Chapter 10 Objectivity Regimes Challenges for Activist Research in the Academy

Navigating Activism and the Academy Using Autoethnography

Knowledge around practices of power is continually being interrogated by activists through direct engagement with political processes and everyday struggles. Activists develop conceptual ideas through research and strategizing in multiple spaces and on a continual basis: at meetings, on the streets, in late-night discussions, at demonstrations, and at organized events. Such conceptualization continues when writing up memorandums and movement reflections and creating action plans, strategies, and tactics. While these spaces have often been ignored as sites of intellectual development and engagement, there is increasing recognition of the importance of these spaces of knowledge production (Choudry 2015). Activists are drawn into the academy for a variety of reasons; it can be the desire to deepen and expand knowledge, gain cultural capital that might help to further advance social change, or carve a path to economic or career stability where social justice might continue. Of course, identities overlap and collide, and I use the term activist scholar to denote people who may move between street- and community-level work where they may be involved in organizing, campaigning, report writing, support work, and academic work in institutions, such as being involved in publishing, teaching, and conferencing. Once inside academic institutions, activists “doing academia” have multiple kinds of pressures and structures of power that come to organize the ways knowledge is produced.

PAE’s focus on the empirical social processes that occur in the real world that create ruling regimes of academic knowledge production and structures of power through everyday practices can illuminate ways in which “objectivity” becomes a superior academic standard. Codes that devalue political subjectivity can be found in the social organization of peer review processes, awards committees, and tenure reviews and are deeply embedded within academic politico-administrative relations. These norms can present real challenges to research that attempts to disrupt them.

Dorothy Smith (1974) critiqued ideology, and objectivity, as the social organization of knowledge operating through “the imposition of objective, textually-mediated, conceptual practices on a local setting in the interest of ruling it” (G. Smith 1990, 633). It was here where George Smith saw the “epistemological line of fault between the objective knowledge of a regime and [. . .] reflexive, everyday knowledge (i.e., knowledge as members)” (G. Smith 1990, 633). As (at times reluctant) members of the academy, activist scholars create ruptures in the ruling regimes of objectivity, as much as they may also be challenged by it. Through PAE, we may also better ascertain the assumptions we bring to our research while looking closely at how ruling regimes are organized. To interrogate by whom and by what knowing is organized, I approach the questions around objectivity and ethics in activist scholarship through an autoethnography grounded in “the everyday world with the actual experiences of actual individuals” (G. Smith 2006, 48), in this case my own experience navigating objectivity regimes as both a graduate student and an activist scholar.

During my doctoral research, I became acutely aware of the ethical requirements of activist research that relied on my ability to hold on to my subjective positionality and personal ethical commitments alongside the institutional ethical standards, objectivity regimes, and practices of the academy. I reflect on one moment where this tension became visceral using autoethnography (Allen-Collinson and Hockey 2008; Gale 2019). Autoethnography is a genre of autobiographical writing and research (Ellis and Bochner 2000) used as a means of uncovering political and social norms at work through reflexively observing personal experience (Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 2011; Ellis and Bochner 2006). Such an approach allows for a shift in perspective “from an objective to a reflexive one where the sociologist, going beyond the seductions of solipsism, inhabits an actual world that she is investigating” (G. Smith 1990, 233). Autoethnography became an important tool in understanding my research process, as it “acknowledges and accommodates subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher’s influence on research, rather than hiding from these matters or assuming they don’t exist” (Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 2011, 274).

The experience where my subjective positionality and personal ethical commitments came to a head with the institutional ethical standards, objectivity regimes, and practices of the academy occurred amid my research in Durban. I was called back to Canada for an interview for a prestigious doctoral scholarship. After a two-day plane journey to Montréal, I trudged nervously through the freshly fallen snow to where my interview would take place. A panel of four distinguished academics, two men and two women, interrogated me on aspects of my research in South Africa. I had arrived in Montréal directly from Siyapila Clinic in Durban, where one of the women I was working with was clinging to life, desperately seeking access to antiretrovirals (ARVs).

Mandisa was living in a shack with six children to care for, no income, and no money for treatment.1 Her prospects did not look good, and I had been documenting her journey as she moved through ruling regimes, from one government institution to the next, attempting to track the institutional spaces she came up against and how these spaces and practices fit into a broader system of care (or lack thereof) that spanned from the shack settlement to the hospital to the farm.

