Chapter 5 From an Institutional Absence to Radical Action A Political Activist Ethnography Project in Aotearoa / New Zealand

Identifying and Exploring the Research Problematic

Core to PAE is the concept of the research problematic that “provides an organizing frame and gives direction to projects that start from within the activities and relevancies of standpoint informants” (Bisaillon 2012, 617–18). The problematic driving and shaping this research is embodied in its title: “A Major Left Wing Think Tank in Aotearoa: An Impossible Dream or a Call to Action?” The implicit question behind it (Why had a major left-wing think tank never developed, and was the ground fertile for the establishment of such a body?) remained the same from the beginning to the end of the project. It derived directly from the experience and knowledge gained from my work as a frontline activist and organizer. My entry point into PAE was as a researcher who identified as an activist, not an academic. I first became politically engaged when I joined a progressive youth organization while still in school, going on to become a founding member of the first women’s liberation group on my university campus. I took an active role in many struggles and organizations over the ensuing decades. In the 1980s and 1990s, I worked as an organizer in local and national unemployed workers’ and welfare claimants’ groups before going on to become a Member of Parliament for the Green Party for ten years. After resigning from Parliament in 2009, I returned to grassroots work with two organizations: anti-capitalist welfare rights group Auckland Action Against Poverty and Kōtare Research and Education for Social Change in Aotearoa.

I had been part of conversations with friends and colleagues about the need for a left-wing think tank since around 1990. This awareness had in part been driven by the efficacy of the New Zealand Business Roundtable’s influence on political discourse. One of New Zealand’s leading left public intellectuals at the time, Bruce Jesson, wrote the following in 1987:

A cabal of hardline right-wingers now exists in the Roundtable, and it has become a strident organization of the libertarian Right. . . . The battle for political power is a battle for public opinion, and people like Kerr and bodies like the Roundtable are still fighting it. They are more aware than other New Zealanders of the intellectual content of this battle. (1987, 131–32)3

A left-leaning economist, Brian Easton, also spent decades attempting to draw attention to the poor public discourse in New Zealand (Easton 2003) and calling for the development of institutions with the intellectual substance sufficient to enable the social democratic left to present a serious challenge to the neoliberal hegemony that dominated New Zealand’s political life (Easton 2012). In 1995, law professor Jane Kelsey, a long-time campaigner on free trade and other issues, called for the establishment of “well-resourced critical think tanks . . . which can develop an integrated analysis and foster climates favourable to change. Unco-ordinated [sic] research by isolated critics can never compete” (1995, page unknown).

It was not just the calls of renowned public figures on the left that drove my awareness of the absence of a left-wing think tank and the need for the left to create an intellectual armoury of its own. My work in the unemployed workers’ movement and elsewhere had taught me directly that until those who suffered most from the impacts of right-wing government and business agendas had their own think tank(s) capable of advancing and advocating policies in their interests with similar efficacy, they would always be on the back foot. I had also learned from my time in Parliament that the parties who try to represent left interests in the legislature all too often lack the kind of innovative and radical new policies that a substantive and quality left-wing think tank (or tanks) could provide.

As I immersed myself in the field between July and November 2012, I asked participants what they thought of my working definition of think tank, deliberately designed to reflect an organization capable of being developed by left activists and academics autonomously of government and the academy:

Most respondents were positive about the proffered definition, especially when I had explained clearly that the entity I was talking about was both “left” and a “think tank” and that the two definitions should be considered in tandem. The term think tank itself raised far more concern. As community-based researcher and activist Karen Davis told me,

Well, we were opposing those bastard business think tanks, the [Business Roundtable], right back in 1990 or something, so we were aware of think tanks, but we mainly saw them as the enemy. . . . You sort of associate think tank and horrible right-wing bastards in the same breath, so they do get a bit mixed in that way.

Another common perception was that think tank implied a mix of aloof isolation and elitism. Community development worker Jane Stevens said, “It kind of creates a picture of academics sitting around with a glass of wine having a nice little chat.” Several participants also noted with disapprobation the term’s warlike connotations. It became apparent that most participants viewed the term think tank in an unfavourable light and that the term may be a barrier to the development of a left institution of this nature.

