Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship; Charles R. Hale (Ed.) (original) (raw)
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2000
Let knowledge serve the city" reads the golden letters on a pedestrian bridge just 200 feet from my faculty office in Neuberger Hall at Portland State University. Public peace scholarship might allow knowledge to help the polis by keeping it out of war via changing the national discourse toward a strong and informed peace analysis. Educators have an uneasy relationship to public scholarship and mainstream media have a nervous attitude toward public peace intellectuals. Institutions of higher learning are also often either unaware or uncomfortable with a public promotion of a positive peace platform. Academic writing and research is hard to translate into publicly accessible knowledge and time constraints mitigate professorial efforts at such civic engagements. This dissertation looks at the evolving nature of this intersectionality between and among factors and analyzes data derived from research interviews conducted with 12 academics/activists. The conclusion is a grounded theory generated by this process. Key findings include problematic lack of academic freedoms-especially in the promotion and tenure context, overwhelming faculty workloads, infrequent faculty development of public scholarship skills and a spotty distribution/connection system that often fails to facilitate competent and willing faculty to engage as public peace and justice scholars. Policy recommendations attempt to address all these obstacles. Every dissertation is ascribed to one person-and none are done by one. Perhaps one person sweats over the work and details more than anyone else, but the foundational intellectual work, the academic shoulders upon which the doctoral student stands, provide support by the thousands. The human intellectual efforts of generations of scholars prepares the path up to the very cusp of the dissertation and then, once the literature has been combed, sifted, cited and acknowledged, more direct collaboration is needed from each involved professor, Human Subjects Reviewers, participants, colleagues kind enough to offer advice and, in my case, by a young scholar who just finished his Ph.D. in Conflict Analysis and Resolution, Patrick Hiller, who helped me think about this, helped me through the technological challenges of interviewing participants coast-to-coast via computers and telephones, recorded those interviews, critiqued my technique, and transcribed them. Without Patrick's able and consistently timely guidance throughout this process I would have no doubt reached retirement age before defending this project. Swapna Mukhopadhyay, my Dissertation Committee Chair, served me tea and critique for years, from Core Paper to Specialty Paper to Dissertation Proposal to research to composition of this document. To the extent any of this writing is academic, it is due to the discipline gently, firmly, persistently imposed by Dr. Mukhopadhyay, far above and beyond her obligation. Dilafruz Williams offered guidance every time asked and, despite her overwhelming schedule, always offered more. She is my connection to Gandhian education. Dr. Dannelle Stevens restarted my own public peace and justice scholarship, which is also my therapy. Dr. Christina Hulbe and I shared deep involvement in the iv Portland peace movement and our frequent public peace intellectual practice. Dr. Samuel Henry started me on the path to the heart of this dissertation's findings on academic institution policy. What an outstanding committee. I am so grateful to all of them. Rob Gould, my Conflict Resolution department Chair, kept trying to advance my career even as he supported my doctoral work, and never stopped either effort, despite how slowly I move. Al Jubitz has supported PeaceVoice, the public peace and justice scholarship program of the Oregon Peace Institute. I created, founded and still direct PeaceVoice, which is my daily experience of promoting public peace and justice intellectualism. Without Al's vision of a world without war and his willingness-and that of his family who operate the Jubitz Family Foundation-to support projects that share that vision, my direct experience that has so deeply informed this dissertation would be much lighter. Dr. Masami Nishishiba, Dr. Kevin Kecskes, and Dr. Melissa Thompson all generously worked with me with arranged courses that educated me about aspects of this dissertation. I thank them as well. Finally, I honor the late Dr. Ken Brown, chair of Peace and Nonviolence Studies at Manchester College in Manchester, Indiana, who organized the largest training for aspirant public peace and justice intellectuals that I've ever conducted. Ken also met at his home with students virtually every Monday evening for decades, creating and maintaining his peace education and mentorship roles more than any other educator I've ever known.
A crisis of criticality? Reimagining academia in international peacebuilding
2020
Intellectuals, particularly within Western societies, occupy privileged positions which enable them to scrutinize the actions of those in power – having the time, expertise, and resources to analyse motives, expose lies, and imagine alternative futures. This ability is not a given however, and it manifests in a multitude of ways as academics’ epistemological and ontological biases, normative interests, and career security are continually renegotiated in the face of increasingly neoliberal rationales. Since the foundation of Peace and Conflict Studies over half a century ago, these pressures have played out along a problem-solving/critical theory dichotomy, in which problem-oriented scholars produce knowledge to improve the current system, while critical theorists seek to transform the entire paradigm and establish more emancipatory and positive types of peace. By assessing how this contestation has played out within the discourse of international peacebuilding, this thesis seeks to ...
On Activist*scholarship (Special issue introduction)
Radical Housing Journal, 2021
Which side are universities on? We believe it is time to open a debate about this. Scholarship can either play into the hands and be appropriated by oppressive forces, or work to develop new emancipatory tools as a means of support to the struggles of the oppressed. Energies and resources, inside the academia, should be devoted to forms of scholarship, action and research whose proponents already made the choice of standing on the side of the evicted, the homeless, the squatters, the favelados, those discriminated against, those who risk to lose or already lost their land, their house, their job, people, or their health: producing what we called activist*scholarship.
Reflections from ‘the Field’: the Activist and the Activist Scholar in Conversation
Political anthropological research on international social sciences (PARISS), 2022
This intervention consists in a conversation between an activist-scholar engaging in research questioning the conditions facing refugees and asylum seekers in Greece and an activist leading an ngo supporting displaced people. We reflect on our own positionality working in this area and on the role of academia and the humanitarian sector more generally. We explore different approaches to knowledge production that challenge the exploitative practices associated with both academic research and humanitarianism.
at any time, allowing me 48-72 hours to respond. I'm happy to meet by appointment, and especially happy to hold office hours after class, either on campus or in a café in the Claremont Village.