I'm pleased that Laurence was able to respond to our issue about how theorists and activists might work together more effectively. His is a personal account, and he provides lots of useful-looking links. rkm ============================================================================ Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2000 13:49:16 +0000 From: Laurence Cox <•••@••.•••> Subject: Re: you might want to comment... To: "Richard K. Moore" <•••@••.•••> Cc: •••@••.••• MIME-version: 1.0 Hi Richard, thanks for this. I'm not quite sure how to respond! Maybe a sensible way of talking about it is in the personal, since this is where we start from and we all need to find our own ways from where we are to where we'd like to be (one of those ongoing process things....) Particularly since you're threatening to crosspost this - it's hard to know quite what to do with that! I took part of the summer to think about this while doing up a website that's basically documenting different projects I've been involved in, and that has in a sense most of the answers I've come up with to this issue over the years: http://www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/toolsforchange/index.html I hope this doesn't come across as too self-indulgent: part of the results of doing this (which was mostly to reassure myself that I had done _something_ useful over the years) was realising that I hadn't found any neat trick or proposition which could sum up ideal practice, but that "best practice" in this area was always a matter of responding to a given context as sensitively and openly as possible, within the limits set by my own developing skills and understanding. So I'd rather answer by putting that out than in terms of "here's the key to success", which I don't think I possess! Basically I started as a straightforward activist involved in movements like CND, anti-apartheid and Amnesty, graduated into an anti-authoritarian left politics and started finding myself wanting to know more about where the activist scenes I was familiar with came from (.../phd.html). So I headed off to Hamburg and spent probably the best year of my life involved in the Hamburg Greens (very much the left wing of the party) and the anti-Gulf War movement in the name of "research" (.../szene.html). Coming back, activism and academia diverged for a good while: academia was something I put in a token effort at while basically being a fulltime organiser trying to move the Irish Green Party to the left (.../caorthann.html), and it was only after the scholarships and teaching assistantships ran out and I found myself having to take up fulltime work teaching care workers that I had to think about the specific contribution of academia to activism again. As a researcher I started to realise again that theory had a particular role to play in movement building, and used it more or less effectively as a foundation for various kinds of movement networking (.../ifb.html). As a teacher and supervisor I found myself engaging with what working-class women could get out of a sociology education, working with community development activists who were trying to theorise their own practice (.../ma.html) and offering more straightforward technical support in setting up our local anti-incinerator campaign (.../incinerator.html). Now I'm in a more conventional university job for the first time, and trying to find out what I can do with it. About half my time is taken up with running an oral history research project in a working-class estate in west Dublin training local people to investigate the history of community action in their own area (.../ballymun.html); I'm also running an activist / academic mailing list in my own research area of social movements (.../sm.html) and doing talks, papers and workshops for the local anarchists, sustainable development groups (.../activism.html), environmental groups (.../afpp/ecosoc.html), Latin America solidarity groups etc. Over this time what I've found is a general shift from "following my own star" to listening as hard as I can to other activists, including to the kinds of "hidden knowledge" they aren't yet able to articulate but which comes out in what they do and the kinds of things they talk about (.../afpp/afpp4.html). Partly this is through finding that my own logics of research on movements, engaged methodology, radical theory etc. push me away from individualised practice and towards as close an engagement as possible, and partly it's through finding that I now reach the limits of any individual process of thought and research fairly rapidly, so that real development happens in interaction as we articulate a shared implicit knowledge, born out of common involvement in particular kinds of activism, for purposes which are starting to emerge within that activism. I'm currently exploring this with a group of people some of whom are community or other movement activists who are doing research (often on their own movements), some of whom are activists who do research as part of their daily work, some of whom are working-class people in the academy, etc. etc. (see http://www.egroups.com/community-research for a slightly more expanded account). We're still playing around with this, because none of us really knows what direction we're going in, but at least for the moment we're finding enough in the face-to-face interactions to give us a sense that yes, listening and talking to each other is helping us firm up our understanding of what we're up to. >> What bothers me is all the activists and academics who are on one island or another and don't talk to one another. Academic specialization is the epitome. This is I think particularly strong in many areas of Irish academia, which is particularly class-bound. "Radical practice" in sociology tends to mean doing quantitative research which e.g. documents the extent of poverty and can be used to push the state into doing something by the right kind of NGOs - not that this isn't a useful exercise, but that it ultimately positions academics as critical intellectuals within the state, appealing to and hence dependent on enlightened elites within the state and the media ("public opinion") and uninterested in or unaware of the possibility of developing a more active engagement with _movements_ of ordinary people struggling to change these conditions, and whose limits are not set by the interests common to state or media elites. (In other fields than sociology, of course, economic elites might bulk much larger.) What does however exist on the margins is a "community"-oriented fringe of academia, some of which is located within departments geared to training community workers or adult education, other parts of which happen within women's studies, sociology, etc. The good parts of this (in Ireland) are the institutionalised edge of working-class community-based movements, drawing on the models of participative learning for local purposes developed within those movements (Freire is one influence that might be recognised outside Ireland). The people I know