusetts, Boston -- and the highly-regarded academic publishing house, SAGE Publications. URBAN brings together community-based social justice organizations that seek rigorous research methods to analyze their circumstances and options for addressing institutional failure, and academic researchers eager to put their work to practical use making change in the real world. Under CoLab’s leadership, URBAN grew to over 1,000 members, with nodes of activists and activist scholars in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and more recently in Hartford, as well as in substantive areas-- American Educational Research Association (AERA), ongoing convenings and panels with the Urban Affairs Association. Last year, in keeping with URBAN’s commitment to embed itself within public higher education institutions, CoLab spun off leadership of URBAN to the CUNY GC, where it continues to grow into a robust nationwide network.

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Summer 2016 URBAN Newsletter