ABSTRACT
This chapter stresses the need for faculty to make themselves useful and visible to their communities, particularly during times of crisis, when the university and its civic mission are under assault. One way to accomplish this is to develop various types of collaborative and horizontal projects such as the ones charted out within this essay; projects that bring students and community members together in the quest to promote social and ecological justice, as well as some measure of cultural and political empowerment. Such projects can play a valuable role in disseminating information that might be useful to broad segments of the population so as to help combat information poverty. Whether developing partnerships to engage in media activism through radio programs and video documentaries; contacting thousands of potential Latinx voters to promote voter awareness, registration and participation; or building broad projects such as the Constellation of the Commons, today there are plenty of opportunities for teacher-scholars to apply their skills and social creativity through collaborative projects, in order to help create and democratize cultural capital, to bridge the gap between social worlds, and to bridge the gap between classrooms, disciplines, communities and the world beyond.
