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ABSTRACT
The significant contributions of knowledge produced in contemporary and historical social, political, and environmental struggles are often overlooked or overwritten by accounts by ‘experts’, including scholars of social movements and activism. Much of the writing on research for social change tends to assume that professionals with specialist academic training (perhaps employing certain methodologies that are claimed to be inherently emancipatory) do ‘activist scholarship’, but rarely engages with knowledge production from inside of social movements. Indeed, much of the work on ‘scholar-activism’ centres university faculty or graduate student efforts and experiences, implications for academic careers, scholarly credibility, and contributions to academic disciplines, rather than its use, relationship or relevance to struggles for change. In this article, I contend that we need to take the opportunity to learn from how organisers, activists and people in struggles think, learn, analyse and generate knowledge in the course of organising for progressive social change – beyond the sometimes self-referential loops of academic scholarship. In order to do so, we need to recentre understandings of activist scholarship that are not so primarily tied to university-based and produced knowledge.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Aziz Choudry is associate professor and Canada Research Chair in social movement learning and knowledge production in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education, McGill University, Canada, and visiting professor at the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation, Faculty of Education, University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
Notes
1. While I appreciate the dominant framework of this journal and special issue concerns human rights, for similar reasons to Radha D’Souza, What’s Wrong With Rights? Social Movements, Law and Liberal Imaginations (London: Pluto Press, 2018) and Brewster Kneen, The Tyranny of Rights (Ottawa: Rams Horn, 2009), I do not frame my intellectual or political contributions in the language of rights. See D’Souza, What’s Wrong With Rights?; Kneen, The Tyranny of Rights.
2. See, for example, Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Catching History on the Wing: Race, Culture and Globalization (London: Pluto Press, 2008).
3. Sivanandan, Catching History on the Wing, Comment (Institute for Race Relations, 6 November 2008). http://www.irr.org.uk/news/catching-history-on-the-wing/.
4. Ambalavaner Sivanandan, ‘“The Rules of the Game”?’ ECLN Essays (European Civil Liberties Network, 2005), 1.
5. Ambalavaner Sivanandan, ‘All that Melts into air is Solid: The Hokum of New Times’, Race and Class 31, no. 3 (1990): 1–30.
6. Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 8.
7. Gary Kinsman, ‘Mapping Social Relations of Struggle: Activism, Ethnography, Social Organization’, in Sociology for Changing the World: Social Movements/Social Research, eds., Caelie Frampton, Gary Kinsman, Andrew K. Thompson, and Kate Tilleczek (Black Point, NS: Fernwood, 2006), 153.
8. Richard Flacks, ‘The Question of Relevance in Social Movement Studies’, in Rhyming Hope and History: Activists, academics and Social Movements, eds., David Croteau, William Haynes and Charlotte Ryan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 3–29.
9. Charlotte Ryan, ‘Successful Collaboration: Movement Building in the Media Arena’, in Rhyming Hope and History: Activists, academics and Social Movements, eds., David Croteau, William Haynes and Charlotte Ryan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 111–12.
10. See also Radha D’Souza, ‘The Prison Houses of Knowledge: Activist Scholarship and Revolution in the Era of “Globalization”’, McGill Journal of Education 44, no 1 (2009): 19–38.
11. Eurig Scandrett, ‘Social Learning in Environmental Justice Struggles – Political Ecology of Knowledge’, in Learning and Education for a Better World: The Role of Social Movements, eds., Budd L. Hall, Darlene E. Clover, Jim Crowther, and Eurig Scandrett (Rotterdam: Sense: 2012), 41–55.
12. Jane L. Thompson, Learning Liberation: Women’s Response to Men’s Education (London and Canberra: Croom Helm, 1983), 170.
13. Richard Johnson, ‘Really Useful Knowledge: Radical Education and Working Class Culture, 1790–1848’, in Working Class Culture – Studies in History and Theory, eds., John Clarke, Chris Critcher, and Richard Johnson (London: Hutchinson, 1979), 75–102.
14. In Staughton Lynd and André Grubacic, Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2008), 40.
15. In Lynd and Grubacic: 40. See also Staughton Lynd, Doing History from the Bottom Up: On E.P. Thompson, Howard Zinn, and Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2009).
16. Alan Sears, The Next New Left: A History of the Future (Halifax: Fernwood, 2014), 9.
17. Paula Allman, Critical Education Against Global Capitalism: Karl Marx And Revolutionary Critical Education (Rotterdam: Sense, 2010). Aziz Choudry, Learning Activism: The Intellectual Work of Contemporary Social Movements (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). Griff Foley, Learning in Social Action: A Contribution to Understanding Informal Education (London: Zed Books, 1999). John D. Holst, Social Movements, Civil Society and Radical Adult Education (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey: 2002).
