Postscript Looking Back, Looking Forward

Gary Kinsman

My close encounters with the work of Dorothy Smith and institutional ethnography (IE) saved my life as an activist and scholar by providing a way of bringing my socially divided self as a queer activist and graduate student together. I learned how the insights and capacities of ethnography could be turned against ruling social institutions in this society. This was deepened through my learning from George Smith, my political activist ethnographer mentor. I engaged with Smith not only at OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto) but also in the Right to Privacy Committee fighting anti-gay police repression and in AIDS ACTION NOW! organizing for treatment access and survival for people living with HIV. I learned how research could be done to produce knowledge for oppressed people and, more specifically, for activism and social transformation. This enriched my life both as an activist and in the university world.

Since then, I have witnessed aspects of IE shift as they have become institutionalized in university disciplines and professional locations. This, of course, is what had happened earlier with women’s studies and other activist/scholar currents, as they became more academically institutionalized and their connections with activism and organizing were broken. So, it should be no surprise that no matter how critical we are, this can still happen to IE. This shifted the social standpoints from which IE was done away from community and movement-based organizing. I have read exciting IE work that is brilliant in its critical analysis but seems mesmerized by, or trapped within, forms of bureaucratic and textual power, producing little knowledge for resistance and social transformation.

In response to this, in the edited collection Sociology for Changing the World, we point to a return to George Smith’s political activist ethnography (PAE) as one way of resisting these very real social pressures and as a way of re-grounding our work in activism and social movements. In our concluding chapter, we outline one way of doing this as a joint activist/academic research project that would produce knowledge for anti-poverty organizing, providing knowledge for more effective organizing through mapping the social relations of struggle anti-poverty organizers are engaged in. While this approach is still very useful, it is also increasingly precarious given the regulations that characterize the neoliberal capitalist university. Still, where there is possible space for this, we need to struggle for it, opening it up further and making it as accountable to the needs of activism as possible.

Increasingly, I find there is value in pursuing PAE-informed research in organizing that takes place outside university and academic contexts. This is part of what I suggest in my chapter in this book reflecting on my experiences in mapping out the social relations of struggle that the Sudbury Coalition Against Poverty was engaged in. This is also an attempt to push PAE further, from it largely being the work of the individual activist/scholar, as it was in Smith’s experience, to see how direct action–based organizing provides for the emergence of more collective and participatory forms of knowledge production informing the research-activism-research relation. This focuses on developing the research and knowledge production capacities of activists and organizers in movements where theorizing and practice can be reflexively interlinked. In my view, this needs to be expanded with more investigations of this research-activism-research relation in other sites needing to be undertaken in producing a broader mapping of social struggles that can be linked together. This also intersects with a new emphasis in organizing on forms of activist research, research within and for social movements, and other forms of militant research.

In my view, PAE needs to expand in these grassroots organizing contexts while continuing to be connected to places for radical knowledge production that exist in university settings. It is only through movements and organizing that we can secure and define a future for PAE. As the Zapatistas put it, “Walking we ask questions”—it is only through doing PAE grounded in activist organizing that this future becomes clearer.