Contention

The current organization of academic institutions creates a tension between knowledge and social change. Many scholars put inequality at the center of their research agenda. But they may also be subject to logics of exploitation linked to the commodification and marketization of knowledge and the precarization of the workplace. Such a struggle may appear especially salient now in British universities, where a long series of strike actions are taking place over pay equality and pay levels, casualization, and workload.

This special issue explores theoretical and methodological issues related to activist and engaged scholarship. Combining scholarship and activism involves the (collaborative) production of knowledge that contributes not only to understanding the issues research participants face, but also to the social change they envision (Kirsch 2018; Hale 2006; Rasch and Van Drunen 2017; Rasch and Köhne 2016). Often, this entails a process of double contention. Activist scholars might be involved in social struggles against inequality and exclusion beyond the production of knowledge, engaging in solidarity work, supporting court cases, and co-strategizing for actions (see for example Bringa 2016; Grasseni 2014; Hale 2006). At the same time, they are often involved in processes of contention related to the metrics-oriented neoliberal university, as well as to its underlying positivist, eurocentrist, and colonialist structures (see for example Datta 2018; Mountz et al 2015).

In Brazil, many anthropologists are encouraged to act for the benefit of minority groups, assuming an activist role in conducting research on and with them. Yet efforts to integrate these dual roles are undermined by the continued separation of scientific knowledge production processes from other scholar-activist activities. In this article, I seek to contend this separation by reflecting on my work as a volunteer in medios libres (the “free media”). With this form of activism, I sought to support the Mexican Indigenous social movement Modevite alongside my doctoral research, in a process of double contention. I reflect on the possibilities of rethinking the activism–academia dichotomy in knowledge production and on how we can produce knowledge that is more strategic for the people we engage with.

This paper reflects on knowledge activism as a form of activism that strives to make scientific research politically effective. It analyses the contradictions of scholar-activism aiming to overcome the dichotomy between scholarly and activist work while at the same time experiencing the dual commitments to these two different fields. It does so through an auto-ethnography of writing a “scientific letter” signed by academics to the Dutch government, urging them to stop the use of palm oil as biofuel in the EU. I argue that when knowledge activism builds on the authority of science to pursue political change, the boundary work to produce the needed credibility at the same time reproduces the dichotomy between activism and science.

In this article, I explore what a more ethical and decolonial approach to North-South research could look like, reflecting on my experiences of accompanying women territory defenders in Bolivia. I argue that the same colonial extractivist logic that threatens the lives and territories of indigenous and rural women in Abya Yala is also being reproduced in processes of knowledge production in neoliberal academia. Drawing on the critical work of feminist and indigenous scholars from Abya Yala, I propose a relational and embodied methodological approach that I call ‘acompañar’ that has the potential to resist these extractivist tendencies. I conclude that decolonization requires a radical exploration of the researcher's positionings in ongoing colonial processes and resistance to the temporalities of neoliberal academia.

In this paper, I explore how teaching can be an act of activism; a way of hacking the neoliberal university. In doing so, I draw on our experiences with the course “Resistance, Power and Movements.” I argue that activist teaching not only involves teaching about issues related to social justice and resistance, but also engaged, horizontal teaching methods, as well as self-reflection. This implies a process of double contention. On the one hand, the course resists the outcome-oriented university that we work in by focusing on learning as a process and a form of reflection. On the other hand, the lecturers of the course seek to equip students with tools and knowledge to not only understand social change, but also become part of it.

Employing subjective experiences in academia obviously questions central academic concepts such as objectivity and value-neutrality. The article challenges these taken for granted values by reflecting on the experience of producing and disseminating scientific knowledge with personal engagement. In a dialogical style, the article argues for the relevance of “academic activism” which draws on subjective experiences as incorporated in the process of knowledge-making. Regarding both writing this article and teaching the course “Researching Social Change” the authors exemplify how scholars can practice “academic activism” to gain knowledge and become part of social change themselves.

The article addresses some of the challenges and possibilities of taking slowness as a tool to theorize and practice a way of being an activist anthropologist in the contemporary (neoliberal) university. The activism discussed here intervenes in the university itself. To articulate slowing down as mode of resistance to the unbearably fast and exclusionary rhythms of academic life, the article puts into dialogue documentary cinema and critiques of contemporary academia. Turning to the film Inland Sea as an instance of a mode of attention/attending to the world otherwise, the article concludes on the political potential of slowness to become a collective strategy of resistance to the increased culture of quantification, competition, and financialization in the university, and a tactic for an engaged anthropology to come.