Reflections on Scholarship and Activism

Nik Heynen, the Interventions editor at Antipode, asked me to reflect on how scholars can also be activists. My own work, he said, reflected a dual preoccupation with activism and scholarship, so he thought my comments might be useful to others trying to take this path. In fact, many people enter the academic world determined to become scholars because they want to be both scholars and activists, a trend that became especially evident in the aftermath of the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s in which many young people had participated. The motivating idea is that academic work can be useful in ameliorating the big problems of our society, problems such as inequality and insecurity, or militarism and imperial overreach, or the corruption of democratic procedures, or ecological degradation. And a good many academics try to use their scholarship to work on these problems and to influence policy solutions. Accordingly, they write reports about social and political problems that can be drawn upon by policy makers, or they provide testimony for city councils or congressional committees, or they may even advise presidents. Or they try to influence public opinion by writing op-eds, or working in sections of academic associations that have a political and an activist bent. Or they write articles and books analyzing the workings of economic or political or military elites at the top end of society, or the dynamics of labor markets and poorer communities at the lower end. These academics want their work to be politically relevant (“relevant” was the code for scholar-activism in the 1970s.) They see themselves as part of the political left, and they want to make a contribution to left reform efforts. This sort of politically oriented scholarly activity has a long history in an American social science with its roots in the progressive era, and it often has worthwhile consequences. Social scientists have helped us to understand the multifaceted dimensions of inequality, the dynamics of the domestic economy that produces and