My primary research site was a community-based HIV drop-in centre in a sprawling, politically active shack settlement. Inspired by PAE, I followed the research directives of a primarily women-based centre on the frontlines of community health care. Volunteer workers provided basic support and health care services for the community of over seven thousand shack dwellers. Many were in need, with infection rates in the settlement rising past 70 percent (Hunter 2005). The more time I spent in the settlement, the more involved I became in the community, in local social movements, and in the lives of the people who were becoming friends. Mandisa, initially a home-based care worker as part of the drop-in centre, was now on the edge of her life and being denied treatment because she did not have the funds to pay for it. Any residual attempt to be a distanced observer evaporated as Mandisa’s life increasingly hung in the balance. I began to directly attempt to help her access ARVs.

As I told Mandisa’s story back in Montréal to the distinguished panel, one of the jurists curtly interrupted, visibly irritated. He questioned research methods that focused on the life stories of such a few people, grounded in a community-based movement, and my direct involvement at times in their lives. He wanted to know the statistics: How would I collect numbers on infection rates in the settlement? Why was I following Mandisa through the health care process? Why was I involved? His tone was sharp. I explained that a great deal of statistics had already been collected. More than one thousand people were dying every day of AIDS-related illnesses in South Africa. The provincial HIV infection rate hovered at 45 percent in KwaZulu-Natal. There were an estimated seven out of ten people having HIV infection or AIDS in the shack settlements. There were plenty of numerical facts available. In fact, one of my respondents in Durban, a child welfare social worker, had emphatically reported that they were so overwhelmed on the ground that they had no need for new statistics. “We know the infection rates; we need action,” she told me. There is a real tension between the knowledge people need and the knowledge demanded by institutions, which in turn govern their lives. I explained to the jurist that while I was doing research, I also had become part of the lives of the people I was working with as I moved with them through the various levels of bureaucracy and governmentality around health care. The jurist audibly gasped and turned to the others, saying, “It sounds like she’s talking about intervening! How can she maintain objectivity?” His outburst was awkward and threw the others into a strange silence. I cited feminist and qualitative research that had evolved ideas around research subjectivity, activist ethnography, and social change. One of the other jurists made silent eye contact with me from across the table, and we seemed to share a moment of understanding. The moment passed. The tension between work for people versus work about people for academia felt stark in this moment. The conceptual practices of power were made visible in the ways that abstract, numerical knowledge about people’s lives is the optimal and most valued form of knowledge in academia.

I concede I may have read the jurist’s disdain for activist research incorrectly. Perhaps he was not as irritated as he seemed with my approach, merely doing his due diligence. Nonetheless, the tone and tension of the exchange left a strong impression. Often, norms are internalized and adopted unwittingly, and the jurists were likely enacting and governing institutional forms of knowledge in line with stated institutional priorities. It is during these kinds of micro-moments that the social processes and norms of the academy are materially enforced. It was a moment of visibility within the ruling regimes of knowledge production, in this case between the senior academics acting as adjudicators and a graduate student. I was learning the ropes, still being trained in the language and social practices of the institution.

Our divergent sense-making was on display. For the jury, the purpose, rigour, reliability, and ethical commitments, as related to academic norms, were in question. For me, the purpose, ethical commitments, and reliability of my research had a direct relationship to the community members with whom I was working. I was drawn back to the sense-making that would happen at the community level, where people living with AIDS (PLWA) were frustrated by the lack of access to life-saving health care, including ARVs, and their belief that academics were only contributing piles of paper to already well-documented issues, and not committed ethically, materially, or reliably to the task of changing a situation in which people were dying daily. These spaces were such different parts of the complex social relations that I was trying to work through in the literature, the writing, and the being and doing in the world.

In that moment in front of the jury, I felt the weight of the academic institution demanding a distanced, numbers-based objectivity. Institutional ethnography gave me a way to examine this small moment for the subtle, relational dynamics of power operating within the everyday practices of a ruling regime, bringing some light to the barely visible ways that social discipline, privilege, and dominant forms of knowledge are reproduced. I realized that the adjudicator and I had divergent understandings of the purpose, rigour, and reliability of my research through our different social processes of sense-making. We must remember that “sense making is not a process happening in an individual mind; rather, it is a social process” (Hussey 2012, 8). These micro-moments pile up in the life of activist scholarship, where the force of institutional power can obscure other ethical commitments. In fact, our understandings of ethical commitments are inherently organized differently, and other academics may well believe they are upholding their commitments as an oppositional position to my own. To enter this space can at times feel like becoming a split person. As Dorothy Smith (2005) reminds us, even though we are taught to reproduce hierarchies of scholarship and theories, there are other ways of knowing.

