Abstract
Bringing together a group of scholars from across North America and beyond, Activist Scholarship editors Julia Sudbury and Margo Okazawa-Rey consider the possibilities for bridging activism and scholarship and raise genuine questions about the “radical potentialities of the university” as a site of resistance when it is also “shaped by elitism, social inequality, and complicities with state violence” (p. 2). In doing so, they have three goals: “make visible the activist scholarship that is occurring,” highlight the innovative research methods that result from the refusal to separate scholarly rigor from social movement involvement, and “explore the particular gendered and racialized dynamics associated with activist scholarship” (p. 3).
Like most anthologies weaved together by way of a common theme or topic, the diversity of voices and experiences is Activist Scholarship’s greatest strength. Andrea Smith’s chapter on native studies and the academic industrial complex is a compelling treatment of ironies implicit in the (academic) politics of representation: “Does tenuring more native or ethic studies scholars necessarily contribute to a decolonized academy,” or does it create “an elite class that can . . . police the rest of its members” (p. 41)? Smith’s theory is summed up as “take power/make power” inside the academy, and through it she tackles everything from the grading system to student evaluations to learning styles as sites suitable for radical critique and collective action. Other chapters, such as Mieko Yoshihama’s about domestic violence activism in Japan, read more like reports from the field that articulate strategies, tactics, and results of a specific research project. As such, she provides readers with the nuts and bolts of what activist scholarship can (and does) look like.
Still other chapters take on a more reflective tone and unpack the ways activist scholars experience, on a deep personal level, the various contradictions implicit in their identities. Michael Hames-García, in “Three Dilemmas of a Queer Activist Scholar of Color,” questions both the coherence of any community and the challenges of belonging to multiple communities. In particular, he speaks about his choices to conceal his sexuality to be more effective in his work in prisons or to vote his conscious on promotion committees populated with colleagues who see activism as oppositional to scholarship. As he puts it, “There comes a time in any radical scholar’s career when he or she faces a choice: Is this the moment when I become the person on this committee who no one will take seriously anymore?” (p. 200). Julia Sudbury’s own chapter about her work with prisoners presents even more gut-wrenching quandaries about the women she interviews for her research. In particular, she questions whether or not her work will have any positive impact on participants’ lives, a possibility she finds deeply troubling.
To scholars who search for expanding the intersections of activism and academia, this anthology proves both hopeful and instructive. It provides one more artifact to bolster the authority of those who might otherwise find their passions for social justice antithetical to a career in the academy. Sudbury and Okazawa-Rey argue by way of the structure and content of this volume that the scope of activist scholarship is vast, multifaceted, and intellectually demanding. But the risks are real. A number of the contributors attest to denials of tenure, feelings of alienation and even hostility from colleagues, lack of support and/or recognition from both administrators and movement participants, and of course mental and emotional exhaustion.
While I find hope and inspiration for my own political passions in these chapters (thankfully on the other side of tenure), I also find myself curious as to a familiar tension they stir up. Specifically, I speak of the dichotomy we inevitably evoke through pairing the terms activist and scholarship at the same moment that we seek to transcend that dichotomy. In other words, while most Activist Scholarship contributors illustrate the ironies and outright contradictions they experience and the editors note the “danger[s] of producing an idealized vision of collaborative or antioppressive research” (p. 3), there is also, at times, a tendency to represent “the community,” “the grassroots movements,” and “true” political commitments as some sort of pure space outside the academy and its excesses. Both of these things—the contradictions and the idealizations—cannot simultaneously be true, although, even in my own work, each seems true in different moments. Frustrating as this tension is, activist scholars certainly realize that they are the ones ideally positioned and, more or less, institutionally sanctioned to do the work of unraveling it.