Conclusion

Mapping the Terrain of Struggle

Mapping social relations of struggle is a strategy first proposed by George W. Smith (1990) and later expanded on by other political activist ethnographers. Mapping in IE and PAE provides an analytical and “visual representation of sequences of action and interchanges that connect the activities of individuals working in different parts of institutional complexes” (Doll and Walby 2019, 152). Collectively, the chapters bring to light a plurality of repertoires that activists and advocates are using. This includes direct action (Withers, Kinsman, Deveau, and Choudry; chapters 1 to 4), direct action support work (Kinsman, Deveau, and Welsh Carroll; chapters 2, 3, and 8), “document and demonstrate” strategies (Kinsman and Deveau; chapters 2 and 3), navigating bureaucracies with or on behalf of clients (Kinsman, Welsh Carroll, and Doll; chapters 2, 8, and 9), activities involved in coalition building (Kinsman, Deveau, and Choudry; chapters 2 to 4), and policy-oriented empirical research for marginalized populations or underrepresented activist groups (Withers, Kinsman, Choudry, Bradford, Sirett, Bisaillon, Welsh Carroll, Doll, and Walsh; chapters 1, 2, 4, and 5 to 10). Those activist interventions and research practices are mostly unknown to anyone outside of the network of actors participating in them. Contributors to this volume illustrate a variety of forms of activism and advocacy organizing. Activist research is grounded in the realities of activists’ and advocates’ work, so it must account for the repertoires from which activists pull when they design, develop, and perform their interventions.

This collection also provides a range of examples of how mapping is done. Mapping emerges as a multi-faceted practice that may involve activities of researching, organizing, strategizing, and direct activist intervention performed at multiple sites of struggle. In her chapter, Sue Bradford, an activist, organizer, and researcher, explores (through sizable empirical data) the historical absence of left-wing think tanks in Aotearoa / New Zealand and explores ways for building this capacity. Bradford’s projects, along with others in the volume (Withers, Kinsman, Deveau, and Choudry; chapters 1 to 4), showcase from a practical point of view how the everyday work of activists grounded in their realities opens sites for a critical investigation of those social relations. Moreover, contributors explore how mapping can collectivize and democratize research (Withers, Kinsman, Deveau, Choudry, Bradford, and Welsh Carroll chapters; 1 to 4, 5, and 8) and strengthen a group’s capacities so that everyone can potentially become an activist researcher and enhance pedagogical and memory work (Kinsman, chapter 2, but also Choudry, chapter 4).

The work of mapping as a collective endeavour also helps train social movement actors to identify how thinking and actions are socially organized (Kinsman and Choudry; chapters 2 and 4). Building new maps or reflecting on older ones (“memory work,” pedagogical aspects of mapping) allows activists to see how to use the formal political system to achieve change (Kinsman, this volume). Choudry further notes that activist research is embedded in collaborative relationships between activists and organizations through which trust and a commitment to working together are fostered. Those steps “allow for the identification of research that is most relevant to struggles and the communication of that research in ways that are meaningful and useful for movement building” (Choudry, chapter 4). Such collective knowledge production creates preparedness for current and future struggles. This collection illuminates how PAE’s methods and tools can be relevant for activists and provides examples of various kinds of collective endeavours (e.g., Welsh Carroll, working with and learning from service providers).

Debunking Speculative Accounts

Explicating movement capacities—including possible allies, strategies, and tactics—and identifying weak points and contradictions in ruling relations are important tasks for organizing. Challenging ruling relations requires that movements shift their organizing from a moral critique of “others” toward how people’s practices come about. In such instances, George Smith argues, “these become the ‘causes’ of action or inaction by a regime. Instead of events being produced by people in concrete situations, they are said to be ‘caused’ by ideas such as ‘AIDSphobia’” (G. Smith 1995, 22). He illustrated how ideological accounts focused on “homophobia” or “AIDSphobia” prevented people from being able to learn about the social organization of police practice and government hesitancy to provide AIDS medicine. Tools provided by institutional and political activist ethnographies illustrate how people (including clients of agencies) make sense of the world through ideological lenses that may be individualized rather than highlighting organizational and institutional issues.

Contributors undertake the critical work of debunking speculative accounts of how institutions against which activists struggle function and how things happen, for example, by exposing both how people use ideological accounts of evil workers and the notion of betrayal to make sense of malfunctioning systems and how workers use ideological accounts to categorize clients and construct their institutional actions accordingly. In this volume, Kinsman illustrates how class relations are produced in the daily activities of services workers who divide living in poverty as distinct from the broader working class (chapter 2). Similar analysis and observations appear in Welsh Carroll’s chapter as she traces relations including race and class that organize formerly incarcerated women’s access to resources (chapter 8). Class, race, gender, immigration status, and other relations can be exposed when speculative accounts are debunked. By reflexively accounting for her presence in the field and contrasting her experience with the experience of her research participants (the well-dressed white lady and the perception of the “typical angry client—poor, Black, and female”), Welsh Carroll examines the intersections of race, gender, and class as socially organized practices. Sirett (chapter 6) demonstrates how colonial relations between North American and Global South non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are reproduced in Western NGOs’ everyday work around funding practices. These insights regarding class, class production, and class alienation/divisions are important. Although those relations often sustain the focus of anti-poverty and anti-racism work, they have not been as central as they should be in political activist and institutional ethnographies.

