About the Journal

The Social Justice Research Collaborative is a home for community engaged interdisciplinary work produced by scholars at UIC in partnership with communities in the Chicagoland area. The SJRC was created by a group of UIC scholars and researchers as a mechanism for developing and amplifying interdisciplinary and engaged work that has long been central to UIC’s mission, but has not always received the academic recognition it deserves. Our hope is that our authors will use the SJRC as a platform to shape their work in progress and find new and exciting ways to develop their research and scholarship for various audiences who might not otherwise have access. 

The SJRC collection serves as a developmental space where authors obtain peer review by UIC colleagues and prepare work for broader distribution. Our pieces range in genre, content, and format; yet they all have the common theme of collaboration among research and community action. Each article has been peer reviewed by UIC scholars and researchers and our authors continue to develop their pieces with different end goals: some to bring their work to public audiences who might not traditionally engage with scholarly work, some to make their work accessible to undergraduate classrooms, and all with the intention of making research with communities rather than about communities in the Chicagoland area a priority. 

The SJRC podcast project is an important part of our work to expand the forms research can take if it is to be distributed to various audiences. Communicating community engaged work through an audio format is a practice we hope to encourage among our community engaged scholars and researchers. We see the potential to expand audiences for academic work at the same time that we can co-produce materials that can be used by community partners in their networks. 

We invite you to journey through reading and listening to the incredible scholarship and collaboration highlighted in each piece of our collection. We are proud to feature this groundbreaking work and welcome you to consider how you can become involved in similarly collaborative work, either as a researcher, a student, or in your own community.