Chapter 1 “Don’t Study Us—Study Them” Political Activist Ethnography and Activist Ethics in Practice

A. J. Withers

I came into academia after a long history of social justice organizing and encountering multiple people conducting research on activists, social movement organizations, and social justice movements. I have found that researchers tend to take a lot of time out of activists’ lives and give very little back. Academics, especially graduate students, often articulate a desire to make an important political intervention to benefit social movements. In the end, however, there is usually a long and inaccessible thesis or dissertation of which the people and the organization that contributed might never see a copy. This type of work commonly goes on to benefit the career of the author but not the movement or those of us who are part of it. Indeed, Croteau (2005) says, “Becoming an academic to support social movements is akin to launching a space program to develop a pen that writes upside down. At best, it is a circuitous route that is surely not the most efficient way of realizing this goal” (20). I cannot say how many times I have heard people I organize with in anti-poverty circles say something to the effect of “don’t study us—study them—study something that will be useful to us.” Political activist ethnography (PAE) helped me “study them” while “looking at us and from our perspective” to help “us” be more effective in the struggle for social justice.

I worked as an anti-poverty organizer with a group called the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) for many years. OCAP was “a direct-action based anti-poverty organization formed in 1990 and disbanded 33 years later, in 2023. OCAP [was] based in Toronto but work[ed] on issues that affect people across the province and are in solidarity with similar movements across the country and around the world” (OCAP, n.d.). I joined OCAP in 2000 and have been a paid organizer and served many terms as a member of its executive committee. My recent project examined ruling relations and the social relations of struggle from the standpoint of OCAP. With PAE as my central theoretical framework and methodological approach, I conducted field research, interviews, and textual analysis of city and organizational documents. I focused on OCAP’s homelessness campaigns: a campaign to stop the criminalization of unhoused people in a public park by private security, a campaign to increase access to a social assistance benefit for people in need of emergency housing, and a campaign to increase the number and improve the conditions of emergency shelter beds. My findings demonstrated the active and ongoing research and theorization that anti-poverty activists engage in as well as the practices of delegitimization—excluding critique, testimonial injustice, and epistemic violence—that ruling relations engage in to counter activist research and theory. While the city of Toronto worked to contain homelessness organizing in Toronto and deployed numerous demobilization tactics to do so, each campaign was fully or partially successful. These victories were secured by anti-poverty activists through the use (or threat) of direct action tactics, showing poor people’s organizing can be effective even in periods of neoliberal retrenchment.

PAE offered me, and offers other activists and scholars, a theoretical and methodological framework to do this work. As an organizer, I wanted to better understand my own work and how it fit into and impacted the world. In this chapter, I will discuss the ways that PAE provides a useful alternative to normative scholarly social movement theory and the activist ethical framework I developed to implement PAE fully and justly in my own organization.

Political Activist Ethnography as a Theory/Method

When I started getting ready to do my research, I set out to read every academic text that had been written about OCAP. I came across a chapter written by one of OCAP’s founders, John Clarke (2006). In “Researching for Resistance: OCAP, Housing Struggles and Activist Research,” Clarke says social justice organizations like OCAP “need a generalized understanding and detailed knowledge of what they are up against” (132). Nowhere does he say that we need more studies of social justice organizations. Clarke’s chapter is in Sociology for Changing the World: Social Movements / Social Research, edited by Frampton et al. (2006c), the only book about PAE—until now. And the chapter after Clarke’s is Gary Kinsman’s (2006) “Mapping Social Relations of Struggle: Activism, Ethnography, Social Organization.” I knew Gary from my work in OCAP; he was an organizer with the Sudbury Coalition Against Poverty, so I took the time to read his chapter. As I read it and then the short, accessible section introductions by the four editors, including Kinsman, I felt excited and relieved. This was my way out from under the mainstream body of sociological movement theory that is largely irrelevant to social movements (Bevington and Dixon 2005; Flacks 2004). PAE would let me show OCAP’s work but not with the aim of simply learning about OCAP—rather, with the aim of supporting it and other social justice movements.

