Joyce Duckles

Biography

Joyce Duckles specializes in family studies, community development, informal learning, and qualitative grounded theory and participatory research practices. Her current research includes an eight-year ethnographic collaborative project on urban community transformation, an investigation of the processes and outcomes of the training and education program “Engaging Older Adult Learners as Health Researchers (ENGOAL),” which aims to engage older adults from underserved and under-resourced communities as participants in health research, and a collaborative mixed-methods study to understand how to support local food and health practices and co-construct spaces for healthy and sustainable change.

In November 2018, her community-university research team expanded to include ENGOAL graduates. Sankofa Communiversity was founded as an intergenerational, collaborative community of research, scholarship and social activism. With 17 community researchers and graduate student apprentices, this collaborative works as co-researchers, co-authors, co-implementers, and co-activists with shared values of remembering history, building community, and grounding their practices in research. They present widely on relational strategies and models of urban transformation and activism, on supporting neighborhood and family well-being, and on addressing inequalities and disparities across community and health through re-framing practices of collaborative research and publicly engaged scholarship.