Activist research and organizing: blurring the boundaries, challenging the binaries

Abstract

This article draws from ongoing research into the practices and processes of activist researchers. It discusses social relations of knowledge production located outside of academia with/in social movement milieus. Focusing on the politics of research in people’s organizations and social movement organizations in the Philippines, it builds on interviews with activist researchers. It argues for a Marxist theory of praxis which insists upon the unity of thought and action, contending that research and organizing in this context are mutually constitutive and that knowledge production in these movements is dialectically related to the material conditions experienced in struggles for social and economic justice.

Notes

1. Interviews were conducted as part of a larger project on activist research spanning several countries. The author acknowledges funding support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Standard Research Grant (No: 410–2011-1688) and thanks Désirée Rochat, Michelle Hartman and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

2. Laguna Lake, the Philippines’ largest freshwater lake, and the communities dependent upon it for livelihoods and food, has suffered from overfishing by large commercial operators, serious contamination through industrial pollution and faces a public-private partnership reclamation and development project which some fear will displace about 82,000 fishing families—500,000 people. (See Quijano, 2012)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aziz Choudry

Aziz Choudry is an assistant professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. He is co-author of Fight Back: Workplace Justice for Immigrants (Fernwood 2009) and co-editor of Learning from the Ground Up: Global Perspectives on Social Movements and Knowledge Production (Palgrave Macmillan 2010), Organize! Building from the local for global justice, (PM Press/Between the Lines 2012), and NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects (Zed Books 2013). He has over 25 years of experience working in activist groups, NGOs and social movements in the Asia-Pacific and North America as a researcher, educator and organizer.