That small moment, and others like it, posed questions around ethics and objectivity that I have carried with me ever since. From my perspective, it was far more unethical not to “intervene”—to document Mandisa’s death—when direct efforts could have been taken to prolong her life and quality of life. The jurist’s bewildered comment echoed in my head. I considered my role as an insider/outsider and wondered if I was too involved in Mandisa’s life. I contemplated whether focus placed in other ways might have provided more reliable, scalable data that would contribute to change via a more traditional route. The sense-making of distance and objectivity that is taught in courses, outlined in ethics reviews, and discussed in academic articles was deeply ingrained in me. I had been a member of academic life for decades, even if I knew that there was no field “out there” to retreat to or to run away from. The HIV drop-in centre, the hospital wards, and the university’s plush offices were all part of a continuous field of ethical engagement. Yet each world, in its different way, asks us to resolve this tension, to stake a claim of integrity. For the academic jury, the question was “Where is your objective integrity as a researcher?” while for Mandisa and the other women at the drop-in centre, the question was “Where is your ethical integrity as a human being?” At times, the gap seems insurmountable between much of the institutional framework of the academy and what feminist, qualitative, and activist literature endorses. These tensions are continually arising in various ways and forums. As Campbell and Gregor write, “Institutional ethnographers explore the actual world in which things happen, in which people live, work, love, laugh, and cry. Exploring that is a different research undertaking from approaches that objectify people and events, and slot them into theoretical categories to arrive at explanation” (2002, 17).

Activist research is messy and needs to be so. We are part of this world, not merely its distanced observer. I agree with Aisha Ong when she writes, “[There is] no objectivity that stands outside a moral position . . . because power operates through hegemonic constructions of social reality, making commonsensical, routine, and ‘natural’ the immoral arrangements that perpetuate social inequalities” (1995, 429). Furthermore, the ethics of the research encounter are never explicit. Ethics involves informed consent and due diligence and is about relational aspects of being-in-the-world, accountability, and responsibility toward those we encounter. At times, institutionally organized ethics may encroach on the ethics of humanity during the research process. Feminists, both inside and outside the academy, have written and discussed the silencing and dismissal of research that involves working with participants rather than on them. Yet there is something quite idealist in this framing too, as though it were ever possible to create a space free of power differentials and asymmetry.

Situating ethnography around the activist insider allowed for new spaces to open around how knowledge is produced and by whom. It emphasized the complexity of social relations and relations of power. In this kind of work, the researcher is necessarily involved in social movements. Yet this can also blind research to biases: from romantic ideas of the ideological purity of social movement subjects to being less willing to critique leaders who are key academic informants or friends. Too often academic researchers try to conceal their bonds, friendships, biases, and affective ties with their research subjects. These relations bubble beneath the surface, with the potential of spilling over at any time. Seen as dangerous, as compromising the objectivity of the researcher, these biases are kept hidden. Yet social processes that create structures of power always operate within affective relationships (Walsh and Soske 2016). Dispositions, biases, and skewed thinking can be reinforced by keeping affective networks hidden. With these questions and issues in mind, I turn to other activist scholars to gain some insight into the dilemmas of objectivity and ethics in their research practice.

Activist Scholars: Relevance, Objectivity, and Ethics

The interviews that follow are with activist scholars within my own social network whose scholarly work I am familiar with. These excerpts were done just as I joined my first academic faculty position in 2013 and 2014, and they are fragments of longer-standing discussions with activists navigating the academy. These discussions have been ongoing for years. The activist scholars interviewed were, and continue to be, invested in social change in South Africa, Spain, Hong Kong, and Canada. This chapter emerges nearly ten years after the interviews were initially conducted, creating a dynamic of looking back at an earlier period of activist experiences in the academy that stand in relation to contemporary experiences of the same phenomena. How have things changed, and how have they stayed the same? These interviews marked a few distinct moments in time, but such discussions had been ongoing before and have continued ever since. Each activist scholar was asked to reflect on ways they had been challenged on the objectivity and ethics of their research by the institutions in which they were engaged. As members of a community that may rupture the regimes of objectivity often enforced by the academy, I asked them what had been their experience in disrupting or confronting existing regimes.