These are all textually mediated processes that can be explored to enhance activist struggle. Developing critical reading skills will enable activists to read state regulations for their social organization and the ideological work they do (Kinsman, Deveau, Choudry, Bisaillon, and Doll; chapters 2 to 4, 7, and 9). Agency workers draw on those regulations, and it becomes one way that texts organize local sites. Deveau (chapter 3) analyzes how the government produces ruling and ideological relations when it attempts to advance its agenda. Such an investigation can help activists go beyond their experiential knowledge to explore the work of agencies, policies, laws, and institutional processes that produce relations of class, race, and gender. Another potential future direction for PAE is work that critically interrogates commonly used but rarely unpacked terms, such as neoliberalism, that activists might use as explanatory tropes instead of explicating the social relations that produce the conditions in which people live and work.

Academic Research Divide

Contributors to this collection challenge us to rethink the academic activist divide and its limits when applied to politically engaged ethnographies. They challenge the separation of activist research from the actual life/work of movements by showing how activist direct action, activist organizing, and advocacy-infused fieldwork are at once key sites for struggle and essential places for activist knowledge production. They expose how the imposition of professional academic standards on research and knowledge production within social movements results in the professionalization of activist research and the exclusion of specific ways of knowing. Walsh (chapter 10) centrally addresses this issue. Choudry (chapter 4) argues that for more professionalized NGOs, grassroots knowledge production may be seen as invalid when the former internalizes the conception of a professional researcher as an expert and of academic research standards (predominately Western) as universal standards. Choudry suggests knowledge is only valued if people with certain qualifications, social capital, and status produce it.

Here we reflect on the hazard of institutionalization that political activists and grassroots research may face if incorporated into academic spaces (e.g., involving activists in producing standards for academic research), which can contribute to the loss of activist research’s radical potential. This shift has been observed as aspects of IE have become institutionalized in university disciplines and professional locations. Based on his political ethnographic work organizing with other activists associated with S-CAP, Kinsman has demonstrated that such radical spaces for critical discussion, mapping, and decision-making skills are crucial for “moving the struggle forward.”

There are many possibilities for equal collaboration between academics and activists. Welsh Carroll and other contributors to this volume deepen the discussion between activist researchers inside and outside academia involved in politically engaged research. Choudry discusses collective knowledge production, as does Kinsman. Bradford’s research further points to the need and desire for a collective vision and a shared way of achieving that vision. Her study was one way for participants to think through that vision collectively and which organizations might be useful in working collectively toward a shared purpose. For PAE to remain radical and relevant, the pathways between movement spaces and the academy must be well-trodden to open possibilities for intellectual work to be done in common spaces within social movements.

Engaging Frontally with Tension and Contradiction

Contributors to this volume have problematized NGOs’ professionalism and professionalism as a ruling relation. Professionalization of activism coordinates how activists, researchers, funding organizations, governing bodies, and so on interact to achieve institutional goals. Already in the 1990s, institutional ethnographer Roxana Ng (cited in Campbell and Gregor 2004, 115), in her study of working with an agency for immigrant women, noted that in the course when activist agencies began to rely on government funding, “the perspective of the agency shifted from one who attended to the lived experiences of the clients to the perspective of an impersonal institutional order.” This insight has been advanced by our contributors, who empirically demonstrate how the ruling relations of professionalism, within the context of activist organizing and activist research, shift and dislocate the accountability of social agencies, partnering global North and South NGOs, and activist researchers toward the state, funders, and other professional bodies. The professionalization of activism and social justice organizing is visible not only in the instalment of corporate forms of organizations in NGOs but also if one looks at the social relations of funding. The fact that the processes of state funding and regulations transform community groups into professional groups (Kinsman, Sirett, Welsh Carroll; chapters 2, 6, and 8) is a functional trope in institutional ethnographic research (see Ng 1996; Walker 1990; and the edited collection by Griffith and D. Smith 2014). Kinsman illuminates how this collaboration of workers within ruling relations is socially organized by investigating state funding and regulation processes that have transformed community groups into professionalized groups.

