2019/06/28 by Aziz Choudry · 1 voice · 3 citations
Social Sciences · #Higher Education Governance and Development #Service-Learning and Community Engagement #Adult and Continuing Education Topics
paper · doi:10.1080/13642987.2019.1630382
openalex publication_date 2019/06/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
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.