C. McGregor and J. Knox
Activism and the academy: assembling knowledge for social justice
Authors: Callum McGregor1 and Jeremy Knox2
Abstract
In the UK, if Higher Education institutions were to operate ‘as if the world mattered’ they must pay closer
attention to the relationship between contemporary social movement activism and academia. Despite the
inadequacy of reified generalities such as such ‘grassroots knowledge’ and the ‘ivory tower’, they continue to
enjoy widespread currency. Moving beyond a naïve ontological critique of linguistically, we argue that what is
at stake is the obfuscation of the ways in which the practice of social justice is materially constrained and
mediated by power relations. Combining insights from the socio-material turn in educational and social
movement theory, we suggest that the concept of assemblage provides a rich resource from which a purposeful
humility and creativity might flourish. Creatively drawing on Deleuze’s concept of larval subjects (Deleuze
2004), we propose larval thought as a way of thinking through the difficulties of HE’s relationship with social
movements.
Introduction
It’s hard to think of another time when there has been such a gulf between
intellectuals and activists; between theorists of revolution and its practitioners.
(Graeber 2002: 61).
In the UK, if Higher Education institutions were to operate ‘as if the world mattered’, they
must pay closer attention to the dysfunctional relationship between contemporary social
movement activism and academia. However, we also need to ask in what ways HE
institutions matter to social movements. Contemporary movements have arguably overcome
their (collective) identity crisis through negation of the very concept. (see Fomiyana (2010).
Meanwhile, academics struggle to address social justice concerns within institutions
increasingly encroached upon by a neoliberal culture of marketization, performance
indicators, and the ‘tyranny of fast-time’ (Erikson 2001). Tensions between social
movements and the academy are compounded by discourses that obscure material reality. In
what follows, we explain why we think such discourse is problematic, before suggesting an
alternative, drawing on assemblage theory.
Grassroots knowledge | Ivory tower
1
2
Moray House School of Education, The University of Edinburgh, s0094768@sms.ed.ac.uk
Moray House School of Education, The University of Edinburgh, j.k.knox@sms.ed.ac.uk
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C. McGregor and J. Knox
Movement and academic discourses habitually make use of reified binary opposites such as
such grassroots knowledge|ivory tower, knowledge from below| knowledge from above, or
horizontal ‘wiki’ approaches as opposed to hierarchical elitist methods of knowledge
generation. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with using such binaries to make important
analytical distinctions. Nevertheless, we can articulate two concerns: first, neither social
movements or ‘the academy’ are hermetically sealed spaces of knowledge ‘production’
(Flowers and Swan 2011: 237). Secondly, and more pertinently, such terms carry pragmatic
implications, which we must be cognisant of.
For example, the sustainability-oriented
Transition Towns movement trades on its ‘horizontal’ ‘community-based’ approach to
knowledge production (Hopkins 2008, 2011). Consequently, such discourse distances itself
from what is perceived to be ‘elite knowledge:
Everything you read in this book is a result of real work in the real world, with
community engagement at its heart. There’s not an ivory tower in sight; no
professors in musty oak-paneled studies churning out erudite papers (Hopkins
2011: 17).
Yet, existing studies of this particular movement, note its genealogical origins in the work of
white middle-class, educated males, and are cautious of its more insidious assimilative
practices (e.g. Connors and McDonald 2010).
Similarly, academics concerned with social movements also default to easy terms such as
‘knowledge from below’ (Choudry and Kapoor 2010), or social movement ‘knowledge
production’ (e.g. Conway 2006). Whilst these authors’ works are fully sensitive to such
nuance, and don’t romanticise such knowledge as somehow ‘better’, this impoverished
vocabulary hinders the potential for meaningful dialogue.
The problem with reified generalities
By invoking the grassroots, social movement discourse often obfuscates activist routes
(Edwards et al 2011); the pathways that particular individuals have travelled, so that they
arrive at a point where they can be ‘active’. Often, routes to activism pass through the
academy (Rootes 1995; Morris and Staggenborg 2004; Rootes 2004). As Estevez (2008:
1934) brings to our attention, accounts of ‘movement knowledge production’ frequently
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underestimate the complex power dynamics that “intersect in the setting up of the
‘boundaries’ of ‘insidership’ and ‘outsidership’” within movements.
It is our contention that ‘grassroots’ organising and in particular, ‘horizontality’, are not
anterior material realities but rather, discursive devices which serve to bolster the
foundational separation of contemporary movements from supposed hierarchical institutions
(c.f. Juris 2005; Nunes 2005). In this sense we can argue that such tropes form part of a
discursive strategy for ‘buy-in’, rather than being ‘internalised’ by activists, per se. More
adequate is to conceive of movements as assemblages, in which their linguistic components
perform semantic as well as pragmatic functions (DeLanda 2006).
Insights from assemblage theory and Actor-Network Theory, as applied to both social
movement studies (DeLanda 2006; McFarlane 2009), and educational research (Fenwick et al
2011), provide the necessary rudiments for exploring these concerns. Hence, social
movements and academic practices will be conceived, not as isolated entities or oppositional
producers of knowledge, but rather as particular categorisations, produced through relations
of exteriority with each other. A social movement’s identity is thus the stabilisation of its
material and expressive dynamics, and is deeply enmeshed and contingent upon the same
politics within which the academy operates. Too often, the expressive components of
movements result in a valorisation of organisational form. This valorisation obscures
particular contexts, in which the material and expressive components of the university are the
same (recontextualised) components of social movements.
Larval thought as a productive metaphor
Creatively drawing on Deleuze’s concept of larval subjects (Deleuze 2004), we propose
larval thought as a way of thinking through the difficulties of HE’s relationship with social
movements. This will be a form of conceptual experimentation, with which we will
foreground the need for mutual deterritorialisation. As a point of departure, we argue that
critiques of contemporary Left movements focus excessively on their lack of political
coherence, and fail to address the educative potential of their prefigurative politics. While
many accounts of such movements focus on their attempts to reclaim space (community
space, urban space and so on) this is not enough. In reality the focus should be on the
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assemblage of available time, space and resources – the very same dynamics that impact on
academics’ ability to engage in practices of ‘slow scholarship’ (Hartman and Darab 2012).
As a further example, Hartman and Darab’s (2012) catachresis of the Slow Food Movement
to a call for Slow Scholarship, can be extended from pre-figurative politics (Scott-Cato and
Hillier 2010: 882) to pre-figurative thinking. Here, larval thinking entails mutual humility.
Sometimes this involves blurring the distinction between activist and academic knowledge
production (Bevington & Dixon 2005), but more often, it entails recognising both the
difficulties in doing so, and the irreducibility of these positions. Rather than reifying
problematic subject positions, experiments with larval thought may provide new
understandings of the dynamics of broader learning assemblages for social justice. In this
sense, the focus is not on where knowledge is from, but what it is for and what we can do
with it.
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