PAE was founded by George Smith (1990) and emerged out of and in response to institutional ethnography (IE), which was developed by Dorothy Smith (e.g., 1987, 1990, 1999). One can’t understand PAE without understanding some of the theory behind IE. I couldn’t do PAE without turning to IE because there were so few examples of PAE. Drawing on Dorothy Smith’s work, George Smith, who was a gay liberation activist, developed PAE, which uses basic IE approaches to conduct research within activist movements and to assist movements. George Smith (1990) argues that IE “provid[es] a groundwork for grass-roots political action; not only because, as a matter of method, it begins from the standpoint of those outside of ruling regimes, but because its analysis is directed at empirically determining how such regimes work—that is, how they are socially organized” (631).

PAE draws heavily from IE. Its key extensions are with respect to the role of the author and the purpose of the research. Here, the researcher is an activist doing work with a group they have an ongoing relationship with, and the research is intended to contribute to the social movement of which the activist/researcher is a part. Frampton et al. (2006b) explain, “One of the central propositions of political activist ethnography is that, through confrontations with ruling regimes, activists are able to uncover aspects of their social organization. Through an analysis of the institutional relations movements are up against, more effective forms of activism can be developed” (3). This is a materialist framework and methodology that understands ruling relations as something that “we actively produce” (Frampton et al. 2006a, 256) and, therefore, as something we can change. Dorothy Smith (1990) observes, from her reading of Marx, that society is not a thing; it is “relations and processes that arise in and only in the actual activities of actual people. Society, therefore, happens” (34). Drawing on this, Frampton et al. (2006a) say there is “therefore [a] need to abandon the language of ‘systems’ and ‘structures.’ They get in the way of the work of recovering social practices, relations, and organization, and impede our social struggles” (256). Scholars and activists are inclined to reify (make to seem real by extracting the social relations) and objectify social relations and their consequences, what Dorothy Smith (2001) calls “blob-ontology” (166). Ruling relations and things like oppression, capitalism, and colonialism, for example, are not leviathans that we must fight but cannot necessarily locate—they are the result of human interactions, and they are under human control. As a social justice organizer, I have found this ontological observation to be significant both for my research and for organizing work. The target for change is not a far-off yet ever-present set of interlocked systems; it is human actions of which we are a part and that we can resist and change.

Getting Ready: Standpoint, Subjectivity/Objective, Inside/Outside

George Smith (1990) envisioned a standpoint for PAE not based on the experience of being part of an oppressed group but based in activity—being an activist who is already within the organizations or movements that one is researching (also see Hussey 2012). I took on the standpoint of a member of OCAP, which I was. George Smith took on the standpoint of a gay activist who was part of a group doing work to make social change, which he was. Hussey (2012) says “the details” of each activist standpoint “are case specific” (3). This is an important distinction between PAE and IE (although sometimes PAE scholars use standpoint following Dorothy Smith’s IE; see Ng 2006).1

Approaching my research from the standpoint of an OCAP member allowed me to reject the ideology of objective sociology and generalizability typical of mainstream social movement theory (D. Smith 1987; G. Smith 1990). At the same time, PAE and IE avoid the pitfalls of relativism because the methodology does not simply produce situated subjective knowledge that is only applicable to isolated situations. Rather, they allow for the piecing together of the ruling relations that dominate and organize social relations. As such, the problems of objectivity and generalizability within social movement theory, and scholarship in general, can be addressed while still producing meaningful and useful knowledge. Further, rather than pretending to be objective, PAE is actively oriented toward supporting social justice and social change. IE and PAE focus on “explicat[ing] ruling relations that organize and coordinate”; therefore, generalizability “relies on discovery and demonstration of how ruling relations exist in and across many local settings” (Campbell and Gregor 2002, 89). The researcher works to uncover “social processes that have generalized effects” and/or “institutional processes [that] may produce similarities of experience” across space and time (DeVault and McCoy 2012, 382). Within these frameworks/methodologies, knowledge about ruling relations (or the social relations of struggle) is uncovered, and that can contribute to broader understandings of ruling relations generally. Therefore, what my research uncovers about the tactics that ruling relations use to demobilize shelter struggles in Toronto could be applied to and built on by climate justice activists in Tokyo. In this approach, each movement or organization that research is produced about from within can help piece together a part of a broader map of ruling relations—some findings will create new knowledge, while others will reinforce understandings of these relations.

