Special issue introduction: social movement struggles, learning and knowledge-making: in memory of Aziz Choudry (1966–2021)

Born in Croydon, South London, England in 1966 at the same time and town that the extreme right-wing and racist National Front was formed, Choudry spent his formative years in an atmosphere of potent racism. In 1988 he moved to Christchurch in Aotearoa/New Zealand. After a short stint as a construction worker, Choudry began working for non-governmental organisations and social movements involved with indigenous groups in the Pacific region. In the mid-90s he was an organiser with GATT Watchdog, a non-governmental organisation that monitored the activities of the World Trade Organization. In 1996 while holding a public forum and rally against an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Trade Ministers’ meeting hosted in Christchurch, Choudry’s home was broken into by New Zealand state security officials. A colleague who came to collect some papers from Choudry’s home disturbed the state’s agents and managed to take down their vehicle’s number plates. Choudry sued for and received a financial settlement from the New Zealand state which he used to travel to Montreal in 2002.

These activist experiences informed Choudry’s global contributions to social movement learning, knowledge production in community organisations, activist archives, immigrant workers’ education, anti-racist/anti-colonial education and other areas. Aziz, as he was affectionately known by those who worked with him, helped activist work around the world by opposing surveillance and repression, unfair trade and supporting activism for food sovereignty and climate justice.

In Montreal he was accepted into a post-graduate programme in the School of Community and Public Affairs at Concordia University based on his extensive background in advocacy and social justice movements since the 1980s, despite not having an undergraduate degree. After completing the programme he graduated with a Master’s degree in 2003. In 2008 he completed a PhD, and then went on to become Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Social Movement Learning and Knowledge Production in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University.

Choudry and Eric Shragge, his PhD supervisor, jointly launched a group called the Rad School, a space for community members and university staff involved in various social movements to learn from each other. Choudry also spent close to a decade on the board of Montreal’s Immigrant Workers’ Centre. He was also a founding board member of the Global Justice and Ecology Project, an organisation that seeks to explore and expose the root causes of social injustice, ecological destruction and economic domination.

Many have commented about Choudry’s incredibly productive combination of internationalist political connectivity, activist commitments and hard thinking about contradictions facing both social change movements as well as activists in the academy. He was an untiring international solidarity activist supporting indigenous, Palestinian, anti-racist and anticolonial resistance and struggles.

Choudry will also be remembered for his unstinting, generous and energetic devotion to the students he supervised and taught as well as the encouragement and affirmation he provided to the many, mainly young academics and movement activists he mentored throughout the world. He always sought to open academic spaces for activists and used his mordant and sardonic wit and humour to great effect against those in academia who he considered sycophantic, careerist, predatory and apathetic. Aziz was also a strong advocate for education as a public good and championed the struggle for a decommodified and decolonial academy. In this regard, he developed an incredibly deep and sharp analysis of neoliberalism, global economic domination, social injustice and learning through activism, prolifically documented in eleven books published between 2009 and 2020 and countless other writings.

The massacre of worshippers in March 2019 at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, together with the Covid pandemic and the passing of close colleagues, deeply affected Choudry. In 2021, after over a year’s delay, partly because of Covid-19 travel restrictions and work permit requirements, Choudry finally left Canada and took up employment at the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation at the University of Johannesburg in February. Prior to arriving from McGill University, he was a visiting professor at the University of Johannesburg for five years and a frequent visitor to South Africa. He had a strong affinity with the people and struggles for social justice in South Africa, and forged many friendships. Choudry passed away on the 26th of May 2021. A number of memorials were held for him around the world. The first was soon after his passing in Johannesburg where members of his family, colleagues, activists and friends spoke powerfully of his life, his work and his personal and political legacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhuIl0jJhKc.

Choudry’s research highlighted the knowledge produced by the everyday work of social movements, knowledge about how societies function and perhaps more importantly, how the world could be. Much can be said about the extensiveness of Choudry’s praxis. We comment here on just three areas that a number of the contributors to this Special Issue write about: the intellectual life of social movements; nonformal and informal learning in activism; and activist research and knowledge production.

