Trent Community Research Centre

The topic of this project is the discipline of university-based community-based research, more specifically within the context of the Trent Community Research Centre. Its purpose is to review the archive of TCRC projects to find those of notable quality that may be highlighted at the TCRC's 25th anniversary conference, and to uncover what trends have developed within TCRC projects over the years. Interviews were conducted with host organizations, Trent faculty, and former TCRC staff. Ongoing archival research in addition to the interviews emphasized specific trends, including sociopolitical, environmental, economic and cultural. Analysis of these trends helps to situate the TCRC within the broader field of community-based research.

Abstract: OPIRG Peterborough celebrates its 40th anniversary of social and environmental justice activism in the Peterborough community. As a continuation of Rihannon Johnson's History of a Student-Led Organization I, this project chronicles the development of OPIRG Peterborough during the 1990's. Using sociologist Alan Sears' 'infrastructure of dissent' paradigm, each chapter explores a different social and environmental campaign that OPIRG Peterborough was involved with during the 1990's. In doing so, the historical evolution of the organization is traced. At the theoretical level, however, the infrastructure of dissent (and its implications for social mobilization) is re-evaluated in every chapter, culminating in a conclusion that posits that the infrastructure of dissent may be more applicable to the study of social movements than Sears originally conceptualized. By contextualizing OPIRG Peterborough as part of a wider student movement in Chapter One, it is seen that the infrastructure of dissent has a professional 'branch,' one that is necessary for the survival of grassroots organizations. By analysing the historical development of the Peterborough Ecology Garden in Chapter Two, it is argued that the infrastructure of dissent has the capacity to homogenize the organizational identities of environmental justice organizations that may otherwise appear fractured. In Chapter Three, the capacity for the infrastructure of dissent to foster individual identities within OPIRG Peterborough working groups is discussed. By developing these particular facets of the infrastructure of dissent, it is argued that the infrastructure itself may be key to formulating effective social mobilizations outside of strictly labour-political dichotomies.