Miguel Martinez worked in Spain for many years as a researcher and participant in European squatting movements. In 2009, Martinez launched the SqEK (Squatting Europe Kollective), aimed at creating an activist research network focused on squatting throughout Europe. During the same period, he was straddling a career as an urban sociologist and a manager of the Municipal Housing Department in Vigo. Martinez is deeply invested in multiple and intersecting worlds of activist and academic research. He describes how in his experience, the freedom to express his political perspective is often hampered by the ruling regimes of the academy. He attempts to navigate these as best he can, finding spaces to subvert the systems to his own needs and the needs of the communities he works with. Martinez speaks specifically to the academic systems of anonymous peer review that, even unwittingly, enforce a regime of objectivity or neutrality on the way research proposals are written. In an email to the author on August 11, 2014, Martinez explains,

Our freedom to express our points of view, rationality or knowledge depends heavily on those usually anonymous gatekeepers. And therefore, we tend to adopt an apparent “neutral” and overwhelmingly informed way of writing or presenting ourselves. It’s a form of self-repression that can only be surpassed or avoided in case we create our own free environments to express ourselves and our own publications, or if we participate in friendly spaces. Otherwise, there is the more risky, but brave, option of facing directly all the criticisms while struggling always from our most sincere standpoint. . . . Going to your point, if I propose a research project about a hot political issue, I know in advance that the likelihood of obtaining funds is by not saying what I really think about many of those involved in the issue, with the hope that once I get the money I would be able to write more freely what I want, and this usually happens.2

Martinez attempts to play both fields at once and find a way through the various ordering regimes in the best way possible as he tries to hold on to what makes sense for him in the activist worlds he feels are the outlets for his research. It is interesting that the subversion Martinez chooses to use is that of camouflage. He hides his perspective and attempts to work in two registers simultaneously.

Melissa Garcia Lamarca has been active in anti-eviction social struggles in Spain as well as working within formal academic research environments to look at insurgent claims on urban development. In her work, Garcia Lamarca attempts to represent varying and multiple points of view, allowing for a full picture of the social issue to surface. She describes her research process, quite like PAE, as building from actors’ discourses to investigate how particular institutional regimes are organized to strategically resist them. In an email to the author, she writes,

Aside from being engaged for almost a year with housing rights platforms whose struggles are at the core of my academic and political interest, I have also interviewed people working in banks (or retired) and in regional government and attended a real estate investor conference. Methodologically this provides some “air” of objectivity in terms of engaging with other actors/perspectives, but what is the most politically interesting is to use these actors’ discourses to understand how they have lived/experienced certain processes, to make evident systemic contradictions, how certain ways of thinking are normalized, etc. [This] can give more ammo to defend an (anti-capitalist, egalitarian, etc.) position by having spoken with elites. . . . Of course it is often not possible to access these people but if it is, it can be an interesting approach, and surprisingly insightful. (M. Garcia Lamarca, personal communication, August 14, 2014)

For Garcia Lamarca, empirical data are grounded in how actors have “lived/experienced certain processes” to resist them and give her work what she calls an “air” of validity within the sense-making of the university. As Kinsman notes, activists assess research validity differently than academics, looking for how they can depend on research findings to develop strategies and tactics for resisting ruling regimes toward activist goals (Kinsman this volume).

For Miguel Martinez, the regimes of objectivity in the academy have systematically excluded him, in an “implicit way, by being excluded from many standard or mainstream academic and media events, books, journals, etc.” Working in an urban studies department, Martinez chooses to integrate a reflexive position into his process while still hanging on to the structuring ruling regimes of the university and society, which he believes will allow the work to gain further traction. In personal correspondence with the author, he explains,

For me, in social sciences, “objectivity” is a very ambitious goal and quite difficult to reach, so I also prefer “reflexivity,” “intersubjectivity” or just something like “engaged-rationality-under-collective-construction.” Regardless of all my (political and social) subjectivity, at [a] certain point, I need to engage with society (and academia) at large, so I need to justify and argue in a rational manner my “points of view” as “good knowledge” about society versus “bad knowledge.” So, this is a critical and never-ending stance.

