Nine Nifty Notes For Scholar Activists

Below I have put together what I hope is an illustrative, but by no means exhaustive, list of the kind of best practices scholar activists may wish to adopt in their work. These notes will hopefully help scholar activists reflect upon our work to ensure that our research and activism can be carried out critically, accountably, with integrity and in useful and engaging ways. There are many different ways of doing scholar activism, and of being a scholar activist, so this list will likely be more relevant to some kinds of scholar activsts than to others. The audience I had in mind whilst writing it was graduate students, like myself, who want to want to take their research into the field and make it useful and accessible. The notes below are not supposed to be understood as rigid prinicples but rather to provoke thought and self-assessment. I would love to read your thoughts, feedback, edits and critiques of the list so far, so feel free to add your commentary in the section at the end.

Here is the list I came up with:

1. Don’t give away information that activists do not want disclosed publicly. It is important to know the ethics your research institution will hold you to and to which you will hold yourself. It is also especially important to know the extent to which your university or research institution will cover you if you happen to find information to which security agencies may want access. If your university won’t cover you and you don’t have access to good lawyers, it’s probably best not to go looking for this kind of information. Similarly, don’t publish anything that could undermine the activist strategies you are studying. It is crucial to consult the activists you are working with and ask them if what you intend to publish is information they want to be public before you publish it.
2. Acknowledge your privilege and legacies of oppression, but don’t let that guilt paralyze you. It is probable that as a student in grad school or an academic, you will have access to, and will have benefited from, at least some forms of privilege. I am all of the identities that activists can be suspicious of (white, upper middle class, educated, straight, male, English) but I am also more than those identities. Quite often it is easy to internalize the suspicion and anger that some activist communities (rightly) harbor towards those privileged identity groups. Understand where that suscpicion comes from but remember also that if you are a scholar activist, it is likely that you share the cause and overall vision of the activists with whom you are working. Remember that you are least helpful to the movement when you are doing nothing at all. Act, and ask if you are unsure. If you make a mistake, acknowledge it, apologize, and learn.
3. Don’t be oppressive. Listen to and include (or center) the voices and experiences of the activist communities in which you are working and researching. Often researchers will assume they know more about the situation than activists do because they have done a lot of reading on the issue. Allowing activists to speak for themselves through your research and showing how this either supports or undermines your assumptions is an empowering method that many scholar activists choose to adopt.
4. Remain critical. Don’t fetishize “the activist community” as the sole or singular authority on your research subject. While activists, and your own participation in the movement as an activist, will provide you with unique and crucial insights, it is important to remember that, as Donna Haraway says, knowledge is always situated and that true objectivity is always partial vision. Understand that your experiences as an activist, as well as the experiences of the activists you are studying with, are only partial experiences and deeply rooted in context.
5. Be inclusive. Discuss your work with the groups amongst whom you are researching and working to find out how your research can be most beneficial to their cause. Find out where you can be most useful as a scholar and an activist. This will depend on your own skill sets and willingness to leave your comfort zone. In addition, your work is helpful in so far as it is accessible. Write in langauge everyone can understand and if you need to use specific terminology, explain it clearly.
6. Stay true to your own vision of your project. While it is crucial to listen to and take cues from activists and their needs, also remember that your research is yours and has a specific agenda and set of goals. If your goals and agenda change throughout your research (and to certain extent they very likely will), make sure you hold yourself and your research accountable to those changes and that you are not being forced to carry out research you don’t want to do. Scholar activism should be recognized as being mutually beneficial, not selfless or altruistic.
7. Learn about, and stay aware of, competing discourses and practices that comprise debates on methodology and know where you stand. Some will argue that your methodology is illegitimate, unaccountable or biased, while others might argue that your methodology is the only way to study your research subject. Understand that questions of power and epistemology underlie methdological discourses and perspectives and respond to them critically.
8. Develop vocabularies for describing your work to different audiences. Funding opportunites, departmental approval, and most importantly, your relationship with activist communities, may well depend upon this. Furthermore, if you want your work to help change the world, then know that you are going to have to talk to a lot of different people from a lot of different perspectives about it. Think about your audiences and the framing and language to which they may be most responsive.
9. Find a gatekeeper who can vouch for your integrity within either scholarly or activist spaces. This is something I learned on my first day of sociology as an undergrad in my first ever methods class and I still think it is the most useful things I learned from that class. If you are an activist you will have contacts and if you are a student you will have contacts. They can help introduce you to other activists and community leaders. Use them.

That’s all I’ve got so far but if you think of any others do let me know!

Bye for now,

Theo