Also, unlike most social movement researchers, I, like other political activist ethnographers, am an “insider” researcher because I am a part of the movement that I am researching. Being a member of the group that one is engaging in interviews and doing field research with can be an opportunity and a limitation. Because I am embedded in this community, I am invested in maintaining relationships and being non-exploitative. I may be more driven to act ethically than other researchers because of my connections with the people being researched. Further, Oakley (1981) argues that qualitative interviews are the most fruitful when there is a relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee.

There is a difference between being inside or outside an organization and being inside and outside of ruling relations for activists. Kinsman (2006, 143) challenges these divisions: “While we may be in rupture with ruling relations on one front, we may be fully inside ruling relations on another.” Kinsman calls on us to reject simplistic understandings of insider and outsider and grapple with the complexities of the ways in which we both are subjected to and benefit from ruling relations. Consequently, a PAE approach calls on researchers to “explod[e] the inside/outside binary” (Frampton et al. 2006a, 247). Some researchers claim innocence from complicity in oppression as “insiders” in oppressed communities. This negates both the diversity within communities and everyone’s participation—no matter how reluctant in institutional relations. This offering from political activist ethnographers is an important one in thinking about how researchers relate to their research. It requires ongoing reflexivity and does not provide the space for insiders to absolve themselves of oppressive actions because they are “insiders.”

Putting Political Activist Ethnography into Practice

George Smith developed PAE for researchers who were working from the standpoint of social justice movements to do research “with a view to helping them change it” (1990, 629). However, simply having such a view is not sufficient. Indeed, every researcher who came along and studied “us” instead of “them” also, I’m sure, wanted to support social justice movements—including those who have caused harm conducting their research. Many people have enacted violence with the aim of helping make the world better and in the name of progressive or radical social change (see Chapman and Withers 2019).

For my own practice of PAE, I needed to establish clear activist research ethics because George Smith did not provide an ethical framework, and academic institutional ethics are inadequate. Academic institutional ethical review boards have been criticized for prioritizing “sav[ing] face, minimiz[ing] liability, and prevent[ing] offense” (Nichols 2015, 9). There can also be direct conflicts between academic and activist ethics (for example, what information should be provided to the state, if any, and at what point; see Bevington and Dixon 2005). These bodies are, therefore, fundamentally insufficient ethical guides for activist research.

Further, social movements, in general, and OCAP, in specific, are distrustful of researchers (Greene 2006). I had this access to OCAP because of my relationship with OCAP. I had established a significant amount of trust with people in the organization as both a volunteer and a former paid organizer. It was politically important to me, in terms of my responsibility to OCAP, not only to act in ethical ways but also to be understood as acting in ethically sound ways. This was also personally important to me, as many people in OCAP were my dear friends, and my political reputation would be deeply impacted by this project. So, in addition to institutional ethics, I developed my own set of ethics, or guiding principles, to hold me to a social justice movement ethic that was transparent and accountable. The activist research ethical principles that I developed to both guide and ground my PAE work are accountability, utility, accessibility, reciprocity, and reflexivity.