18. Sears, The Next New Left.
19. Foley, Learning in Social Action; Choudry, Learning Activism.
20. David Austin, Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex and Security in Sixties Montreal (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 2013). Choudry, Learning Activism. Aziz Choudry and Salim Vally (Eds.) Reflections On Knowledge, Learning And Social Movements: History’s Schools (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018). Kelley, Freedom Dreams. Sears, The Next New Left.
21. See, for example: Aziz Choudry and Dip Kapoor, eds., NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects (London: Zed Books, 2013); Jude Fernando, The Political Economy of NGOs: State Formation in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh (London: Pluto Press, 2011); Peter Dauvergne and Genevieve LeBaron, Protest Inc.: The Corporatization of Activism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014); D’Souza, What’s Wrong With Rights?.
22. See also Clairmont Chung, ed., Walter A. Rodney: A Promise of Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014). Walter Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers (East Point, GA: Walter Rodney Press, 2014).
23. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1970).
24. Sunera Thobani, ‘War Frenzy’, Atlantis 27, no.1 (2002): 5.
25. Olga Koffman, Shani Orgad, and Rosalind Gill, ‘Girl power and “selfie Humanitarianism”’, Continuum 29, no. 2 (2015): 161.
26. David McNally, Global Slump (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), 149.
27. Sivanandan, Catching History on the Wing, 61.
28. Nicholas Hildyard, Licensed Larceny: Infrastructure, Financial Extraction and the Global South (Manchester: Manchester University Press: 2016), 95.
29. Richard Flacks, ‘Knowledge for What? Thoughts on the State of Social Movement Studies’, in Rethinking Social Movements: Structure, Culture, and Emotion, eds. Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 136.
30. See, for example Choudry, Learning Activism.
31. See for example, Hildyard, Licensed Larceny.
32. See Choudry, Learning Activism.
33. Bevington and Dixon, 2005, 195.
34. Biju Mathew, ‘Conversations on the M60: Knowledge Production Through Collective Ethnographies’, in Learning from the Ground up: Global Perspectives on Social Movements and Knowledge Production, eds., Aziz Choudry and Dip Kapoor (New York: Palgrave MacMillan: 2010), 169.
35. Choudry, Learning Activism.
36. See for examples, Choudry, Learning Activism, and Valerie Francisco, ‘Migrante, Abante: Building Filipino Migrant Worker Leadership Through Participatory Action Research’, in Just Work? Migrant Workers’ Struggles Today, eds., Aziz Choudry and Mondli Hlatshwayo (London: Pluto Press, 2016), 211–29.
37. See D’Souza, ‘The Prison Houses of Knowledge’ and Choudry, Learning Activism.
38. Andrew Flinn, ‘Working with the Past: Making History of the Struggle Part of the Struggle’, in Reflections on Knowledge, Learning and Social Movements: History’s Schools, eds., Aziz Choudry and Salim Vally (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018), 21–41.
39. Choudry, Learning Activism; Choudry and Vally, Reflections On Knowledge, Learning And Social Movements.
40. Sally Alexander, Bill Schwarz and Andrew Whitehead, ‘Radical Histories’, History Workshop Journal 83, no. 1 (2017): 2.
41. Verene A. Shepherd, ‘Afterword: Walter Rodney’s Groundings - 45 Years on’, in The Groundings with My Brothers, ed., Walter Rodney (East Point, GA: Walter Rodney Press, 2014), 66.
42. Kelly Gillespie and Leigh-Ann Naidoo: ‘#MustFall: The South African Student Movement and the Politics of Time’, South Atlantic Quarterly 118, no. 1 (2019): 190–4.
43. See Aziz Choudry and Salim Vally eds., Lessons in Resistance: University Struggles across the Globe (London: Pluto Press, forthcoming).
44. Bahar Baser, Samim Akgönül, and Ahmet Erdi Öztürk, ‘“Academics for Peace” in Turkey: A Case of Criminalising Dissent and Critical Thought Via Counterterrorism Policy’, Critical Studies on Terrorism 10, no.2: 274–96.
45. Sangeeta Kamat, ‘Comment at Panel on Social Movements, Education, and Learning’ (62nd Comparative and International Education Society conference, Mexico City, Mexico, 25 March 2018).