The perils of professionalization within social movements and grassroots agencies have been made explicit in the work of Sirett (chapter 6). Sirett examines “how partnership programming and its funding arrangements were shaping international development assistance and affecting the work and social relations of the two activist NGOs.” Her institutional ethnographic work illuminates how the “discourse of capacity building” that responded to CIDA’s Voluntary Sector Program conflicted with the NGO staff’s experiential knowledge of how best to engage in partnership with each other to accomplish their social justice aims. It also challenged the Bangladeshi NGO staff’s capacity to use their local experiential knowledge and their members to guide their work. Instead of focusing on their members’ needs, the Bangladeshi NGO concentrated on realizing the Canadian government funding agency’s priorities. Sirett’s work illustrates empirically how “in the context of NGO professionalism, people [were] actively and strategically participating in capacity-building discourses, [and that discourse connected] how Canadian and Bangladeshi NGO workers interact[ed] with one another and with farmers in rural Bangladesh.”

In this sense, this volume showcases how the expansive view of PAE (Hussey 2012) allows us to read and map across the ruling relations that activists and movements organize against and that govern movements’ internal operations. Adding to the existing literature (e.g., De Montigny 1995; Eastwood 2005; Diamond 1992; Nichols 2016), it also illustrates empirically how processes of detachment, abstraction, and fragmentation occur when ruling relations, such as social relations of research professionalization, begin to organize the activities of people, including those involved in organizing.

Doll exposes another aspect of professionalization that regulates her work as a researcher associated with a university and as a trained lawyer (although not practicing) and poses tensions with her advocacy commitments. Her insights into these professional relations emerged in the context of a case she followed and regarding which she observed several rights breaches of an involuntarily admitted woman when she was considering intervening in the “case” (although it would have been a different kind of intervention than Welsh Carroll, who provided direct assistance to her research participants). Doll’s ability to intervene (in the initial moments of the case development) would require revealing some confidential information acquired during interviews. She argues that “while [her] professional status as a researcher and legal professional opened important doors for [her], it also imposed significant limits.” Depending on the context, researchers may be able to navigate the tensions between professionalism and activism to minimize the disjuncture between the experiential and the institutional/professional.

In conclusion, there are many possibilities for collaborative work between academics and activists. Yet, with the spread of IE as a new research field, it is important to reflect on the relationship between professionals and activism. First, it is critical to recognize that various professionals’ social locations differ, which may have implications for their research pursuits. Professionals’ activism does not fit easily into the conventional understanding of activism as grassroots social mobilization. Professionals are in their institutional affiliations and professional responsibilities because of differences in their work’s material and organizational conditions. The legal organization of their work impacts their professional loyalties. Yet not all professionals are employees. It is crucial to understand how these diverse social and institutional relations may constrain certain types of activist research and critical engagement with social, political, and economic inequalities. Different professions may also vary in terms of responsibilities. For example, lawyering is often understood as a “public profession” whose “contribution[s] to society goes beyond the aggregation, assembling, and deployment of technical skills” (Sarat and Scheingold 1998, 3). While some lawyers may see their work as serving individual clients with their legal skills (like other professions involved in service delivery), others (cause lawyers) would see their work as “directed at altering some aspects of social, economic and political status quo” (4). Lawyers may also bring their political commitments to their research in the form of professional activism. They aim to address both the social organization of oppressive legal practices and the power relations on which these oppressive practices rest.

Given the diversity existing among professionals and their engagement with politically informed research, it could be more productive to understand activism as a spectrum of possibilities from which radical streams of critique can emerge. By giving space to professional activism, institutional ethnographers can open new kinds of knowledge for on-the-ground activists to draw. Grassroots activists may find it useful to learn from professionals’ practical knowledge about optimal sites for direct interventions and strategies for doing so.

We consider these tensions as productive sites for future scholarly and activist research undertakings. Not only do they emerge from the experiences of researchers doing their activist and advocacy work, but they also open windows into further investigation of a broader social organization of sites of struggle as well as the relations that organize the work of activists, advocates, and social movements. This volume attests to the need for flexible methodological activist research strategies and creativity in applying IE’s and PAE’s tools to explicate these tensions and social relations that organize them to make broader oppressive relations visible as well as foster activist struggle. For PAE to remain radical and relevant, the pathways between movements and the academy must be open to possibilities for intellectual work to be done in common spaces and struggles.

Where Now?

Within the past few years, there has been increasing mobilization around deepening social and economic inequalities, pervasive oppression of disenfranchised and marginalized populations, and environmental issues. While activist research has gained popularity across academic disciplines to the extent that activism and activist research became buzzwords in social justice scholarship, we ask to what extent can such research aid activists in subverting oppressive regimes when it produces theory disconnected from practice? Activist, organizer, and educator Aziz Choudry (2020) calls for re-centring understandings and practice of activist research by unfastening it from academic-based knowledge production and taking seriously knowledge contributions made from inside of social movements. There is an ongoing need for the broader community and political organizing and activism by everyday residents and workers as well as for politically engaged research (Kinsman, this volume). We leave the reader and ourselves as well with questions such as these: What else could be possible in terms of expanding PAE and advocacy-infused IE? What new sites of struggle can be explored? How can we address the need for more flexible methodological activist research strategies so various organizations, grassroots groups, and citizens can use them while doing rigorous research?

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