Community-based leaders and civically engaged research: lessons from the remaking of the Latinx Organizational Archives Project

In this article, we show how, through a civically engaged research (CER) process, a political science project on Latino civic organizations was transformed by community-based leaders with decades of experience in organizing, movement-building, and driving change. We offer lessons for building community-academia research partnerships and, through three case studies, demonstrate the benefits of CER methodologies. Ultimately, by drawing on evidence from a multi-phase, multi-year community-academia collaboration, we show how a CER process can produce a more ethical, rigorous, and potentially useful research project for communities under study.