Using feminist scholarship to build an academic-community research partnership

Background: As an academic-community partnership, ADAPT (Addressing disparities in Asian populations through translational research) represents a cross-campus collaboration of administrators, researchers, clinicians, and students from Tufts University and Tufts Medical Center and community partners from Chinatown. The groundwork for ADAPT was laid by Asian clinicians and researchers within Tufts Medical Center and researchers who wanted to improve care to the Asian community and secure extramural support for research on Asian health that added to the evidence-base on this community. ADAPT formalized in November 2011 and over the last year blossomed into an authentic academic-community research partnership focused on improving the health of Chinatown. Methods: This paper is rooted in feminist scholarship. In looking at the development of feminist scholarship, biography and knowledge “co-evolve.” As such, knowledge production has personal, sense-making value, can have currency for one's career, and social change or social reproduction. Results: ADAPT serves as an incubator and a community building space. It has supported fifteen grants, pilot projects in the community, the development of a new community-based organization focused on Asian American women's health and created opportunities for researchers and community partners to meet, build trust relationships and have bi-directional conversations about how research can improve clinical practice and address community identified needs. Conclusion: We hope that ADAPT provides a case study of how to build a university's commitment to be responsive to its host communities and embody a spirit of institutional responsibility.