Activist Scholarship: Final Study Guide

Activist Scholarship: Definitions and Objectives

  • Defining Activist Scholarship: The production of knowledge and pedagogical practices through active engagement with and in service of progressive social movements. It rejects the dichotomy of scholars carrying out activism "on the side."
  • Major Aims of the Collection:
      - Visibility: Making visible activist scholarship occurring on and off campuses in the U.S., Canada, and globally.
      - Roadmap: Acting as a guide for students and junior faculty to remain true to political commitments within the competitive academy.
      - Emancipatory Knowledge: Examining participatory research methodologies developed in partnership with social movements.
      - Foregrounding Subalterns: Highlighting the efforts of antiracist and feminist scholars (women of color, immigrants, queers) in creating insurgent praxis.

The Neoliberal University in a Culture of Fear

  • Neoliberal Restructuring: Adoption of free-market policies leading to defunding higher education. Public money is redirected to surveillance, prisons, and the military.
  • The Corporate Model: Restructures campuses as businesses where academics are contract labor, students are customers, and knowledge is a commodity valued for corporate accumulation/state power.
  • Academic Policing: Junior faculty risk tenure if they engage in time-consuming community work. Assessment structures encourage instrumentalist extraction of data rather than genuine partnership.
  • National Security State: Rise of "patriotic correctness" post-9/11. Groups like Campus Watch target scholars critical of U.S. foreign policy. The PATRIOT Act has been used to deny visas to foreign academics with "irresponsible" opinions.
  • War of Ideas: A campaign to "take back" the university from 1960s-era radicalism, positioning dissenters as traitors or potential terrorists.

Challenging Penal Dependency (Julia Sudbury)

  • The Prison-Industrial Complex (PIC): A system where imprisonment is a key ingredient of "common sense." U.S. and world incarcerated populations have exploded since the 1970s.
  • The Academic-Prison-Industrial Complex: Universities are not the inverse of prisons; they are symbiotically linked through four functions:
      - Finance: Universities invest endowments in private prison corporations (e.g., CCA) and contract with predatory service providers like Sodexho/ARAMARK.
      - Workforce: Colleges produce an educated workforce for drug/immigration enforcement and homeland security.
      - Data Extraction: Using prisoners as raw material for social science or medical research (e.g., historical experiments at Holmesburg Prison and Kingston Penitentiary).
      - Ideological Legitimation: Mainstream criminology provides scholarly justification for "tough on crime" and "broken windows" theories.
  • Abolitionist Strategies: Using university resources for radical conferences (e.g., Critical Resistance 1998) and applying Participatory Action Research (PAR) where prisoners are researchers rather than objects.

Native Studies and Critical Pedagogy (Andrea Smith)

  • Academic-Industrial Complex: Intellectual labor is alienated from communities and commodified in the academic marketplace.
  • Performativity over Epistemology: Smith critiques the fixating on "indigenous knowledges" as static commodities. Instead, Native studies should focus on "performativity"—practices in flux centered on liberation.
  • Secondary Marginalization: Warning that tenuring Native scholars may merely "multiculturalize" a colonial system or create an elite class that polices their own communities.
  • The Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC): A set of state-linked relationships that manage and control dissent by professionalizing social movements into a careerist model.
  • Decolonizing the Classroom: Critiquing the capitalist logic of grading (meritocracy fiction) and current student evaluations (designed to quell dissent). Pedagogy should be a process of collective ownership, not student-as-consumer.

African Feminism in Postcolonial Universities (Amina Mama)

  • Historical Context: Post-independence optimism versus persisting Western hegemony. African universities are sites of gender inequality where women constitute only 6%6\% of professors.
  • Challenges to Institutionalization: Gender studies departments often have no budget and are dismissed as an "imperialist conspiracy" or Western import.
  • Androcentric Knowledge: Mainstream African scholarship remains largely unchanged by feminist theory. Externalized research (dominated by Western-based scholars) often treats African women as objects of study rather than partners.
  • Militarism and Economy: Feminist analysis has redrawn the boundaries of "security" to include food and basic safety, and transformed concepts of "work" to include female smallholders and reproductive labor.

Emancipatory Methodologies: Domestic Violence in Japan (Mieko Yoshihama)

  • Action Research Success: In the early 1990s, domestic violence was an unaddressed problem in Japan with no empirical studies. The Domestic Violence Action and Research Group (DVARG) formed to name the problem (domesutikku vaiolensu) and conduct nationwide surveys.
  • Strategic Financing: Solicited small donations (¥1,000) from the public, turning a research project into a mass movement.
  • External Pressure: Using the UN (Vienna 1993, Beijing 1995) to exert pressure on the Japanese government, which initially claimed existing laws were sufficient.

Transnational Feminism, Class, and Location (Carty and Das Gupta)

  • The Conundrum of Class: U.S. transnational feminism often elides class relations in the North, using the category "women of color" to stifle materialist discussions of privilege.
  • Relationship of Handouts: Critiques the tendency of Northern feminists to treat the global South as a needy partner for research fodder rather than learning from grassroots organizing experiences.
  • Transnationalized Localities: Redefining the "local" as a manifestation of global forces (e.g., sweatshops, outsourcing, and borders). Transnational work includes joining picket lines for immigrant service workers at one's own university.

Trans-Activisms and Antiracist Pedagogy (Bobby J. Noble)

  • Crises of Incoherence: Noble uses their location as the first FTM trans man hired in a women's studies program to stage pedagogical crises concerning whiteness and the body.
  • Trans Generation: Analysis of class/race privilege in transition (e.g., Gabbie's parental-funded surgery vs. Raci's street hormones).
  • Whiteness in the Classroom: Staging "race trouble" where white students' intellectual grasp of critical race theory is interrupted by their own embeddedness in colonial structures.

Teaching as Community Organizing (Glenn Omatsu)

  • Anticolonial Framework: Omatsu rejects the separation of thinking/doing and social change/personal transformation. Mentors were immigrant workers rather than academic advisers.
  • Political Tours: Reclaiming the model from the 1960s. Unlike tourist tours (sterotypes) or community tours (leader-focused), political tours uncover hidden histories of resistance (e.g., Little Tokyo anti-eviction fights or Koreatown grocery worker campaigns).
  • Shared Leadership: Based on the philosophy of Philip Vera Cruz and the Zapatistas, shifting away from charismatic authority toward the notion that everyone is a leader.

Solidarity and Contradictions: Palestine (Margo Okazawa-Rey)

  • National Privilege: Acknowledging that a U.S. passport provides mobility (using "settler roads") and safety that Palestinian colleagues are denied.
  • Working under Occupation: Building the Research and Documentation Unit at WCLAC to humanize research processes. Focus on Personal Status Laws and why women supported Hamas (seeking material/social needs).
  • African American-Palestinian Solidarity: Locating current work within the legacy of the Black Panther Party, Ralph Bunche, and June Jordan.
  • Relational Practice: A practice that emanates from the soul and moves from detached study to transformative deeds.