Alumni Digest / U of T / Ideas /
Neil Price treats community as a method
An OISE scholar's work connects questions about exclusion in higher education with the collective practices that help people persist.
A portrait of Neil Price.Photo: Submitted photo
The question
Treat community as part of the method
Neil Price spent eight years completing his dissertation while staying close to community work. OISE's flex-time doctorate gave him room to bring those experiences into research about how universities exclude Black knowledge and how scholars build practices of persistence.
The result is a different starting point for research. Instead of asking community to appear at the end as an audience, Price keeps it near the question, where lived experience can change what counts as evidence and what a useful answer needs to do.
Scholarship becomes more useful when it is built with the people who will carry it forward.
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The work
Move between scholarship and public impact
His work moves between scholarship, art criticism and nonprofit consulting. LogicalOutcomes, the organization he co-founded, helps groups understand and explain their impact. That same instinct—to connect an idea to the people who will use it—runs through his teaching and public work.
Those lanes reinforce one another. A critical reading can sharpen a program; a program can expose a research question; a conversation can show where a polished framework still leaves someone out.
The invitation
Measure what a conversation can sustain
Price's next course invitation looks at community responses to health and food justice. His story makes the case for a wider definition of scholarship: one that measures its value by the conversations, tools and relationships it helps sustain.
That is a useful test for alumni work in any field. Before asking whether an idea is impressive, ask whether people can use it together, adapt it and pass it on without losing the context that made it matter.
Source reporting
Scholar, critic, consultant: Dr. Neil Price on building Black community in higher education
Original summary by Alumni Digest, based on public source reporting. This independent publication is not affiliated with or endorsed by the University of Toronto. Source image retained for editorial review; rights clearance is still required before any broader reuse.