For Choudry, the social movements and organisational forms that arise from the collective life and struggles of communities are intrinsic not only to the mobilisation of community for socio-political and cultural purposes but also as expressions of the modalities of learning and knowledge development that take place daily in them. The latter occurs in mostly unseen and academically unrecognised ways even though such learning is the lifeblood of the forms of resistance, solidarity and fortitude essential to the survival of such communities. This means that recognition of the intellectual work and learning that takes place in such communities, through the forms of activism that is inherent in them, is key to understanding the relationship between academic work and community engagement properly conceptualised. This would enable academics to understand the forms of knowledge creation that take place more-or-less continuously in such communities during their life activities. As Choudry (2015, 1) suggested:

Such work can greatly enrich, broaden, and challenge dominant understandings of how and where education, learning, and knowledge production occur and what these look like. It argues that these are resources that can provide critical conceptual tools with which to understand, inform, imagine, and bring about social change. It contends that the success of organizing to fight injustice and create a better, fairer world depends on taking such knowledge and learning seriously. But this also requires being able to reflect critically, build spaces where people can come together to act and learn collectively, and appreciate the unfinished nature of popular struggles for social and political change.

Choudry was critical of the sociology of social movements approach, as well as the new social movement approaches coming out of Europe, arguing that although they ‘ … usefully draw attention to some aspects of movements, their levels of abstraction and generalisation – as well as the overextension of key concepts – make them problematic and limited’ (48). He felt it was necessary to transcend the limits of existing European theory to truly understand social movements. To this end, Choudry turned to Black, Indigenous, decolonial and postcolonial scholars and centred the ways that they were writing about resistance. He emphasised the centrality of critical history, arguing the importance of theorising social movements by learning from the long history and legacies of social movement struggle, examining their accomplishments, losses, challenges and victories and realising that current struggles are not disconnected from their historical trajectories.

Another of Choudry’s important contributions was the dialectical relationship between nonformal popular education within movement spaces, and the informal and incidental learning that takes place and transforms people. Importantly, he did not prioritise one over the other but pointed to their critical interconnections. Particularly notable is his work on the surveillance state. It explained and explored the radicalising effect of the struggles against a repressive state on activists and communities, shaping how they understood state power.

Choudry (2015) critiqued the ‘critical pedagogy promoted by North American academics who appropriated images of social movements for their promotional videos while being contemptuous of any actual engagement with concrete social struggle’ (95). For Choudry, the actual process of social change and movement building could not be left to popular educators because of the complex issues that arose in the context of movement building, requiring direct participation together with spaces of reflection for changes in consciousness. He wrote, ‘My own politicisation and political education can be best characterised as a jigsaw of events; moments of revelatory disjuncture; exposure to radical ideas through music, poetry and other artistic forms; conversations; and learning by doing. This kind of process has no obvious beginning or end point’ (118). In other words, rather than thinking about radical adult education as a sudden moment of ‘epiphany’ or an instance of transformative learning, Choudry reminds us that the process of critical consciousness building is a long-term process that is not linear but rather emerges and evolves at different points from different learning contexts.

Choudry was very critical of those in the academy who denigrated social movement research as mere ideology or advocacy and not rigorous scholarship. He pointed out that most academic research with communities is ‘ …  more concerned with implications of such work on individuals’ university careers and academic disciplines, and its scholarly credibility, than on the considerable research and intellectual work generated from within activist/community organizations’ (Choudry and Vally 2018, 130).

Choudry’s vision and hope is captured in the concluding paragraph of the co-edited book, Reflections on Knowledge, Learning and Social Movements: History’s Schools:

… young people, dissatisfied with inadequate explanations for the state of the world, and seeking ways to change it, are searching for other ways of approaching and understanding history. We have encountered many young people who are hungry to learn about how people have struggled, what they have done, how they have envisioned alternatives, all as part of developing their own political, social and environmental activism … recognising the urgent action that is vital on so many fronts today, we remain convinced of the care and commitment needed to reflect, prepare the ground, plant seeds and grow vibrant movements and politics of resistance, and of continuing to work through, in our different contexts, how we might critically conjure up the spirits of the past in the service of liberation.

Aziz Choudry is now one of those spirits. An ancestor whose praxis and vision for a kinder and more humane world will always inspire and remain with us. His influence will continue through the countless people he touched through his writings, mentorship and friendship.

In soliciting articles for this special issue, we drew on Choudry’s vast network of engaged activist scholars. Some of these activist scholars are Choudry’s former students, others his informal mentees and many more his colleagues and friends who worked with him throughout his life. There are also a few contributors that never knew Choudry personally, but draw on and use his work in their own research.

