What does engagement look like? For NIU Anthropology Professor Mitchell Irwin, community engagement permanently shifted his perspective about the purpose of research and the role of the researcher in the community.
When Mitchell Irwin first traveled to Madagascar to research lemurs in 2000, that experience changed the course of his professional and personal life. Irwin recognized that protecting threatened ecosystems also required addressing the poverty and lack of economic opportunity that pushed local people to overharvest timber and engage in other practices that damaged the forest ecosystem. This led him to see engagement with the local community as an indispensable part of his research.
“I developed new relationships with Malagasy scientists and local people, and I encountered the stark reality that I had such privilege and relative wealth while rural Malagasy had so little, yet lived alongside such astounding biological richness,” Irwin said. “I began to identify as someone for whom research had to ‘do good.’ In short, Madagascar was no longer just an ‘arena’ where my research occurred. It was a second home, a goal and a mission – and I was personally invested in helping its people and ecosystems.”
For the past two decades, Irwin has put that mission into practice – helping to found an elementary school, bring free dental clinics and reproductive health education, and plant 70,000 trees, for example – while also conducting research, guiding graduate and undergraduate students, obtaining grant funding and working to secure protected status for Tsinjoarivo, the region of Madagascar where he conducts research. Along with NIU Biology Professor Karen Samonds and Jean-Luc Raharison (a fellow lemur researcher and graduate of the University of Antananarivo), Irwin founded SADABE, a Madagascar-based NGO dedicated to helping people and wildlife live in harmony in Tsinjoarivo.
For Irwin, partnering with local people and Malagasy scientists is an essential part of every project. He sees NIU as part of a global community with a responsibility to the wider world. And as he looks ahead, Irwin sees conservation of lemur habitat and the support of a new generation of conservation-focused primatologists as his enduring legacy.
“Some primatologists have lived a mainly intellectual existence, but a great many (including many I admire) have become agents and advocates of conservation,” Irwin said. “It’s a question of preservation. It preserves animals and ecosystems whose beauty you admire. It preserves the research subjects for yourself, and your students. And most importantly, it preserves the ecosystems on which local communities rely – for fresh air and water, flood regulation, biodiversity services and forest products.”
To learn more about Irwin’s community engaged research and teaching, read the full article in NIU Today.