Accountability

The first guiding principle of my research is accountability, which did more than require that there was a mechanism in place to ensure that there was recourse available if I behaved unethically. I worked to establish a form of “dual accountability” (Cancain 1993, 94): accountability to both the academy and the community. In addition to approval from York University’s Office of Research Ethics, OCAP and I established a Research Steering Committee (RSC) that was made up of people chosen by OCAP. It was the RSC’s responsibility to supervise my work and research. I could go to them with concerns or questions that I had, and OCAP members could also go to them with any concerns they had that they did not wish to bring to me directly. The committee was composed of five people. It reviewed my dissertation proposal and provided feedback about and approved my informed consent forms and ethics protocols. The OCAP research committee also helped me transition into the role of an OCAP Organizer. When I revised my dissertation into a book—Fight to Win: Inside Poor People’s Organizing (Withers 2021)—the committee reformed and read through multiple drafts of the text.

The committee and I established several internal protocols for my research relationship with OCAP. If I violated these parameters, OCAP could withdraw its consent for the study (although the research was done with full, free, and informed consent, and OCAP could withdraw its consent at any point—even if I didn’t violate these parameters). Of course, if the RSC felt I violated our agreement, it could put other restrictions on me (these would not necessarily be limited to my research but could include my membership in the organization). It was agreed that I would not report on the internal workings of general membership or executive committee meetings so members felt they could speak freely.

Academic research has a long track record of exploitation and appropriation of social justice movement knowledge (Chesters 2012; Dixon 2014; Kinsman 2006). So OCAP could take the risk in participating, I agreed I would not present anything in my research that caused harm to OCAP. This was always what I believed going into the project. It is what I told each member of my academic supervisory committee when I asked them if they would be part of my committee. I wanted to understand ruling relations and what makes OCAP more effective; I did not want to cause damage to OCAP or the movement. In practice, it can be daunting to hold that principle collectively and make that determination collectively.

Utility

Secondly, I wanted my work to be useful. Bevington and Dixon (2005) put out a call for those engaged in researching and writing about social movements to produce “theory that is useful and accountable to movements,” which “can inform and assist movements” (186). Utility activates a different ethical standard and motivation than typical academic research that is simply focused on producing knowledge. Utility is something that George Smith makes clear that PAE was developed for. I felt like it was important to forefront this for myself and for the folks I was working with, so I articulated utility as one of my five core guiding ethics. I believe that my finished project was useful and have gotten that feedback from some of the activists who have read it. I published my research in a book with a left-wing press (rather than an academic one) to make it more available to activists so it can be more useful. Much of the question of utility was also addressed through the next two activist principles: accessibility and reciprocity.

Accessibility

If one cannot access the text, it is not useful—regardless of the importance or urgency of the knowledge within it—and I cannot easily be held accountable if people cannot read it. Accessibility was an especially integral ethical principle because I was working with a poor people’s organization. While many activists engage with theory, even when it is academically written and less accessible (Bevington and Dixon 2005), this can still be a significant barrier. Those activists who are the least likely to find academic texts accessible are also more likely members of oppressed groups: particularly poor and working-class people who cannot afford postsecondary education, people with intellectual disabilities, and migrants who do not know English well. This works to continue the concentration of knowledge among people who are already exalted in movements, maintaining the oppressive relations it wishes to overthrow. Issues of accessibility are indeed core issues and key to ensuring legitimate and meaningful social justice research ethics. I wrote my dissertation using relatively accessible language and included a plain(er) language summary and glossary to make my work more accessible.

Reciprocity

Also strongly linked to utility, reciprocity is a principle that demands more than an extractive research practice. Reciprocal research is a “collaborative research process [that] becomes an ongoing and dynamic form of giving back in itself” (Driver and Higgins 2014, 1). This means that researchers must think beyond the finished product as their contribution back to the movement and engage in thinking meaningfully about what reciprocity means for the people, organizations, and movements about which they write.

Many well-intentioned activists have made, or attempted to make, “interventions into the movement” through academic texts that many activists I know, including myself, have never read. That is why I began my research with the assumption that my actual dissertation would not be useful at all. I felt that I had to attempt to design a research project that would contribute to my community more than I was taking out of it by doing the research—through the process, not the final project. My shift in thinking about non-extractive, reciprocal research absent a final project is what called upon me to do field research and helped me formulate the parameters in which I would conduct it. I worked as an unpaid OCAP Organizer for my field research. I had, about ten years previously, filled this role in a paid capacity.