The common thread through all of the articles in this Special Issue is how activist knowledge matters, and how this has often been silenced and undermined in academia. Many of the articles both vindicate and demonstrate the complex ways that movements learn, build knowledge, develop strategies and reframe problems and solutions through processes of struggle. In the first article, Fergal Finnegan and Laurence Cox, reflect on the relationship between the work of Aziz Choudry and that of Paolo Freire, and the ways in which they can help frame, understand and support processes of social change.

A few other articles in the Special Issue speak to the question of knowledge production and research ethics. The contribution by Manuel Salamanca Cardona and Laurence Hamel-Roy, two of Choudry’s graduate student advisees at McGill University, illustrates how popular education in community contexts can function both as a site of rigorous research and a space to disseminate research results and contribute to consciousness-raising. In other words, drawing on the Canadian context, Salamanca Cardona and Hamel-Roy offer examples of how activist scholars can engage in academic research while actively promoting social movement learning, breaking the traditional choice that activist-scholars face about whether to invest in academic or activist efforts.

Also engaging the question of research ethics is Mai Abu Moghli’s article on research in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Her article reminds us of the importance of Palestinian-led research and knowledge production, as well as the danger for Palestinians engaging in this work in the authoritarian Palestinian context. Furthermore, Abu Moghli’s article is a condemnation of the excessive foreign-funded research carried out in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which does not engage in pressing political questions. Thus, Abu Moghli argues – a la Freire – the ‘neutrality’ of this foreign-funded research becomes, in fact, a means to empower and reinforce the Palestinian Authority and normalise violence. The article ends with offering some hope for how research in Palestine can work towards national liberation.

Together, these two articles build on Choudry’s work by both critiquing certain forms of (exploitative) academic research and offering scholar activists a rough roadmap or at least several examples about how to build a research agenda not merely ‘with’ communities but rather embedded in social struggle.

The other contributions to the Special Issue touch on a range of themes central to Choudry’s scholarship, including social movement learning, popular education and anti-racism struggles, social movements and surveillance, and anti-capitalism, the global justice movement and trade unions. Together, these articles and their analyses of distinct geopolitical contexts shed light on the twists and turns of social movement organising during the twenty-first century. Of course, Abu Moghli’s article also reminds us that many twentieth-century struggles continue into the twenty-first century.

In Latin America, a central characteristic of twenty-first century social(ist) movements is a reconciling with histories of enslavement and indigenous genocide, and the increasing protagonism of Black and Indigenous movements throughout the region. Discussing the Colombian context, where Black, Indigenous and Peasant movements are all demanding territorial rights, Patrick Kane writes about the intercultural pedagogies employed by a human rights organisation in Southwest Colombia to link diverse movements together. Kane’s article illustrates the potential for unity within diversity through popular education, which has the potential to ‘strengthen and interweave’ these different struggles. This unity across movements is critical in a country like Colombia where civil war and right-wing hegemony have been the norm. Importantly, in 2022 leftist and former guerrilla fighter Gustavo Petro came to power with Francia Márquez, an environmental activist, lawyer and long-time leader of the Colombian Black movement. Kane’s article suggests that grassroots popular education and more specifically intercultural pedagogies were critical to bringing together social movements including environmental and feminist movements across differences in Colombia for this historical victory.

Meanwhile, the Global North has also had its own reckoning with structural racism in the twenty-first century, with the rise of social movements fighting anti-Black police violence. In the United States, the police murders of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida in 2012, Eric Garner in New York City in 2014, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, in March 2020 and George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 2020, among many others, inspired both the Black Lives Matters movement and the broader Movement for Black Lives. R. Nanre Nafziger, Krystal Strong and Rebecca Tarlau discuss the rise of the BLM movement and its organising efforts in the Philadelphia context. Drawing on Choudry as well as Black feminists and other Black scholars writing within the Black Radical Tradition, these authors argue that political education in BLM Philly is deeply embedded within a radical organising culture; in other words, for Black organisers ‘popular education’ is never separate from organising practice. The most important spaces for political education in BLM Philly include organisers’ own personal histories, the culture of community support within the movement and intergenerational knowledge-making. This article touches on one of the most important social movements of the twenty-first century – the Movement for Black Lives – while also illustrating the need to rethink our understanding of popular education through, as Choudry would advocate, an examination of the actual forms of knowledge production within movements.

