Traversing the Challenges of Community Engagement in South Africa: Emerging Researchers’ Perspectives

With the growing emphasis being placed on community engagement, many emerging scholars have found themselves in the field with much to learn beyond the research that they are conducting. Community engagement is guided by principles such as the mutual exchange of knowledge, collaboratively identifying community priorities and an ongoing focus on strengthening and sustaining communities. In practice, community engagement is fraught with various challenges that need to be navigated. These challenges present themselves in different ways to different researchers. In this article, we draw on our experiences as three emerging researchers navigating community-engaged research across two geographic spaces in South Africa, namely, the Western Cape and Gauteng, two of the country’s nine national provinces. The objectives of this article are to explore our experiences of relationship building, to determine the role our positionalities have played in our engaged scholarship, and to explore feelings of disconnectedness as young academics. Following a qualitative reflexive approach, we identified three themes that speak to these objectives, namely, navigating newcomer status and building relationships in community-engaged spaces, reflections on researcher positionality in the field, and the dilemma of (dis)connectedness in engaged scholarship. Our findings highlight the need for support such as mentorship from experienced community-engaged scholars, resources for establishing community connections, guidance in navigating cultural nuances, and training for effective communication and relationship building in communities.