Scholar-Activism: A Twice Told Tale (original) (raw)
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I am honoured to participate in this symposium, inspired by and celebrating the work of John Saul. John's activist involvements over a lifetime have proceeded alongside his scholarly career and have marked his written work and his teaching. John's political commitments and, perhaps more importantly, his activist practice were decisive in my choosing to work with him as a doctoral student at York. I am delighted to have this opportunity to offer my reflections on " scholar activism " as a central problematic raised by John's praxis and an ongoing challenge to all of us who identify with and participate in movements for social change while also struggling to respond to a and shape scholarly vocations that serve those movements. I will focus on two dimensions of the problematic. The first is an exploration of the issues, dilemmas, and imperatives in combining scholarly and activist practices and in crossing scholarly and activist cultures. The second is an epistemological argument about the status of practice vis-à-vis theory, of activist practice in particular as a source for emancipatory knowledges, and progressive social movements as sites for the production of such knowledges. Although these insights and arguments are deeply rooted in my own experience, the claims I am advancing are more ambitious; they are about the conditions for producing emancipatory knowledges for emancipatory politics. * * * I probably more readily identify myself as an activist than a scholar, having entered the ranks of professional academe only two years ago. However, the questions and hopes that propelled me into academia and continue to animate my scholarly work are the questions that also drew me into the movement, defined my activist engagements, and continue to drag me into political projects, even as I now teach and write full-time. I have been an activist for more than 15 years and a politically progressive and socially aware person long before that. I actually made the leap into activism, that is, concrete and practical political activity embedded in movements and organizations for social change, through graduate study in theology. So formal intellectual work as well as long-standing ethical orientations propelled me into the movement. For almost a decade, I considered myself a full-time activist, being employed in organizations that mandated and supported me to work in social movement processes. Those years were intensely formative for me, politically and intellectually. I was involved in some of the most intellectually demanding and creative processes of my life. However, those years were also marked by chronic overwork and exhaustion, a grinding pace, relentless 'action' and many political defeats. I returned to graduate study for a rest. I needed to regroup politically. I needed time and space away from the full-time fray in order to think, read, consolidate my learning, and reconsider my political vocation. I didn't set out to become a professional scholar, a full-time academic, so it is much to my surprise that I now am one. I am still growing into this new skin, even as it feels ever more like I am growing into myself. But my activist-self has struggled with this, with the tensions, conflicts and contradictions between my scholar and activist identities, both of which are so much part of me and, indeed, are mutually constitutive.
Multicultural Perspectives
What does it mean for individuals to intentionally see themselves as scholar-activists? Moreover,what does navigating a scholar-activist life mean for scholars in the early phases of their academic careers? As emerging scholar-activists the authors of this article are continuing to grapple with these questions, and in this article they present their distinct but overlapping stories of working through and overcoming the false separation of scholarship and activism. By sharing their stories the authors want to both provide readers an opportunity to find resonance in their experiences, and present some points to consider as we all define and live scholar-activism. Scholar-activism is historically situated with sights on the future. The authors have chosento join the struggle of their predecessors in their scholar-activist work, exploring new possibilitiessparked by the confluence of different generations
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