Related to the rise of racial justice struggles, Lauren Ware Stark also discusses the US context, examining how labour unions have reinvented themselves in the twenty-first century. More specifically, Stark analyses the United Caucuses of Rank-and-File Educators (UCORE) network, which includes more than thirty ‘caucuses’ embedded within US teachers’ unions, which are trying to transform their unions to take on broader social justice concerns. Importantly, a major characteristic of US teachers’ unions in the twentieth century was the ongoing tension between teachers’ fight for ‘bread-and-butter’ concerns such as salary and benefits as well as due process in the workplace, and Black and Latinx communities’ demand for more control of their schools. Emblematic of these tensions was the 1968 United Federation of Teachers strike against Black community control of schools in New York City. In the twenty-first century, however, many teachers’ unions have tried to reinvent themselves, forming coalitions with communities of colour and striking for the ‘Schools that Students’ Deserve.’ Stark’s article illustrates how informal and nonformal learning was a critical part of this shift, as teachers across the country learned from each other about how to centre racial and social justice in their union work and transform their unions’ daily practices and demands. Like many of the articles in the Special Issue, and as Choudry himself discussed, Stark illustrates that without informal and nonformal learning this important component of twenty-first century social movements – the rise of social justice unionism in the United States – would not have been possible.

The next two articles in the Special Issue speak to yet another characteristic of twenty-first century social movements, the central role of youth and students. Josh Platzky Miller analyses the ‘primavera secundarista’ or ‘student spring,’ which took place in Brazil between 2015 and 2016, when high school students occupied hundreds of schools throughout the country. Like the social justice union movements in the United States, these student occupations were a reaction to the neoliberal educational reforms that were being imposed on schools, including the closing and consolidation of many schools without the consent (or input) of teachers and students. Miller documents the innovative educational practices that flourished in the occupied high schools, how students reinvented popular education for their own needs and purposes, and the ways in which youth build connections to other social actors, not simply isolating themselves as students. Salma Ismail and Lyndal Pottier also write about youth activism, focusing on the experiences of six youth activists in Cape Town, South Africa. As in the case of the Black Lives Matter movement, Ismail and Pottier explore how personal experiences become educational moments that shape the direction of future activism. Importantly, these two articles on youth movements illustrate that even in the face of ongoing structural violence and the imposition of neoliberal educational reforms, young people are capable of fighting back and building their own educational and cultural practices that contribute both to achieving their hopes and dreams and broader processes of knowledge production.

Although twenty-first century social movements are led by a broad diversity of actors, including Black, Latinx, Indigenous, LGBTQ+ and Youth communities, many of the issues they are fighting for, such as basic public services are the same as the twentieth century. Adrian Murray, Faeza Meyer and Ebrahiem Fourie emphasise this point in their article about social movement struggles demanding access to water and other public services in Cape Town, South Africa. Importantly, and similar to Kane’s article on Colombia, these authors show how political education and collective knowledge-making can overcome divides based on ‘race’, gender, class and nationality, and bring together communities fighting for basic human rights. Central to political education is organisational autonomy, or rejection of elite organising efforts in order to invest in ‘working-class self organization.’ Again, Murray, Meyer and Fourie remind us that although much has changed globally, structural inequalities that restrict access to water and other public services continue to be a major demand of twenty-first century social movements, and old but reliable strategies such as intentional political education efforts and working-class self-organisation are critical to the success of these movements.

Finally, the two articles on fascism in India are illustrative of the ugly side of twenty-first century movements, the global rise of neofascism and the new authoritarian and white supremacist movements that have emerged globally. Nisha Thapliyal highlights the role of activist research in revealing the transnational nature of Hindu nationalism. Laila Kadiwal, explores the relationship between repression and resistance in India, and the role of social movement learning in both reactionary Hindutva movements and in feminist Muslim women’s movements that seek to counter the politics of hate. Both the transnational dynamics of movements (from above and below) and the repressive nature of authoritarian states towards social movements were issues very much close to Aziz’s life and work and the struggles that he was engaged in.

Together, these articles speak to how Choudry’s work can help reinvent Freire, facilitate reflection on the ethics of research and knowledge production, and provide frameworks for understanding the new twists and counters of twenty-first century movements, including the spread of mass Black and Indigenous movements, the reinventing of the labour movement to support racial justice struggles, the central role of youth and student movements, the ongoing struggles for basic services and the continuation of authoritarianism in locations such as Palestine and rise of neo fascism in other locations like India, Brazil, the Philippines and the United States. Choudry’s work also speaks to the idea of hope, that a different world is possible, that solidarity will bring about that new world, and that ordinary people, collectively, can achieve the most extraordinary things. It is that hope that we also hold on to when we think of our friend and comrade Aziz Choudry, his work and his legacy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).