Types of scholar-activism: Engaged (mostly geography) academia
Types
Intellectual critique
Intellectual visionary
Generating and mapping
information
Embedded community
activist
Impacts
Shifts major intellectual debates, which
enables others to use ideas in changing
society
Uses intellectual ideas to challenge an
existing approach and support
alternative campaigns and policies.
Provides campaigners with overviews
and evidence to fight campaigns. Maps
can have high policy and media impact.
Long-term collaborative work with
campaigners in a particular place. Aids,
supports and drives campaigns.
Feminist participatory
Works in response to needs defined by
participants, works with participants and
produces knowledge with participants.
Can directly aid participants.
Conducting detailed
Doing the analysis, such as economic
analysis
analysis, to supporting particular
campaign claims. Provides crucial detail.
University beyond campus Takes the resources and knowledge of
the university beyond the campus. Opens
knowledge to others.
Situated solidarities
Radical direct action
Horizontal collaboration with activists,
immersion in places and practices of
protest, but bringing academic
knowledge, skills and funding.
Contribute to campaigns by physical
involvement, intellectual reflection used
to aid further direct action strategy.
Examples
Noam Chomsky – critique of
neoliberalism and state power.
Limitations
Can be quite abstract and distanced
from on-the-ground engagement.
Jane Jacobs – used intellectual
ideas about urbanism and
neighbourhoods to resist city
gentrification.
Amber Boll – does mapping for
community groups, activist
cartographer.
Pete North – worked with
alternative economies and
localisation projects in
Liverpool (and other places).
Rachel Pain – has researched
domestic violence, fear and
young people, with participants.
Relies on being intellectually driven,
rather than starting with
community concerns.
Jane Wills – did the research
behind Living Wage campaign.
Working as part of large group can
make academic outputs
complicated.
Often the language, theory and
teaching retain the same style as a
University, just shared for free. Tend
not to attract diverse audience.
Issues of power inequities,
knowledge production and money a
bit vague.
Andre Pusey – organised the
People’s University which ran
workshops and shared
knowledge beyond campus.
Paul Routledge – worked with
south east Asian social
movements and climate justice.
Paul Chatterton – direct action
climate camps, and built LILAC.
Can reduce academia to a method.
Can become aligned with a
particular political approach and
activist community, rather than
broad intellectual ideas.
Can result in practical projects that
lack intellectual depth. Some
become like market research.
Hard to retain any critical
perspective and to write about
friends.
Jenny Pickerill, May 2015