When thinking about the sense-making of ethical positions, both Garcia Lamarca and Martinez speak about their relationships to movements. Martinez claims he has faced many dilemmas around justifying political subjectivity in his work, “especially with activists (always suspicious about the ‘true truth’ of your engagement) because for many scholars this is not a significant question. How do you deal with it?” Martinez is aware of operating in two structuring regimes at once. Conversely, Garcia Lamarca says she is not frequently asked to justify her work among activists. She believes this is due to an assumed sense-making and common ground with people whom she works with beyond the frame of research. She explains,

I have been surprised to not feel any pressure whatsoever to justify my political subjectivity with activists I am engaged with, but I think this is more due to the nature of the movement as well as informal conversations about politics where our (shared) political perspectives emerge: the latter is thanks to spending an extended period of time so these relationships can develop. I also made clear from the start that I wanted to contribute to the movement and have been constantly trying to find ways to do so—it has not been easy but again with time different ways have emerged.

Political subjectivity is a theme that constantly surfaces with activist scholars. I think of Chris Dixon, the author of Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movements (2014). In his book, Dixon interviews organizers and documents work done by anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist activists and movements across Canada and the United States. Dixon describes himself on his blog Writing with Movements as follows:

I’m a white, middle-class, straight cisgendered and able-bodied man originally from Anchorage, Alaska, on Dena’ina Territory, which I still regard as my home. I’m also a longtime anarchist with a deep commitment to collective struggles for liberation, and I have been involved in social movements for more than twenty years. I am part of a political tendency that prioritizes grassroots organizing, creative direct action, movement-building, tenderness and care, coalition work, developing institutions, vision-based strategy, and engaging in dialogue with other sectors of the left, all with the aim of challenging and transforming social relations of domination. (Dixon 2024)

Because Dixon looks at activist knowledge production explicitly, he believes the subjective position of his research is perhaps more easily accepted in academic environments. It is also clear that for Dixon, sense-making is much more grounded in movement-focused regimes than in institutional ones. This may also be in part because of his race, sexuality, class, and gender, along with the fact that he has never tried to “play the game” of being an academic. In personal correspondence with the author, he explains,

I haven’t had much experience with having my objectivity questioned or being asked to justify political subjectivity. I think this is for two main reasons: (1) I’m a white guy from a middle-class background and so I’m accorded way more legitimacy in university contexts, even when doing work that pushes the envelope; and (2) I haven’t pursued a career in academe and so have had much less need to engage with university-based intellectuals who might raise questions about my objectivity.

As Dixon alludes, context is of critical importance. All the scholars quoted above work in North America or Europe. In South Africa, the political context significantly changes the discussion around ethics and objectivity. In Canada—where institutional structures of power built on white supremacy, colonialism, and sexism have never been fully challenged or dismantled—people can be lulled by alienating statistics, whereas in other political economic contexts like South Africa, the neutrality of an institution is continually questioned, whether it is a school, government department, university, or police department. Across society, there is an awareness that apartheid-era institutions were deeply political and ideological. This distrust of institutional neutrality and an awareness of the political and social processes that create structures of power are lived experiences in South Africa, and this grounds the work of activist scholars. During the struggle against apartheid, the adherence to ideas of “objective distance” within university structures was jettisoned. Academics played a major role in the anti-apartheid movement, but they were also vocal in maintaining the status quo. As long-time South African unionist, organizer, and academic Claire Ceruti explains,

When I arrived at varsity, our sociology lecturers were taking up debates inside the movement. Taking sides against apartheid was implied, and our own grasp of the world was also thereby implied to be somewhat indeterminate by the focus on strategic debates. Objective/subjective seemed less important than idealist/materialist. The kind of Marxism I grew up in assumed that your position in society would affect your interests and hence your perspectives on society. “Objective” was therefore the things “outside” of our own heads, rather than a position any human could claim to practice. At the same time, it was assumed that changing the world required understanding it accurately (without claiming to be unbiased). So that meant, at least theoretically, constantly testing our own assumptions. So, if anyone ever said “you’re not objective” my answer would be, “No shit, Sherlock! But I’ve declared my bias. What’s yours?”