in this area have a strong sense that they are trying to theorise their own practice for a range of reasons - providing tools for their own movement, training new generations of activists, articulating oppositional perspectives on the world which can challenge the status quo, etc. >> I'm trying to learn how to communicate with people in other worlds, because I think that is the key to what is needed. > well, I've been trying to get academics and activists in the UK together for ages, and find much the same thing. Activists accuse academics of being reformists or of being all waffle and no action, and academics accuse activists of being irrational and unscholarly. I am of course, being somewhat generalist and stereotypical, as I do know people that make a genuine effort to cross boundaries and explore 'the other side'. Better known activist-academics (or vice versa) include Patrick Bond, Richard Norgaard and the late Walter Rodney to name but three. In my own field there is quite a regular cross-over and interaction at events like the annual Alternative Futures and Popular Protest conferences in Manchester (http://www.mmu.ac.uk/h-ss/sis/altfut2ka.htm), and the occasional events on DIY politics etc. run at UEL and I think Durham. >So what is one to do? Is there 'good practice' that gets like-minded >folk together? I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has a foot >in both camps or has tried to make a bridge between the two >communities. There's a very interesting page at http://comm-org.utoledo.edu/ which focuses on activist / academic and theory / practice relationships in community organising in the States. Check out particularly the conference report at http://comm-org.utoledo.edu//wgoa/fullnotes.htm. There's also an interesting conference outline at http://www.sociology.columbia.edu/home/lesley/organize.htm, though not much to indicate what actually happened! Along with Richard and Maeve O'Grady, a women's community education activist, I organised something rather less ambitious last year (.../ifb.html); the preliminary (and only!) report from this is at .../ifb/report.html. My own sense from this and the other projects I've been talking about (to end on straight propositional statements) is as follows: 1. Much of radical academia _is_ the sedimented results of social movements thinking about their own practice. This is most obvious in theories such as Marxism or feminism and in institutional locations such as black studies, queer studies or community development, but can also be identified in methodologies (feminist and participatory action research, for example) and approaches to teaching practice (adult and community education, feminist practice, critical approaches, etc.) 2. As with other such sediments (from green consumerism to the autistic kind of political sectarianism) it can sometimes be hard to see the links between the current practice and the movement, particularly when the movement has ebbed drastically. Engaging with this issue from different angles (e.g. feminist theory, environmental studies, adult education strategies, community development) can help to open up our sense of what is / should be going on. 3. A crucial issue here is the distinction between contemplative and active forms of thought - not so much between theory and practice as between theory and praxis. The former tends to be propositional in form and ostensibly value-free (more often, loaded with liberal values); geared to the teaching of undergraduates and the supervision or carrying out of research projects that derive from academic rather than activist logics; and crucially has as its implicit social location (the point from which it would make sense to say these things) a position of power or a close relationship to those in power. 4. Praxis is then more about active skills than passive propositions, though the latter obviously play a part. It is more contextualised, in that its purposes and subordinate position are more explicit - though this doesn't necessarily mean that it's more context-bound, since far more human beings live in a situation of relative powerlessness and struggle for existence than can implicitly position themselves as powerful decision-makers. 5. One example of the latter, which is relatively widespread in movement circles, is the "how-to" book, which ranges from technical discussions about how to set up squats, create pirate radios, organise roads protests to manuals about group process, handbooks of organising, and discussions of practical choices in current movements which have long-term political implications. This is more visible as "theory arising from practice", though often the theory is more or less implicit. 6. Another kind of thing is the "why" discussion, which ranges from the stylised discussions of revolution vs. reform, the history of 1917 or the "socialism and..." discussion via debates about light vs dark green, liberal vs radical feminism, consensus vs conflict down to nitty-gritty arguments about whether or not to invite local councillors to speak on platforms, whether "lifestyle" elements of a movement should be suppressed in order to make it more acceptable to "the mainstream", or instrumental vs. expressive forms of action. A lot of this is ultimately about "practice informed by theory", though how clear that is varies. 7. Communication is the key, but particularly communication within shared practice - where there's some kind of sense of a common project is where it becomes important and useful to develop a common language to integrate and develop that project. Both the weakness and the strength of the current situation is that it isn't clear what the common project is - on the one hand, there's a lot of emotional investment e.g. in the anti-globalisation movement, but relatively little consistent and coherent thinking about how that will / should develop (Starhawk wrote a very interesting piece on this, which was posted to the social-movements list a few days back). So we're free to experiment and explore, in a way that maybe a decade back it was harder to, when there was a more normative sense of where "we" were going. The downside of that is that often people lack any strong experience of what it is like to be engaged with a common project, and so reach for inherited languages from the mainstream which are downright unhelpful. This isn't just an academic problem - activists who can't get beyond talking about the technicalities of the issue they're engaged with or make the shift from "this needs to happen" to "how can we make this happen?" have exactly the same difficulty of being trapped in the contemplative mode. Their practice is often smarter than their theory, but the absence of theory all too often leaves them willing to buy into whatever enlightened state or international projects (or innovative businesses!) are willing to give them a bit of consultative space and / or funding. Right, that's more than enough of that! thanks for listening, Laurence ============================================================================