I was keen to find out whether participants discerned the same absence I had, the gap that motivated my research, or had my initial assumption been wrong? I was quickly disabused of any notion that I was alone in recognizing an absence. Former British Labour MP Bryan Gould told me, “I’ve had some experience with that kind of thing, but I’ve yet to see, in New Zealand at any rate, anything that would fit that bill.” Māori unionist and Labour Party campaign manager Matt McCarten summed up the absence—and the need—in a way that reflected the opinions of many: “We just keep losing and when you think about what this government’s doing in things like the reform of social welfare and what previous governments have done on the economic thing, the reason they’re able to get away with it, the intellectual armoury to fight with wasn’t there.”

The responses from participants across the board confirmed that the question posed by the problematic had not been a figment of my imagination. They also provided a textured and thoughtful range of responses about why such an entity had never come into being, including the lack of critical mass in a small country, concomitant with a shortage of the necessary organizing skills and expertise; the simple fact that no one had picked up the challenge and run with it because of an individual and collective focus on other priorities; a history of left anti-intellectualism; and the difficulties in sourcing funding for an overtly left-wing institution of this nature.

What I had not expected when I started out was the extent to which questions about the state of the Aotearoa / New Zealand left triggered by the problematic came to dominate participant responses, my fieldwork journal, and subsequent analysis. While initially driven by the absence of one institution, a major left-wing think tank, the question about what the state of the activist left in 2010–13 indicated about the possibility or otherwise of the establishment of a left-wing think tank opened up what were in fact much broader and deeper concerns among people on the left in Aotearoa / New Zealand at that time and revealed an even more critical institutional gap that I will discuss shortly.

Why Political Activist Ethnography?

My research was well underway before I discovered that a method of inquiry called “political activist ethnography” existed. I had struggled to find an academically rigorous framework that would meet the challenges of the research question and site while remaining congruent with my own political and philosophical perspectives. I was first alerted to PAE through the work of Aziz Choudry, whom I had known as an anti-globalization activist in Christchurch before he left for an academic life in Canada (Choudry 2010, 23). No one with whom I worked in Aotearoa / New Zealand, academic or activist, had ever heard of PAE, but I soon became convinced it would be interesting and—I hoped—productive to build on the seminal work of George Smith and other early practitioners (G. Smith 1990; Frampton et al. 2006a). There were three key reasons for this choice.

First, the questions I was asking were aimed at uncovering knowledge about the activities and perceptions of left activists and academics and a small selection of their organizations. My primary focus was not on examining the ways in which the institutions of society govern and regulate some aspects of people’s lives and activities, in which case it may have been appropriate to employ institutional ethnography (IE; Campbell 2002; Devault 2006; Taber 2010). While the state of New Zealand’s ruling relations would remain of inescapable relevance, my priority was to explore in some depth aspects of the relationships, experiences, tensions, and contradictions within the New Zealand left itself. My inquiry into an absence—the lack of a major left-wing think tank—meant finding a way of investigating the reasons for that absence and whether and how it might be filled.

This meant that I was particularly taken with Ian Hussey’s notion of expanding PAE into the realm of the institutions and networks of activism, suggesting that activist work be viewed in the same way as other types of work and that such work can be investigated and mapped in relation to the institutions of activism itself (Hussey 2012). In other words, PAE can extend beyond consideration of the organization and impact of ruling relations at the interface between the institutions of power and those who work for change into a deeper examination of the relationships, contradictions, and tensions within activist worlds themselves. Related to this was the significance institutional and political activist ethnographers give to the concept of the problematic, discussed above. The question at the core of this project met with some exactitude the notion of the problematic, grounded as it was in a very long period of gestation among the people and groups that constitute the research field and in the dynamics and contradictions of our work. The critical reflexivity inherent in PAE also meant that my identity as a biased, value-laden activist researcher, who was in part a key source of the problematic, would be a useful and congruent attribute rather than something to be minimized or denied.

Secondly, there is an assumption inherent in PAE that knowledge gained from research is expected to inform the next phase of work being undertaken by the relevant activist groups or networks. PAE is designed to move practitioners beyond the all-too-common divides between theory and practice and between activism and the academy. As Gary Kinsman writes, “We need theory connected to and constantly transformed and enriched by practice that can assist us in mapping out social relations of struggle, identifying sites where progress is possible and developing strategies for fighting to win our struggles” (2006, 154). From its conception, my project was developed with the intention that the findings, whatever they might be, would offer some practical assistance to the strengthening of the intellectual and organizational capacity of at least some parts of the Aotearoa / New Zealand left.

