Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship (Global, Area, and International Archive)

402 Pages·2008·1.85 MB·English

by  Charles R. Hale

Engaging Contradictions
Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship
Edited by
CHARLES R. HALE
Global, Area, and International Archive
University of California Press
BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Engaging contradictions : theory, politics, and methods of activist
scholarship / edited by Charles R. Hale.
p. cm. — (Global, area, and international archive ; 6)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-09861-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Political activists. 2. Social action. 3. Scholars. I. Hale, Charles
R., 1957–
JF799.E54 2008
322.4—dc22 2007053060

Manufactured in the United States of America
17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of ANSI/NISO Z 39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).
For Michael Zinzun
in memoriam
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
A Note on Resources xi
Foreword, by Craig Calhoun xiii
Introduction 1
Charles R. Hale
PART I. MAPPING THE TERRAIN
1. Forgotten Places and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning 31
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
2. Research, Activism, and Knowledge Production 62
Dani Wadada Nabudere
3. Breaking the Chains and Steering the Ship:
How Activism Can Help Change
Teaching and Scholarship 88
George Lipsitz
PART II. TROUBLING THE TERMS
4. Activist Groundings or Groundings for Activism?
The Study of Racialization as a Site of
Political Engagement 115
Jemima Pierre
5. Globalizing Scholar Activism: Opportunities and
Dilemmas through a Feminist Lens 136
Jennifer Bickham Mendez
6. Activist Scholarship: Limits and Possibilities in
Times of Black Genocide 164
João H. Costa Vargas
viii / Contents

7. Making Violence Visible: An Activist Anthropological
Approach to Women’s Rights Investigation 183
Samuel Martínez
PART III. PUTTING ACTIVIST SCHOLARSHIP TO WORK
8. Forged in Dialogue: Toward a Critically Engaged
Activist Research 213
Shannon Speed
9. Community-Centered Research as Knowledge/Capacity
Building in Immigrant and Refugee Communities 237
Shirley Suet-ling Tang
10. Theorizing and Practicing Democratic Community
Economics: Engaged Scholarship, Economic Justice,
and the Academy 265
Jessica Gordon Nembhard
PART IV. MAKING OURSELVES AT HOME
11. Crouching Activists, Hidden Scholars: Reflections on
Research and Development with Students and
Communities in Asian American Studies 299
Peter Nien-chu Kiang
12. Theoretical Research, Applied Research, and
Action Research: The Deinstitutionalization of
Activist Research 319
Davydd J. Greenwood
13. FAQs: Frequently (Un)Asked Questions about
Being a Scholar Activist 341
Laura Pulido
Afterword: Activist Scholars or Radical Subjects?
by Joy James and Edmund T. Gordon 367
Contributors 375
Index 377
Acknowledgments
This volume has been a collective project throughout, and I am deeply
grateful to all those who contributed to its realization along the way. It
was first conceived within the now defunct Committee of the SSRC-
MacArthur Program on Global Security and Cooperation (GSC), which
also provided core financial support. The two GSC Program Officers, Itty
Abraham and John Tirman, supported the idea throughout, as did many
of the Committee members, especially Dani Nabudere, Francis Loh,
Daniel Garcia Peña, Mary Kaldor, and Yezid Sayigh. The workshop in
Los Angeles during which the volume first took shape was graciously
hosted at the offices of the Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA). Spe-
cial thanks to João Vargas and especially Michael Zinzun, CAPA’s direc-
tor (now deceased), for making this possible. Abriendo Brecha, the an-
nual conference on activist scholarship at the University of Texas, pro-
vided speaking venues for Ruthie Gilmore and George Lipsitz, who
presented papers that grew into the chapters published here. I am espe-
cially grateful to Vivian Newdick, whose careful editorial hand helped
immensely in the final preparation of the manuscript, and to Mariana
Mora for her eleventh-hour work on the Appendix. Les Field and M.
Brinton Lykes provided thoughtful and constructive feedback on every
chapter, with a level of care that one always hopes for but rarely
achieves in these endeavors. Elisabeth Magnus, our copy editor, toiled
valiantly to make our prose read well, and in so doing, showed a keen
understanding of the substantive contents of our work. Finally, we all
have an enormous debt of gratitude to Nathan MacBrien, GAIA’s publi-
cations director, for seeing the promise in this project early on and for
providing sage advice at every stage that has helped us to fully realize
its potential.
C. R. H.
ix
A Note on Resources
We hope that this book will be used not only for its theoretical and em-
pirical insights but also as a resource, for inspiration and for guidance,
by those who are carrying out activist research or who aspire to do so.
Toward this end, we have prepared an online appendix, meant to be a
guide to organizations, networks, and the like that work in this field. In-
terested readers may find it alongside the online version of this book, at
http://repositories.cdlib.org/gaia/gaia_books/6/.
The appendix is intended to provide activist scholars with the names
and contact information of activist research centers in North America,
Latin America, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Europe, as well as to give a
general sense of the types of areas in which research has been combined
with concrete community action. The guide is not intended to be ex-
haustive but rather representative of the different types of activist re-
search initiatives currently under way.

