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The addressing wicked issues through community-engaged scholarship initiative takes a deep dive into some of the most critical issues threatening our communities and explores how we—higher education community engagement professionals, practitioners, and scholars—can make a difference.
Each year, participants will engage in a series of webinars and discussions that explore how knowledge about a particular issue is being generated and how people can come together to put that knowledge to good use—creating local solutions to these wicked problems. This series is jointly hosted by Campus Compact and the Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship (ACES).
2026 Series: Our Climate and Our Health
Climate change, as a structural issue, affects and will continue to affect all life across our planet. However, the effects of climate change are often unequally and unevenly distributed across different groups and contexts, highlighting the importance of addressing issues of environmental racism, unequal distribution of harms across space, and utilizing an environmental justice approach for cultivating solutions.
Over five sessions throughout the month of April, this webinar series will provide the necessary background and context on this wicked issue, including root causes around climate change, look at ways experts across disciplines navigate addressing the intersection of climate change and health through higher education, and stress the importance of cultivating climate hope for sustaining ourselves in the wake of this wicked issue.
Design Fellow
Rebecca Forsythe
PhD Student, Environmental Sociology and Inequality
Colorado State University
Read Rebecca's full bio
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2024-2025 Series: Youth & Gun Violence
Gun violence has become a vast and daunting issue that has impacted lives of youth across the country—as direct victims of violence, as witnesses to violence, and in day-to-day public life. In 2020, homicide was the second leading cause of death for 15-24 year-olds, with the vast majority involving firearms. Instances of gun violence in our schools and public spaces are prevalent in the media, and have led to growing calls to action from youth across the country.
Knowledge Creation Fellow
Dr. Camille Williamson, DSW, LCSW
Program Manager, Center for Health Equity
American Medical Association
Read Camille's full bio
Wicked Issues Recordings & Resources
1 Results found for:
Characteristics of wicked issues
From "The 10 Characteristics of 'Wicked Problems'" by Courtney Johnson-Woods, Resonance, published March 17, 2023
- They do not have a definitive formulation
- They do not have a “stopping rule.” In other words, these problems lack an inherent logic that signals when they are solved
- Their solutions are not true or false, only good or bad
- There is no way to test the solution to a wicked problem
- They cannot be studied through trial and error. Their solutions are irreversible so, as Rittel and Webber put it, “every trial counts.”
- There is no end to the number of solutions or approaches to a wicked problem
- All wicked problems are essentially unique
- Wicked problems can always be described as the symptom of other problems
- The way a wicked problem is described determines its possible solutions
- Planners, that is those who present solutions to these problems, have no right to be wrong.
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Hosted in partnership with the Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship
Campus Compact is proud to partner with the Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship (ACES) to host the Addressing Wicked Issues through Community-Engaged Scholarship program.