CBRCanada CoP – Bridging the Language Divide Between Community and Academia – Sept 11, 2026

Session Description

As an institutional member of CBRCanada, all U of T faculty, students, and staff have access to CBRCanada member events and benefits and are invited to register and participate.

Community of Practice meetings actively bring together CBRCanada members from across Canada and beyond to engage in meaningful discussions. All CBRCanada members involved in community-based research are welcome, whether you are a researcher, peer-researcher, student, project coordinator, administrator, director, or community leader. The purpose of the community of practice is to network with others, learn from each other, and exchange best practices.

September Community of Practice:

Bridging the language divide between community and academia

This session digs into the role of language in community-engaged research. Language plays a powerful role in research. It determines who understands a study, who can meaningfully participate in it, and whose voice ends up shaping its outcomes. This topic explores how academic and research language often creates unintended barriers between researchers and the communities they work with. Community members and lived experience experts can be inadvertently excluded when researchers engage in ‘exert speak’ using technical jargon, passive constructions that obscure accountability, dense written materials that assume high literacy, and translations that distort meaning. These language-related barriers can undermine relationships, damage trust, and compromise the quality of evidence and the impact of community-based research. Drawing on real examples, this session outlines guiding principles and practical strategies for closing that language divide. Co-creating language with community partners from the outset, building shared glossaries, using plain language and multiple formats, validating meaning through back-translation, and budgeting time and resources for language work as a core part of ethical research practice are some of the ways to bridge the language gap.

Guest Facilitator:

• Dr. Remi Kusimo, Research Officer, Community-University Institute for Social Research, University of Saskatchewan