The third factor that drew me to PAE lay in my own positioning as an activist researcher. While there is no question this study was undertaken in part to gain a doctoral qualification, my overwhelming motivation was a desire to find the answers to the research questions—and then, with others, act on those answers. My long experience in street politics and community organizing had often caused me to reflect on the roles we take as activists beyond the frontlines, in areas like research, education, and policy development. PAE provided a legitimate and provocative framework within which to explore not only the research problematic itself but also my own shifting academic/activist identity as the project unfolded. In addition, PAE’s acute reflexivity and use of the ethnographic toolbox offered distance and rigour within a project that cut to the heart of my political life and context and in which there was a real danger of potentially self-sabotaging confusion and a deficit around issues of transparency.

I faced two challenges in engaging with a relatively new method of inquiry in a geographically isolated academic environment lacking in any collegial opportunities for advice and discussion. First, I was concerned that the scale of what I was attempting seemed larger than other political activist ethnographies of which I was aware, transcending any one group, movement, or network and treating the left of an entire country as a research site. I was heartened by Dorothy Smith’s statement that “institutional ethnography isn’t about studying institutions as such” (2006, 2) but realized that, as part of the scale issue, there was a second dissonance between my proposed research and IE and PAE as I understood them to have evolved up to that point. Both methods use textual analysis. To examine the relevant textual practices and output of the New Zealand left for 2010 through 2013, even within some tight constraints, would certainly have been an interesting exercise, but would have entailed so much work that common sense alone placed such an effort well out of the scope of the project.

As the interviews, journal keeping, and subsequent analysis proceeded, these early concerns diminished in importance. Laura Bisaillon writes about social relations as “sequences of interdependent actions that shape people’s daily practices” (2012, 619). In the field, I observed, discovered, described, analyzed, and mapped these social relations, the contradictions and problems of the Aotearoa / New Zealand left of that time within its historical, geographical, and political context. I utilized PAE to go beyond methods that were either too localized and intimate to paint any bigger picture or too meta, so large that they carried the risk of missing out on the specifics that add colour, complexity, and depth to research findings. PAE allowed all three levels—meta, meso, and micro—and their interconnections to emerge with some degree of clarity, which was particularly useful when engaged with the complexities involved in examining the state of the left.

On the question of textual analysis, it was only later that I came to understand that interview transcripts themselves were texts, although not in the way identified by Dorothy Smith, as “material in a form that enables replication . . . with the capacity to coordinate people’s doings translocally” (2005, 228). I finally came to understand that the raw data of my research—fifty-one interviews and the field journal—were themselves texts that I had in fact analyzed in fine-grained detail. This illumination arrived only at the point I first made contact in person with a political activist ethnographer, Gary Kinsman, when he visited New Zealand in early 2014. The consequences of geographical isolation were suddenly all too apparent, much to my methodological embarrassment. A much earlier collegial conversation would have saved considerable angst.

Findings: Creating a Left-Wing Think Tank in Aotearoa / New Zealand

The original question underpinning the research was answered in the affirmative. Every person I interviewed supported the strengthening of the “intellectual armoury” of the left through the development of some form of think tank or think tank–like organization(s). This ranged from careful skepticism to passionate enthusiasm, and almost everything in between. Academics were encouraging. University lecturer and activist Sandra Grey saw “a left-wing think tank or a longer-term strategizing for the left as being immensely necessary in New Zealand,” while Māori Fulbright scholar Veronica Tawhai told me, “This is just the most amazing idea, we definitely need it.” From those whose identification was primarily activist, the support was just as strong. Welfare rights advocate Paul Blair remarked, “New Zealand could do with one, definitely. The deep south of the planet needs a left-wing think tank, sure, why not?” It was clear that this sample of the Aotearoa / New Zealand left not only recognized the same gap that drove the problematic in the first place but also supported, in varying ways and with varying degrees of enthusiasm, the development of a major left-wing think tank (or tanks).

It was clear, however, that strong verbal support from across the left for some form of think tank was not in itself ever going to make it happen, nor would it determine what such an entity might look like in practice. Above all, was the time right for such an initiative, and how might it develop in practice? Participants were enthusiastic and detailed in their advice. On timing, some conveyed an almost overwhelming sense of urgency. Prominent Māori lawyer and activist Annette Sykes said, “I want this to happen by tomorrow . . . it’s long overdue . . . this stuff here is so desperately needed. . . . I think if we don’t make a commitment to this now it’ll be a hundred years, unless there’s a revolution, a people’s revolution in between.”

