Lived Experience Interview:
Dr. Mark Warren — URBAN Founder, Policy Scholar, Movement Builder

In this interview, conducted at the 2025 URBAN National Conference, Dr. Mark Warren reflects on 30-year career in community-engaged research that has focused on education justice, racial equity, and community liberation. With others, he co-founded Urban 12 years ago and advises emerging and practiced scholars to stay true to their values, be self-reflective, be aware of power dynamics, and build lasting relationships.

JCEC
Can you tell me a bit about yourself, the work that you do, and how you ended up being connected to the URBAN Research Network?

Mark
I’m a Professor of Public Policy & Public Affairs at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. I’m a sociologist, and I’ve been doing community-engaged work and research of one sort or another for 30 years now, starting with my dissertation. I study and work with community, parent and youth organizing groups that are struggling for education, justice, racial equity, and community liberation. I was doing that for a long time and about 12 years ago I was one of the four people who founded URBAN along with Michelle Fine, Jose Calderon, and Dana Cunningham. I did that because I had personally felt kind of isolated in trying to figure out how to do this work. There were people out there. I just didn’t know them. I had to discover them over a period of time, and I definitely didn’t know them when I was starting out. So, I really felt the value of having the support and learning from, and sharing with, other community-engaged scholars. I thought the idea of building URBAN, a place where people can come and find that support and learn to do better was important; particularly for younger, newer scholars having a place because, even at that time of life, people were often still isolated. They’d be in universities where they’re the only one, or they’d be getting the support of faculty who are more traditionally oriented. Actually, things have changed a lot in the last 12 or 13 years, but at that time, it was still very difficult and challenging. It still is, but it was much more so then. And also, I wanted to do something with Michelle Fine and Jose Calderon. I deeply respected them, and l also had learned from them and Dana Cunningham too. Dana and I were friends, so I was already more connected. It was about relationships. So, it’s been wonderful to see URBAN grow and develop over those years.

JCEC
How do you tend to think about collaboration and what kinds of collaborative relationships or practices are you or your organization engaged in?

Mark
I, personally, have moved from a more transactional way of building these collaborations to more of what I call “transformational.” I build the relationships over time. At first, it’s more like, “Well, I want to do something that I think is going to be important and would be interesting and important academically,” and then reaching out to community organizers. Now, it’s building in a way that collaborates with people on the ground who are doing organizing, and we kind of come together with like, “Oh, we can do this project together that we both benefit from.” I think over time it’s more moved to, “I’m just part of the movement — this movement where together we have different roles, and we’ve become much closer.” So, we built community among friends, and I think the relationships are more also based on love, now — maybe before, based on respect, but now a much closer relationship, where the partnerships have a transformative impact on each other. So, that’s been incredibly rewarding for me, and I think it’s made our collaborations much richer and deeper.

I think part of it is my own journey with a large community of partners, but I think also any particular project tends to start a little bit more transactional, then as people get to know each other and build community, it can become more transformation., especially if you work intentionally to build a relationship. I’m a white male professor and almost all my work is with Black and Brown communities…almost all my partnerships are with organizers of color, and so we’ve got to deal with issues of power and positionality over time and build trust as we build closer relationships and are willing to change – I often get challenged and need to change, but everybody has issues regarding being willing to put these kinds of things on the table and be open to change. Over time, people are more willing to challenge me. I’ve learned and grown a lot through these relationships. They have changed my life. [The research] has changed my life. I also don’t make a distinction between research over here, the rest of my life over there. What I’m learning in my partnership with my spouse, or what I’m learning with my family, or when I learn from the community I live in, then it becomes part of how I act in the world of research and vice versa. So, you know, I’ve learned so much from the organizers that have not just influenced my scholarship but have just changed my life.

