Social Science Research Council

The SSRC Program on Global Security and Cooperation (GSC), supported by the MacArthur Foundation, provided fellowships to academics and practitioners to conduct innovative social science research on topics related to peace, conflict, and the root causes of human insecurity. One crucial dimension of the desired innovation is to encourage scholars to develop sustained, mutually beneficial relationships with people and organizations who themselves are actors in the processes under study. This dimension, in turn, brings the concept of "activist research" to the fore.

The idea of "activist research" is both controversial and subject to multiple understandings. Since one central objective of this workshop is precisely to explore these multiple meanings, and their repercussions, it would be counter-productive to attempt to fix a definition in place from the start. At the most general level, the term "activist scholarship" refers to a range of research methodologies in which the researcher works in close collaboration with an organized group of people who are direct participants in the problem or process under study. This collaboration can potentially occur at each stage of the research process, from initial conception of the topic, through dissemination of the results. In the phrase "activist research" the word "activist" is meant as an adjective: it refers to a distinct approach to conceiving and carrying out social science research.

The proposed workshop will gather together leading theorists and practitioners of "activist research," each of whom would contribute, prior to the meeting, a commissioned essay to be discussed over the course of the meeting. For the most part, the focus and contents of these essays will be left to the discretion of each participant. We ask only that he or she write a substantive and original piece on the topic, drawing on direct personal experience with some variant of "activist research," confronting concrete methodological issues (the "how to") as well as the empirical and theoretical. Toward this end, each participant would be asked to address, in the course of their essay, the following three questions:

1. How do you put activist research into practice? Does it entail a series of methodological steps that can be taught, and generalized across diverse research settings? What basic conditions are necessary for activist research to be carried out?

2. One strong argument for activist research is that, in addition to ethical and political commitments, it has the potential to yield "better" results, i.e. more thorough understanding of the problem at hand, more insightful theory, more useful knowledge. In your experience, can this assertion be sustained?

3. What are the most important problems, barriers, dilemmas, etc. that you have confronted in the practice of activist research, how have you confronted them, with what results?

The central objective of this project is to have a sustained, critical dialogue on these and related issues, which in turn would provide the basis for a published volume on the topic. More generally, as the second part of the project title suggests, the objective is to broaden the intellectual and institutional space for this approach to social science research, and for training younger scholars along the lines of activist research methods and practice. A significant part of the discussion will be devoted to this general objective, especially in a concluding session.

As the first part of the project title suggests, this project fully acknowledges that the practice of activist scholarship inevitably confronts contradictions: between the ideal of sustained reflection on a problem and the imperative for political engagement; between egalitarian principles and the power relations inherent in all social science research ("activist" or otherwise)--to name just two. A founding assertion of this workshop is that these contradictions exist across the board, that they are best engaged directly rather than avoided or minimized, and that "activist research" helps us to do precisely this.