Others spoke of the need for organizational expertise if any development was to be successful. Academic and activist David Parker told me, “Creating change is not simply about speaking the truth . . . what a think tank also needs as part of its equipment and armoury is the knowhow and people willing to do that.” Participants were clear that success would depend on the willingness and ability of an individual or group to make such a project their priority. As Dunedin academic Brian Roper noted, “It either requires getting some money from somewhere where you can employ somebody to be an organizer, or it requires somebody who’s prepared to really make that the number one thing that they’re doing in their life, and really devote the time to doing the basic organizing of it, to make it happen.”

A number of those interviewed spoke of the characteristics they believed essential to the successful completion of such an initiative, chief among them the capacity to attract respect and support, to corral together people from different parts of the left, and a degree of charisma. Paul Blair made a very direct comparison with the role played by the late Roger Kerr, former long-standing executive director of the New Zealand Business Roundtable:

Do we need a Roger Kerr? Maybe it has to be a Julia Kerr instead of a Roger, maybe it needs to be more than one person, all those kinds of things, so you have a public face that doesn’t have to be tokenist . . . when he came on the radio, you knew it was the big [Business Roundtable] talking. So when our people in our left-wing think tank come on the radio, the same thing has got to happen.

Despite an overwhelming view that funding was likely to be a major obstacle to the development of a left-wing think tank, many respondents were refreshingly optimistic and practical when offering thoughts on the matter. Long-term community development practitioner Vivian Hutchinson said,

This is how things have happened for hundreds of years. People who want to take initiative have been supported by their friends. That comes with pros and cons and all that sort of stuff, but really, that’s how it happens. So we’ve got to get more businesslike about asking for that support and calling each other to generosity about it.

Participants identified many significant considerations that any future initiatives should take into account. These included a strong sense that left-wing think tanks should not attempt to mirror those of the right but establish their own philosophically and politically congruent purposes, structures, and relationships; that the process of establishment should be slow and careful, bearing in mind that creating impossibly difficult goals would set a project up for failure; and that high-quality work would be vital not only to increase a group’s ability to influence public policy processes and bring about change but also because the powerful forces ranged against the left will, given the chance, do everything possible to undermine such projects. As academic and activist Daphne Lawless said, “It does have to be at a level where it can do battle with the research which is put up by the right-wing think tanks on the field of battle, as it were, in the academic marketplace.”

When it came to suggestions about what the activities of a major left-wing think tank might involve, participants offered an enormous range of ideas, often in considerable detail. These included a wide variety of possible types and areas of research; the suggestion that any new entity should be a place where the left could reflect, think, and argue together; and that a space could be created that nurtured the voices and views of those whose perspectives and stories are not normally heard. As community-based Māori researcher Helen Potter told me, “You would be seeking to hear all manner of voices and there wouldn’t be a closed downness or an excluding of voices that were—what’s that word they use in the literature?—unruly. You would hear all sorts of unruly voices.”

The research found very real barriers to any project that might attempt to establish what left city councillor Cathy Casey called a “pan left” think tank. Analysis of the data left me very clear that it would be foolish in the extreme to expect an initiative that tried to include the entire left within its brief to have any chance of success. Ideological differences between the social democratic and radical anti-capitalist left were too significant. There was also a substantive difference between a lot of environmental thinking and that of both social democrats and radicals, given the “neither right nor left” tendency prominent in some Green Party and environmental activist circles (Tanczos 2011; Browning 2011). I did not consider it possible to overcome these very real barriers with a project whose basic principles may be internally confused and contradictory. Trying to blend the radical and social democratic left together simply would not work, nor would forcing a conjunction between those who contend there is or should be no such thing as “left” or “right” and those whose beliefs and actions are shaped by the side they take in capitalism’s enduring war on the poor. Therefore, I found that while there are many potential permutations, there could be a place in New Zealand for at least three major left-wing think tanks: social democratic, green, and radical left. However, my own interest and commitment after my doctoral studies remained undeniably with the latter category.

Findings: State of the Left—a Second Institutional Absence Revealed

As I began the interview process, I was struck by the sense conveyed by so many participants that the left had lost—that in Aotearoa / New Zealand, we had in effect been permanently defeated in the struggle against much stronger economic and political forces upholding and pursuing a neoliberal agenda. Māori academic Maria Bargh said, “We are being fractured and divided by things that in the scheme of the planet are not as major as they’re made out to be.” Academic and activist John Stansfield was forthright: “We failed, actually. Love us all to bits, but we failed. Things are worse now than they were when we were children, income distribution is worse, fairness is worse, the potential rise in fascism is much worse, the only way people escape this is on a jet.”

