Activism and the academy: Assembling knowledge for social justice (original) (raw)

Academics and Social Movements: Knowing Our Place, Making Our Space

2016

This paper considers the place of academics in social movements, not as (predominantly) researchers or individuals but as activists acting collectively (Autonomous Geographies Collective, 2010). The notions of militant particularism and convergence space (Routledge, 2003; Cumbers et al. 2008) are deployed in relation to global justice networks, to analyze the discussions between academics planning direct action collectively and potentially with the network Climate Justice Action during the UN COP15 climate change summit in Copenhagen in December 2009. A notable tension in these debates centered on ‘radical ’ versus ‘reformist’ action and how either might contribute to transformative social change. The discussions ultimately led to the action of an academic seminar blockade, analyzed as a form of constructive resistance based on mutable particularisms flowing between shifting scales of convergence space. The paper concludes with the proposal that scholar activists should make a long-...

Assemblage, transversality and participation in the neoliberal university

This paper develops a novel approach to what we call 'participation as assemblage' by drawing upon Félix Guattari's foundational work on assemblage theory. We develop and ground our concerns by taking the reader through the details of a participatory development case study that we have been involved in from the Caribbean since the 1990s. Through unfolding this long story, we explain how we have historically engaged different participatory literatures and today find Guattari's work on transversality and ethico-aesthetics salient as a way into thinking through our central interest in participation as assemblage. Here both our case study and Guattari's originating work on assemblage are further grounded by working through some salient relationships between experimental approaches to participatory development and the contemporary neoliberal university.

Social Movement Studies: The contentious politics of higher education

Social Movement Studies, 2020

During the last decade, opposition to fees, debt and managerial policies seem to be a shared dynamic in higher education protests around the world. The recent waves of university protests in the UK (2010/2018), Italy (2008/2010), Chile (2011/2012), Quebec (2012) and South Africa (2015) share common targets and tactics, but they had different resolutions. From a new generation of free education policies to dramatic political betrayals, explaining the impacts of higher education protests remains a challenge. In the book The Contentious Politics of Higher Education, Lorenzo Cini addresses this question by exploring the relation- ships between university governance – the structure of universities as institutions – and the often new tactics of contention. Over seven chapters, the author argues that the structure of universities’ governance is one of the main determinants shaping the strategic agency and outcomes of protestors. Based on qualitative techniques, the research compares how different governance approaches shaped repertoire of activists and their impacts during the university protests of Italy (2010/2018) and England (2010/2014). The results suggest that institutions governed by a professional cadre of academic managers, like English universities, tend to stimulate more confrontational but low- impact tactics of mobilization. By contrast, academic regimes of governance predominant in Italian institutions, tend to incentive more diverse and successful repertoires of action. To explain these results, the author theorizes the impact of university governance over the contentious activity of students, academics and staff. The explanation suggests that universities with academic governance tends to establish ongoing communication and dialogue with activists and other potential challengers. This approach encourages activists to develop a mixture of confrontational and non-confrontational tactics, which increase their influence and power on universities, and it maximizes their impacts. On the contrary, managerial governance tends to ignore and repress challengers, neutralizing their power of influence and association and therefore diminishing the possibilities of success. To confront neutralization, challengers may opt for radical and confrontational tactics, like occupations or disruptions, to recover power on campuses. In doing so, activists mobilize repertoires of action that involve significant compromise and risk for campaigners, and therefore are hard to spread among their constituency. The capacity of challengers to resolve the tension between increasing their influence without losing support thus also shapes the resolution of the conflict and the outcomes of protests.

From ‘Here’ to ‘There’: Social Movements, the Academy and Solidarity Research

Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes, 2014

Increasing numbers of social movement scholars now advocate participatory and collaborative research approaches. These are often premised upon the assertion of a convergence between movement and researcher that implicates the latter in the struggles of the former. Naming this approach “solidarity research”, in this article I identify the components that provide the rationale for its pursuit. As well as affirming movement-researcher solidarity, this rationale also comprises a situated epistemology that asks academics to think reflexively about their research practice, the roles they play, and the interests they serve. This reveals the diverging positionality, of knowledge and interests, that often exists between movements and academics. Such concerns give rise to specific methodological and ethical principles that indicate the importance of negotiating this positionality to successful collaboration. Reflecting on my own experiences trying and sometimes failing to conduct ...

Scholarship and activism: a social movements perspective

This article revisits the debate over Barker and Cox’s (2011) use of Gramsci’s distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals to contrast academic and activist modes of theorizing about social movements. Often misread as an attack on personal choices in career and writing, the distinction aimed to highlight the different purposes, audiences, and social relationships entailed by these different forms of theorizing. Discourses which take ‘scholarship’ as their starting point position ‘activist’ as a personal choice within an institutional field, and substitute this moral commitment for a political assessment of its effects. By contrast, few academics have undergone the political learning curve represented by social movements. This may explain the widespread persistence – beyond any intellectual or empirical credibility – of a faith in ‘critical scholarship’ isolated from agency, an orientation to policy makers and mainstream media as primary audiences or an unquestioned commitment to existing institutional frameworks as pathways to substantial social change. Drawing on over three decades of movement participation and two of academic work, this article explores two processes of activist training within the academy. It also explores the politics of different experiences of theoretical publishing for social movements audiences. This discussion focuses on the control of the “means of mental production” (Marx, 1965), and the politics of distribution. The conclusion explores the broader implications of these experiences for the relationship between movements and research.