xi
Foreword
Activist scholarship is as old as Machiavelli and Marx or indeed Aris-
totle. The social sciences developed partly in and through activist schol-
arship. The classical political economists of the early nineteenth century
did not simply observe the effects of mercantilism, they campaigned for
the repeal of the Corn Laws. Sociologists at Hull House and the Univer-
sity of Chicago not only studied migration, they pressed for changes in
legislation and local administration and through the settlement house
movement engaged in direct action. Anthropologists have lately en-
gaged in much soul-searching over complicity in colonialism, but an-
thropology was also recurrently the basis for efforts to mitigate harmful
colonial practices. If early anthropology was shaped by racial thinking,
modern anthropologists have been widely committed not only to intel-
lectual criticism of the use of the race concept but to action to end
racism.
That knowledge is vital to social action—as to individual ethics—has
long been recognized. Thinkers have been doers (contrary to stereo-
type). And reflection on successes, failures, and unexpected conse-
quences of social action has been a vital source of new understanding.
Yet activist scholarship often seems an unusual or surprising idea. It
isn’t widely taught in textbooks. Tenure committees are unsure how to
think about it. Why should this be so? Three reasons seem especially
influential: (1) modern science (and modern epistemology more gener-
ally) has developed an ideal of knowledge based on detached, objective
observation; (2) the university has come to contain a much larger pro-
portion of scholarship than in the past (though perhaps not as big a pro-
portion as academics believe), and thus scholarship is more contained
with “academic” agendas and career structures; and (3) activism is
widely understood as directly expressive of individual interests, or emo-
tions, or ethical commitments rather than of a broader, more reflective,
and more intellectually informed perspective on social issues.
xiii
xiv / Craig Calhoun
Nonetheless, activist scholarship is of vital importance, as the chap-
ters in this book suggest. The importance of social science to social ac-
tion is not limited by discipline. Neither is the potential for improving
social science by learning from and through activism.

The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) has for more than eighty
years sponsored and organized projects to improve the quality and crea-
tivity of social science and to connect it better to public issues and con-
cerns. Many SSRC projects have had little to do with broader social ac-
tivism; they have focused on improving research methods or theories,
on building better linkages across disciplinary boundaries, or on ensur-
ing integrated scholarly attention to major world regions. But the SSRC
has also mobilized academic experts to inform the policy process—
helping, for example, to create the U.S. Social Security system and shap-
ing approaches to economic development in the mid−twentieth century.
Occasionally SSRC projects have sought to put issues on the policy
agenda that weren’t yet the focus of policy makers’ attention or to
change the way issues were understood in public debates. In the 1990s,
for example, the SSRC was active in developing new ways of thinking
about “peace and security” that complemented previous concerns re-
garding conventional warfare and nuclear arms races with new attention
to international immigration, environmental degradation, food supplies,
ethnic conflicts and genocides, and gender-based violence as basic dimen-
sions of “human security.” Grasping the connections among these dif-
ferent topics required scholars from different disciplines to collaborate;
making their knowledge effective required them to communicate not
only with each other but with broader constituencies and actors in vari-
ous practical domains. It was—and is—not enough simply to communi-
cate social science knowledge to policy makers in government. It is im-
portant to foster collaboration and communication with those whose
work in NGOs, social movement organizations, businesses, legal advo-
cacy, and other arenas that can be improved by social science knowl-
edge—and can challenge social scientists to keep improving their own
understandings.
Engaging Contradictions is linked to this work on international peace
and security. Charles Hale was among the advisors to a MacArthur
Foundation−funded Global Security and Cooperation fellowship pro-
gram. Discussions there and elsewhere led him to propose a more sus-
tained look at activist scholarship. Most of the chapters are about the
work of researchers in or with activist organizations and social move-