Is Research Activist?
New contribution by Olaf Zenker to the boasblog “Beyond Activism”
In his new contribution “On Research, Activist Research and ‘Activist Research’” to the boasblog Beyond Activism, Olaf Zenker distinguishes three different meanings of “activist”: All research is activist insofar as it necessarily makes the world intelligible from particular perspectives, rendering some things visible while obscuring others. Some research is activist research insofar as researchers deliberately seek to intervene in social and political worlds. And some research gets marked as “activist research” – an attribution that can itself have political effects when particular perspectives are rendered ideological while others are made to appear neutral or self-evident.
What does this mean for the relationship between scholarly knowledge and social intervention? And how can we critically assess different perspectives if there is no “view from nowhere”?
The contribution is part of the boasblog Beyond Activism, which puts the conventional distinction between activist and non-activist scholarship up for debate.
https://boasblogs.org/beyondactivism/on-research-activist-research-and-activist-research/