Organizers are constantly strategizing about how to be more effective; PAE also aims to make social movements more effective. Consequently, my conversational engagement with members and allies about the work we were doing, about strategy and evaluation, was often what Eric Mykhalovskiy calls “confirmation or correction” of my analysis (as quoted in DeVault and McCoy 2006, 23). This also meant I was checking in and checking back in with OCAP members about my analysis—something that took their time and energy (even if these conversations were interesting or engaging to them). So, while I intended for my field research to be a giving method, it would be naive for me to imagine my role as organizer-researcher as a straightforward contribution. Researchers are always extracting, always taking.

Initially, I intended to work for OCAP relatively full-time; however, my physical condition prevented me from doing this, as my recovery from my back injury and surgery was slower than I had expected. My original ethics approval permitted me to conduct field research for four to six months, but I later amended this period for an additional six months. Even as I stepped back from intensive full-time organizing, it made sense for me to continue to collect more data as I analyzed my data given that I continued to organize with the group.

I also interviewed OCAP members with various degrees of involvement, from those who were relatively new but routinely attended meetings and demonstrations to those who had been members for longer but were less involved at the time of the interview. OCAP interview participants were provided with those quotations that were used in the dissertation so they could respond to or clarify their quotes. This was a taking practice because I took people’s time and especially their knowledge. Providing people with their quotes permitted an extra degree of ethicality, in my view, but it also added an additional burden onto those people who were interviewed. I tried to take measures to mitigate the extractive character of this practice. This included naming anyone who wanted to be named so their contribution was attributed to them and providing an honorarium of $20 in recognition of their time. I also interviewed city councillors, their staff, members of the media, and a Member of Parliament. These latter interviews were highly reciprocal because they didn’t take time or energy from the movement, and the information I acquired through them produced strategically useful knowledge for the movement. I also submitted multiple requests for information under the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, totaling over five thousand pages. While all these requests were to the city of Toronto, except one that was to the province of Ontario, some of the social justice movement ethics that I outlined could still be applied. As freedom of information (FOI) requests came in, I would often review them with one of the other organizers or bring summaries to meetings. Sometimes we would obtain useful statistical data; other times we would obtain information about how OCAP was perceived. We would come up with working theories that we would use to apply to OCAP’s work, demonstrating the utility of the project. The practice of figuring out questions and reviewing the documents involved others and took resources. I did the bulk of the labour, and this method was generative, but it also took resources out of the movement.

For me, reciprocity meant sharing my findings as I went and working as an unpaid organizer (staff person) as field research. Also, in the spirit of reciprocity and accountability, I created a research archive (including recordings of interviews with people who consented) for OCAP. The process of determining reciprocity is dynamic and must be done collaboratively with the community (Driver and Higgins 2014). As my project shows, even when someone tries to design a research project that is beneficial to the movement using largely reciprocal methods, there is still a resource cost for the movement in conducting that research.

Reflexivity

Researchers can impact those they are researching, including in harmful ways. Reflexivity is often viewed as an important part of the qualitative research process in order to mitigate harm (Cooper and Burnett 2006; Fortier 2015; Gray 2008; Pinnington 2012; Probst and Berenson 2014; Larsen and Walby 2012). Social justice activists also practice reflexivity, although they often don’t call it that (e.g., Dixon 2014; Fortier 2015; Milstein 2017; Oparah 2010; Withers 2020). Throughout my project, I worked to practice reflexivity, including what Craig Fortier (2015) calls “collective self-reflexivity,” which seeks “to foster a collective process of self-reflexivity rather than see[ing] this process as being inherently individualistic” (60).