In a context such as South Africa, most academics were forced to understand, through struggle, the political nature of knowledge production. Given that it was institutionalized racism that laid the foundations for the apartheid system, for South African scholars, the idea of an objective researcher is suspect. The sense that ideas and their application serve systemic regimes of power is starkly clear.

Mondli Hlatshwayo is a South African activist, organizer, and academic. Hlatshwayo explained to me that he attempted to deal with his political position when he entered the academy through reflexivity. This meant including details of his personal biography in his doctoral thesis. For Hlatshwayo, his research journey is intimately linked to questions of race, class, and political positioning. I quote his story at length, as it shows the dynamic nature of his subjectivity and multiple identities, remaining connected to movement spaces while also attempting to reconcile his institutional position within the academy:

Predicated on the assumptions of “reflexivity,” as a researcher of this [PhD] project, I was also caught up in this complex relationship between “insider” and “outsider” positions. I am a Black man who grew up in a society where race “matters.” Together with other Blacks, I lived in a rural area, which lacked access to basic services. My parents are black working class and worked in the textile factories of Ladysmith. Later, my mother was retrenched and had to work as a domestic worker in a residential area reserved for whites, in Ladysmith. After I matriculated, I worked as a part time gardener for a liberal white family who offered moral support and who encouraged me to further my studies.

While studying in a boarding school in Pietermaritzburg in the 1980s, I became interested in the activities of the UDF and the Congress of South African Students (COSAS). These organizations were to change my life. As a young man, I became part of the anti-apartheid movement. My role was limited to taking part in marches and protest actions in the Edendale area. I completed formal schooling in 1990 and became unemployed. I then worked in a Taiwanese factory at Ladysmith in 1993 and left the factory for a shop where I worked as a general worker. I then organised workers for the South African Catering, Commercial and Allied Workers’ Union (SACCAWU) in several shops that were part of a family business. I became a shop steward of SACCAWU in 1993.

In the 1990s, I was a member of the African National Congress (ANC) and represented SACCAWU in the ANC, COSATU and SACP tri-partite alliance meetings in Ladysmith. At that time, I developed a close relationship with Kassim Goga, who was a member of the ANC. I was expelled from work because of my union activities. After some discussions with comrades in Ladysmith, I decided to go back to further my studies at the “University of the Left,” that is, the University of the Western Cape, where I became a student activist with a working-class orientation. After completing my post-graduate studies, I worked for ten years at Khanya College, a labour and community support organisation. In my capacity as a researcher at the college, my main research area was trade unions and social movements. (Hlatshwayo 2013)

Hlatshwayo recounts his position as a globalized worker, union organizer, shop steward, ANC party member, graduate student, student activist, community organizer, and researcher, as well as an African man in apartheid South Africa and the recipient of support from a liberal white family. It is a complex array of stories that tell of his journey toward the academy, none of which are complete in their descriptions or easy to disentangle in relation to how he approaches the research setting.

Finally, the focus and ethics of activist research itself can be affected by its position within the academy. Many activist scholars attempt to occupy a concrete location in academic environments and faculties while continuing to participate in grassroots movements. This can be quite contentious for scholars who want to create movement-relevant theory, for example, but who are primarily writing in academic contexts. These two readerships can pull the writing, research, and focus of the work apart. At the same time, for so many activist researchers working in a neoliberal academic environment, the emphasis on “outputs” in recognized academic journals and conferences can hamper both the time and the energy spent on creating work aimed at social movements or community groups. In addition, as Martinez explains, the politics of the university system become more intractable as researchers become more deeply embedded in the system: “Experiences around the questions you raise are quite different as a PhD student and then at different levels of academic positions, where there are certainly more pressures and challenges in terms of (explicitly) having radical politics especially as universities become more and more neoliberal.” For each of these activist scholars, then, there is a complex negotiation that happens between the institutional space and the social issues that are at the heart of the research.