This sense of loss and failure was accompanied by a decrease in confidence, an awareness of insufficient collective analysis and planning, and the realities of organizational fragility across sectors. Community organizer and educator Tim Howard summed up what he saw as the possible consequences of life as a left activist at a time when the neoliberal hegemony seemed virtually unchallengeable. He explained that we risked “taking on internally the dominant discourse that means that they are right, that their perception—corporate capitalist stuff from the neoliberal perspective—is ‘the way things are.’ . . . While fighting that norm, we can be taking that perception as somehow centralized in ourselves and leave ourselves peripheralized by that.”

At the same time, there were signs of hope among many participants. Union economist Bill Rosenberg said, “You keep on coming across people who are more progressive than you ever expected.” Activist Rhiannon Thomson observed,

Perhaps it’s my age. . . . I’ve seen people almost doing a full circle, like some people that I thought were reasonably right wing are seeing the effects of things, or perhaps have hit a point in their life where they’re mature enough to see. I think they’re becoming quite aware just of those divisions between the haves and have-nots and workers and some of those workers’ rights things. Amazingly, since we’ve been so down for so long, people are becoming aware.

Beyond the aspirations of participants, there was also a noticeable rise in street and left parliamentary activism during the research period, which included the local manifestation of the international Occupy movement in 2011 (Grey 2011) and the rise of the Mana Parliamentary Party, launched after a left-wing split from the more conservative Māori Party (Mana 2011). There was also a growing willingness, noted particularly among the traditionally factionalized radical left, to cooperate with and listen to each other across old generational, sectarian, and ideological boundaries.

Unlike findings around the absence of a major left-wing think tank, the major conclusion in this area was not expected from the outset of the project. As part of determining whether the New Zealand left was in a fit state to support the development of one or more major left-wing think tanks and of working out whether and how such initiatives might fit within broader strategies, it was crucial to explore how we might develop counter-hegemonic power more effectually than we had done so far. Trade union leader Robert Reid summed up the thoughts of many when he said the left needed “to put a knife through that neoliberal framework, because it’s still so powerful.” Referring to a line from Yeats’s poem The Second Coming, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” (Yeats 2003), Pasifika poet Karlo Mila put the question, “What would hold [the left] together?” In assembling a response, I found myself asking, “What would Robert’s ‘knife’ look like? What strategies, ideas, and actions might more cogently hold us together as we wield that knife?”

In posing that question, the most significant finding in this area emerged: a desire for a shared vision across the radical left and a shared way of achieving that vision through the creation of a party or movement. As history lecturer and former unemployed movement activist Cybèle Locke put it, “I’m still looking for that home, ideological home . . . and a really, really beautiful utopia . . . I’m still looking for that too. I’ve never given up trying.” These are powerful sentiments. Finding an ideological home that provides a congruent means to achieve the common dream requires organizations that can meet these purposes in alignment with the beliefs and hopes of those who are doing the seeking. Given that I was deliberately interviewing people from all parts of the left spectrum, some of whom were completely comfortable with their current affiliations or were not in search of such a “home” in the first place, this absence only affected some participants. For the latter, the search for something not yet born—a party or movement that fully expressed their dreams while providing a mechanism for realizing those dreams—was imperative.

The use of PAE as my method of inquiry brought this conclusion unexpectedly to the fore. Analysis of my source texts (the fifty-one interview transcripts and the field journal) also provided the beginnings of a road map forward. Recommendations included the need for the New Zealand left to become braver and more aware that courage and the willingness to take power are essential; that we recognize and foster theory as part of developing sustainable counter-hegemonic organization, no longer accepting it solely as an elite practice within the academy; and that the left, wherever we are placed within it, simply needs to become more thoughtful, replacing mindless activism and a gross imbalance of power by collectively becoming smarter, deeper thinkers than the structural forces we are up against.

Concluding Reflections

“Ethnography is not an innocent practice. Our research practices are performative, pedagogical and political. Through our writing and our talk, we enact the worlds we study” (Denzin 2006, 422). My research question was not an innocent one. Anything discovered was aimed at serving those who aspire to “put a knife through the neoliberal framework.” From the point at which I first became aware of its existence, PAE seemed a close, if not quite perfect, fit for this far-from-innocent purpose. There were times when it felt like a risky choice for a geographically isolated researcher new to the world of sociological theory. Yet despite the risks and uncertainties, the experiment was attempted. I offer three closing reflections on the experience.