Because I am an “insider,” long before I began the research process, I had to practice self-reflexivity in relation to this project. Indeed, from the moment I first had the notion that I might want to do this as a project, I started “checking” my behaviour to ensure that I wasn’t doing anything that could impact my research, and this continued through my initial informal conversations with key OCAP members about their thoughts about such a project until the last T was crossed. For example, because I, like most OCAP members, have an opportunity to edit most of the text that OCAP puts out, I could make subtle changes to seed the record to benefit my research before people in the organization even knew I was thinking about conducting it. A simple change from “government” to “government bureaucracy,” for instance, could better fit a text into a section that I anticipated writing in the future. I had an ethical responsibility as both a researcher and an OCAP member not to do this not only because it would lead to invalid results but also because it would undermine the organization’s trust in me.

An important part of reflexivity is understanding who I am in the world and how that impacts (and is impacted by) my research. Doing PAE, being an “insider,” and starting from the standpoint of an activist do not negate those social experiences that deeply inform how every researcher engages with and understands their research from start to finish. It was important for me to practice reflexivity about my social location (as, I would argue, it is for every researcher), and in the interests of accountability and reflexivity, I needed to make my own social location apparent to the reader (also see Sudbury 1998).2

Early in the text, I located myself as a white settler who benefits from settler colonial and white supremacist relations. Being exalted as white informs all my experiences. I organize in an anti-poverty organization, and until I entered my PhD, I lived below the poverty line, with many of those years spent on social assistance—both welfare and, later, disability. I had brief experiences of street and hidden homelessness in my youth, and I am queer, trans, and non-binary. All these things impact how I experience and interpret the world.

However, it wasn’t enough to simply position myself in the text, to render my social location visible to the reader. I would argue that this is helpful to the reader in understanding the text and the research but would ultimately mean I was performing accountability through socially locating myself. Instead, it is important that researchers “show their work”—to demonstrate their reflexivity in the text. Because reflexivity is an ongoing and continuous practice, I couldn’t have written up my research and included even a significant portion of my own field notes on the issue. However, when I was aware that my social location was significantly impacting the research, I tried to include it in my final write-up.

One way I included my social location was in discussing my talks with unhoused people while doing outreach. While I have had some experience with homelessness, that means nothing to folks who are unhoused right now, and it would have been weird to try to drop that into conversations. I described how I would try to demonstrate working-class solidarity and groundedness rather than middle-class do-gooderness. Sometimes people would give me a “Why is this stranger coming up and talking to me?” look. I usually overcame this by using a few strategies, including dropping OCAP’s name quickly and, if people didn’t know OCAP, asking them if they knew Gaétan. Gaétan Héroux is a well-loved long-time frontline worker and OCAP member who, it seems, has helped pretty much everyone on the streets at some point. I was often smoking and would give out cigarettes when asked and/or have my adorable three-legged Chihuahua with me (a dog probably meant I was not at work). I would usually swear quite quickly in our interactions as well. All these things were disarming and signalled to most people that I was not—or at least not only—some random do-gooder. However, when someone was distant in an interaction, I never knew why that was the case, and it very well could have been because of my social privilege.

I also wrote my disability into the write-up of my project as part of how I located myself because it impacted how I conducted my work. This wouldn’t be the case for all disabled researchers, but when I began my field research, I was recovering from spinal surgery, in addition to having chronic pain, and it significantly impacted my work. This doesn’t mean disability is a deficit; it can contribute to the research process (see Bennett 2013). I brought insight and ways of observing because of my disability that I made palpable through my disability (see Michalko 2002; Withers 2012). Accounts of field research are often grand depictions of physical performance (e.g., Graeber 2009; Valentine 2007), not of painful disabled bodies. A non-disabled researcher is assumed.3 I haven’t come across descriptions of fieldwork that include my experiences—like taking calls in the office while lying down on a yoga mat or participating in a protest march from an accessibility van. But those are movement spaces where organizing happens, ruling relations are confronted, and knowledge is produced. So I thought it was important to make my disability visible.