I should say that the formation that I really build these relationships in is something called The People’s Think Tank for Education Justice, https://peoplesthinktank.us/ and that was a formation that grew out of the participatory research that I was doing with organizers. Here is the story: About seven or eight years ago, I was approached by the Ford Foundation to bring different people together across different sections of the education justice movement, drawing in mostly the organizers that I had had relationships with and others. We were to write a book that would document and say, “Well, we now have a new iteration of an education justice movement”. And some of the organizers challenged me and said, “Well, why should you write this book? You’ve already written, like, four books now, and even though you work hard to be accountable to us and we appreciate the work you’re doing, when do we ever get to write our own stories?” That was another one of these transformational challenges for me. And I said, “Well, yeah, I hear you. So maybe I should use my talents to help you write your own essays and then curate them into the book.” And that’s how we came up with the book Lift Us Up, Don’t Push Us Out! Voices From the Front Lines of the Educational Justice Movement, which is all essays by people themselves. I went through this long process — which I don’t have to get all into. How do you do that, right, with people who are not necessarily writers, or don’t have the time to write or whatever? I can talk about that another time, but we did it and, out of that process when the book was done, I was like, “Okay, this is great, you know, we’re done!” And the organizers said, “No, we don’t want to be done. This space has already been powerful for us, so why can’t we stay together and become a People’s Think Tank https://peoplesthinktank.us/ and continue to do this kind of work of documenting and lifting up our stories and strategies?” And we did. That was the point of transformation of our relationships, that have become increasingly closer, me feeling a part of the movement with a particular role…so wonderful. Yeah, that’s my story.

JCEC
Based on your experience, what would you say are some collaboration-best-practices that you would suggest others use in their collaborative relationships — particularly in this current context of great social upheaval and uncertainty?

Mark
I think the first thing I would say is to try to be true to your values and don’t let people tell you that you have to put off this work until you write your dissertation, get a job, or get tenure because you’ll never do it, or you may not ever do it. And there are ways of doing it and having a successful career in the academic world. I have had one. I’ve had ups and downs as well, and defeats and problems because of the work I do. Now I am a full-tenured, full professor, so I have been able to do it. And yes, I’m a white man, but I see many other people of various racial and gender identities who’ve been able to do it, too. So, I would say, “Stay true to your values, do the work that you really believe in, and don’t let the institutions push you into these more traditional boxes.” So that would be one thing.

Secondly, I would say, I consider myself on a journey in this work, and I think that it’s helpful to think about it that way. Ask yourself, who are the people, experiences, communities that have shaped you on your journey to community engaged scholarship? Just be very self-reflective and think about the learning and growth, not just as a graduate student but forever after. Being self-reflective is huge and reflecting with other people, I think, is hugely important. Who are we in this work? How are we giving to it, but also gaining from it as scholars and also as human beings? I think that’s second.

The third thing — and I probably have a lot of things — would be that I think it’s really important to build relationships long term. And there’s tension around that. What kind of commitments are you making? And maybe it doesn’t mean forever for the rest of your life, but I’ve learned that people really value the relationships and, if you build them, you can move through lots of tensions and difficulties. We start with one project, but that’s not the end. It rolls into something else, assuming everybody wants to keep working together, and usually people do. I think the work can get richer and deeper over time. And if you’re constantly like, “Oh, I just got this one project; now I do something completely different,” then it’s hard to build transformative relationships. For me, the next project comes out of the one before. Maybe not everybody else moves along with it, but most do, and then maybe other people also come in. For me, it’s meaningful, but I also think it’s ends up becoming deeper, richer work.

JCEC
Is there anything you would like to add?

Mark
Everybody’s different, but I think that, for me, I do think of myself as a scholar who’s basically helping to build movements. That’s why I do this work,. That’s so meaningful for me, but I think that’s hard as an academic. Very few academics will understand that mission, outside of the world of URBAN. But I think it’s important to hold on to that because there are a lot of pressures in the mainstream academy. You can decide to do this work outside the academy, but if you decide to do it in the academy and try to make a career out of it, there is constant systems pressure on you reinforcing more dominant and hierarchical ways of being. So holding on to your values and really having a strong identity that’s connected to other people who aren’t just in the academy is really essential. You can lose yourself if you try to get too far into the academy. I have one foot in the academy and one foot out in the education justice movement, and over time, probably even more of a foot out. But I think having them in both places — for me — it’s been really necessary and has helped me create a meaningful life.