First, the practical application of PAE to this research enabled me to overcome two challenges I faced in seeking to understand a lacuna, an institutional absence rather than a presence, as well as coming to grips with a large and somewhat amorphous ethnographic field. Fundamental to this was the notion of the problematic and the way in which it had genuinely risen from inside the activist world. It emerged not just from the mind and memory of the researcher but also from the acute consciousness of many others, as the research findings demonstrated. The method of inquiry was also flexible enough to open up and deal with the unexpected scale and complexity of data around the “state of the left,” demonstrating Gary Kinsman’s point that IE and PAE “are alternative ways of doing sociology that are not fixed or dogmatic and thus are able to be continually open-ended and remade as new voices and new movements come forward to join in struggles for social transformation” (2006, 155).

Second, the research findings have already been of direct and immediate use to a wide range of individuals and organizations on the Aotearoa / New Zealand left. From the time research results first started to be disseminated in 2013, there have been several practical consequences at both the local and national levels among individuals, groups, and networks. Perhaps the most significant of these was the collective project to establish a radical left-wing think tank for which my thesis became in effect a feasibility study. In September 2016, Economic and Social Research Aotearoa (ESRA) was officially launched at a major public event in Wellington, New Zealand’s capital city (ESRA 2016). Building on the second major research finding, ESRA was also actively working to nurture an even bigger and more difficult initiative: the creation of a national radical left political organization or party. The editors of Sociology for Changing the World argue that “the test for whether or not research has been successful is the extent to which it enables people to transform the world” (Frampton et al. 2006b, 1). In my study, PAE proved not only its academic worth but also its capacity to reveal and support at least two significant starting points for action aimed at strengthening the power and influence of left thinking, culture, and organization in New Zealand.

Third, in undertaking this study using PAE, I accepted the challenge presented by Frampton and her associates a decade ago when they proposed that activist-ethnographic research should “challenge and move beyond the binary opposition that separates ‘activist’ and ‘researcher’ as identity categories . . . in the very process of doing activist research and knowledge production” (2006c, 258). One of the most telling moments during the research period came when it suddenly dawned on me that I was no longer just an activist with an interest in using research to further our daily work, but I had somehow metamorphosed into an academic as well. Since then, I have carried this dual identity consciously as I seek, with others, to extend the range of what is both conceivable and practical at the academic activist interface. I could not have championed the establishment of a think tank without a PhD, as so much of the work involves mutual understanding and respect with those already situated in the academy. My credibility as an activist would never have allowed this on its own, but that identity was also essential in first attempts to develop a new kind of institution that lies beyond old boundaries.

With others, I have also been part of the development of a series of national conferences called “Social Movements, Resistance and Social Change,” which now bring together hundreds of left activists and academics each year to share their latest research and insights. The fourth such gathering took place in September 2017 and was jointly hosted by ESRA and Massey University (ESRA 2017). I am also a member of the editorial board of a new journal, Counterfutures: Left Thought & Practice Aotearoa, a “multidisciplinary journal of Left research, thought and alternatives,” which now publishes twice a year and is another site where academic and activist thinking can be brought into the same arena (Counterfutures, n.d.). This is to imply not that my involvement was essential to either of these latter initiatives but rather that the reflexivity and ethnographic rigour offered by PAE played an integral part in the practical development of my understanding, confidence, and capacity to attempt a useful contribution to all these boundary-crossing projects. The terrain of the counter-hegemonic left in New Zealand has changed considerably since my thesis became public in mid-2014, and I believe the use of PAE in this study has helped underpin the development of “a position that contests the insider/outsider polarity that continues to trap both research and activism” (Frampton et al. 2006c, 258).

Lastly, I am excited by the new possibilities for the use of PAE in New Zealand. Since my thesis became public in July 2014, I have become aware of at least three New Zealand–based postgraduate students who are using, or considering using, PAE in their research. There may well be more. The ESRA Research Committee was itself interested in the possibilities of using PAE as a method of inquiry in future projects with our union and community activist partner organizations. I am much taken with the following statement from Aziz Choudry (2014): “Rather than attempting to categorize activist research processes into neat, finite models, I contend that it is important to capture and understand the dynamic interplay between activist research and organizing.” I believe there is much exciting potential for this to happen as increasing numbers of us at the academic activist interface continue to trial methodologies and methods in ways that will become increasingly relevant to the activist as well as academic worlds, including here in Aotearoa / New Zealand, where such research is barely visible. PAE is unquestionably a valuable addition to the range of methodological options available to all of us who wish to innovate and strengthen our intellectual and organizational capacity to build a future less confined by colonial and corporate agendas.

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