I also wrote about my note-taking process. This is often the case for many people describing their field research in a large project; however, I had to take notes and describe how I took notes very differently than most people doing field research. In “Political Activist as Ethnographer,” George Smith (1990) talks about meetings and conversations being sources of data but doesn’t say how he makes that information text—how he takes notes. His is a short article, so it makes sense that he doesn’t spend time on this. Generally speaking, people doing field research are told by the textbooks to write as much as possible as quickly as possible and to do so on location whenever possible (e.g., Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995). I had to not only demonstrate that I knew the “right way”—the non-disabled way—to take field notes but also then explain why and how I deviated from this norm. I turned this into a reflexive discussion not only about my chronic pain, which made it impossible to keep normative field notes, but also about the culture within social movements, which responds negatively to people taking field notes in such a manner. I followed the field note–taking practice of Hugh Campbell (2005), who was in a bar and drunk most of the time for his field research on hypermasculinity. What I didn’t say at the time but hoped was evident on its face was just how sad and comedic it is that, because of the absence of disabled ethnographers who talk about disability, the best example I had to follow was a note-taking practice designed around drunkenness and its subsequent frequent urination.

The reflexive process can create space for accountability with both the group the activist is working with and the broader community. For me, I worked to put reflexivity on the page, especially with respect to social location, but reflexivity was a daily practice with the people around me. David Graeber emphasizes the practice of reflexivity—the actual doing of it rather than performing it (Graeber 2014, drawing on Skeggs 2002).

The activist research ethics that I developed and implemented as part of my PAE research process has five principles: accountability, utility, accessibility, reciprocity, and reflexivity. These principles are important because PAE begins from an activist standpoint, and social justice activists and academic institutions hold different, sometimes oppositional ethical standards. These principles are not discrete pillars; they are interwoven in multiple ways—like a net. Some of the ways they are interwoven are that one of my research projects can be reciprocal if the research process is useful to the movement, that accessibility is a prerequisite for accountability and utility, and that reflexivity is necessary for accountability to take place. PAE calls on researchers to support movements that make social change, and I developed these principles to help me do that.

Conclusion

My research examined homelessness organizing from the standpoint of an OCAP Organizer. PAE wasn’t simply a nice fit for my project. When I found PAE, this theory/method resolved many of the problems that I had with and felt stifled by normative social movement theory. PAE allowed me, as an OCAP member working for social justice, to be explicit in my aims to conduct research that will help contribute to social justice organizing. PAE enables the researcher to produce knowledge with social movements that is useful to social movements.

PAE has a lot of underutilized potential for social justice research that can work to benefit organizing. Both Gary Kinsman’s (2006; this volume, chapter 2) and my work examine the social relations of struggle with anti-poverty movements. PAE is especially suited for anti-poverty movements because it is a methodology from the bottom. I found using FOI requests to access documents that would not otherwise be available to the organization was particularly fruitful. They helped me examine what the ruling regime is doing to coordinate ruling and attempt to demobilize movements. FOI requests can take a lot of time, and my field research certainly did; this isn’t to mention the advance work with the organization to ensure accountability and reciprocity. PAE, the way that I practiced it, was slow research, which can run counter to the urgent needs of crisis organizing and the knowledge production standards of the neoliberal university. However, finding the time to step back also means making the space to map the social relations of struggle to move forward more effectively. The aim isn’t simply to struggle, as OCAP says; it is to “fight to win,” and PAE can be a useful tool to help us do that.

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1 I have written elsewhere (Withers 2020) about some of the difficulties I have with standpoint as it is used in IE and how it can lead to epistemic and colonial violence. Taking up the standpoint of an activist, rather than the standpoint of a member of an oppressed group of which one is not a part, resolves these issues.

2 Of course, there are different ways that this makes sense. Situating the author doesn’t necessarily make sense on an info sheet or report published by the organization.

3 With, perhaps, the exception of disability studies.

2. Direct Action as Political Activist Ethnography: Activist Research in the Sudbury Coalition Against Poverty