Dangers and Ethical Issues

Another issue is that academic writing about social movements does not feed back into movements at all. Journal articles and academic books are often not accessible or written in clear ways and, therefore, not engaged by activists. Additionally, work done by activist scholars might also be read to gain insider accounts of movement dynamics that, for previous decades, activists worked hard to keep private. Revealing the details of how the insides of social movements operate could be damaging to movements, as it brings internal fault lines into public sight. There is almost no discussion on the ethics of revealing insider knowledge when political stakes are high, such as when groups are fighting multinationals, governments, or other powerful stakeholders. Activist scholarship would greatly benefit from establishing a hearty discussion around the ethics of reporting activist and social movement knowledge. These considerations should include thinking through various levels of ethical concerns in the research space and being up-front with informants about potential vulnerabilities if the research is read by the police or state or is the target of social movement action. Accounts of tactics, direct action, and other strategic debates may be unethical to reveal if participants are not able to fully envision the life cycle of a published article available to the government, law enforcement, and so on. This seems to be a particularly important discussion to have when doing in-depth reporting and documentation with social movements that might trust the researcher as a former/current activist insider without fully understanding the potential dangers. In such a burgeoning area of research, it is important to discuss the kinds of ethical challenges that are particular to this form of knowledge dissemination.

Conclusion: Tensions of Activist Scholarship

Since this research was first conducted, there has been a well-spring of activist engagement within academic environments that is ongoing. From Black Lives Matter to #MeToo, voices that were once on the margins have grown louder and have been given more importance. While on the surface, it may seem that things are changing, in practice, alternative knowledge production for activists and movements is still a fraught space within the academic environment. The feminist scholar Sara Ahmed, for example, who has written extensively about the everyday practices and structures of power, resigned from her institution as an act of protest. As part of the institution, she increasingly turned her focus to the university as a site of power itself. Ahmed explained how attempting to bring critical language and ideas to institutional spaces in fact hollowed out the very goals such criticality attempted to transform. Referring to her experience as part of a group writing a race equity policy, she explains,

Writing that policy was my first hard institutional lesson. We brought what I thought of as a critical language into it, but the university was able to use the policy—which was about articulating racism in the institution—as evidence of how good it was at race equality. What I learned from that was how easily we can end up being interpellated. It’s not only that there’s a gap between statements about inclusivity and diversity and what actually happens. It’s also that we end up working to create the appearance of what isn’t the case. (Binyam 2022)

Ahmed eventually famously resigned, coming out with the book Complaint! in 2021, which explores institutional power through testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal work conditions at universities. The structures of power at work in institutions are strong and ongoing. Methods developed by activist scholars that aim to correct such power imbalances and contribute to processes of social justice can be invigorating to the research process, yet it is worth remembering that these methods are not inherently ethical or always effective, as the above example illustrates. Ethics and the dilemmas around activist methodologies still have many hurdles to overcome. A method is a process, but a process must always be further informed by principles.

As I have set out in this chapter, the tensions around academic knowledge and the governance of academic standards by those in power often subjugate and marginalize activist knowledge. The tension between making movement-relevant research and simultaneously creating work that meets the demands of the neoliberal academy is not always easy to navigate. Many scholars find the pressure from the academy more persuasive in the end and sacrifice some of the action or process-oriented goals to meet the demands of publishing and outputs. Race, gender, and class become real factors in how much scope researchers are given to experiment and push the envelope. Somewhere in trying to squeeze into the academic box, some of the reasons activist scholars came to research in the first place get lost. Relevance slips away as the desire for neat narratives that fit the intellectual trends of today takes prominence. As Aziz Choudry (2014, 113) warns,

Rather than building an analysis that is based on actual practice and useful to movements for social change there is a temptation and perhaps a danger of imposing typologies on activist research. The alternative is to seek to understand such research processes through starting from actual practice and the sense activist researchers make of this, as well as the ways in which movements with which they are connected understand, use, and are often part of the research process themselves.

This chapter explores multiple tensions and dilemmas that exist when doing activist research. Through autoethnography and interviews with activist scholars, the chapter examines how varying ethical considerations in activism and academia evolve and can be untangled. Activist scholarship can and should challenge the politico-administrative regimes of the academy to create new spaces to investigate ethics, objectivity, relevance, and subjectivity. After nearly a decade since the initial research and interviews in this chapter were first conducted, the uneasy relationship between activism and the academy has been given more attention, with many scholar-activists attempting to bridge the divide. In some places, activist knowledge in institutions is more contested than ever, while in other ways, there has been an evolution of the language and practices that many activists have fought for. It is clear that objectivity regimes and the challenges scholar-activists face in academic institutions will continue to be contested and investigated.

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