Social Science Research Council

A Field-Building Workshop
Global Security and Cooperation (GSC) Program
Social Science Research Council

Local sponsor: Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA), Michael Zinzun, Director

Los Angeles, 11-12 April 2003

This workshop, held in the offices of CAPA, involved two days of intense discussion on a range of topics related to activism, intellectual work, and activist research (in its numerous facets and according to various understandings of the term). The discussions were organized around the presentation of eight written papers by:

Bickham-Mendez, Jennifer (Sociology, William and Mary)
DaSilva, Denise (Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego)
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson (Geography, UC Berkeley)
Greenwood, Davydd (Anthropology, Cornell)
Hale, Charles (Anthropology and Latin American Studies, U Texas at Austin)
Martinez, Samuel (Anthropology, U Connecticut)
Vargas, Joao (Anthropology, U Texas at Austin and Vera Institute)
Zinzun, Michael (Director, CAPA)


Dani Nabudere planned to attend, and prepared a paper especially for the event, but was denied a visa by the U.S. Embassy in Uganda.

Ted Gordon (Anthropology and African and African American Studies, U Texas at Austin) served as general discussant for the workshop, and Jemima Pierre (Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora, U Maryland) served as discussant and participant as well.

Additional participants, who were not paper givers or discussants, were: John Tirman and Maggie Schuppert (of the SSRC), Mr. Wendell Collins (community member and activist), Maybe Settlage (CAPA Staff).

Additional information on the participants, their affiliations and research-activist interests can be found in the appendix to this report.

The report is divided into four sections: Initial Reflections and Overview; The Issues; Ideas on Where from Here; Resources.

Part 1: Initial Reflections and Overview

Listening to you makes me angry and disgusted; there has been an endless discussion of reality, endless verbal masturbation; enough to make anything seem like something that it is not. You could even change black into white. If you continue in this way, you'll never change the world. You'll become the enemy. If I met up with you on the streets, I'd have a enormous desire to shoot you all.
—Mr. Wendell Collins, community activist (see below)

Although this activity appeared to follow the standard "academic workshop" format of papers-discussion-conclusions, it also departed from that format in important, formative, at times radical ways. The CAPA offices, located in the heart of south central, are a living museum of 30 years of ongoing community struggle for social justice, with a primary emphasis on the lives and struggles of African Americans. A mural on one wall depicts this history in Diego Rivera style; another on the adjacent wall memorializes the "gang truce" between the crips and the bloods, which CAPA helped to forge in 1992. Pictures, posters, and other artifacts of community activism fill every available space in the main conference room. Directly across from the table where we worked for the two days hangs a frame, with pictures of two black men who the police killed on the UCLA campus in the days of Black Panther activism. As our first session began on Friday morning, Ruthie Gilmore briefly remembered one of these men, John Huggins, her cousin, who had been like a brother to her. This moment of reflection drove home the deeply felt personal and political immediacy of the workshop, and set the tone for the discussions that followed.

CAPA is a community organization that places great importance on research, and Michael Zinzun, CAPA's director, takes an intensely analytical approach to the work. This made CAPA an ideal host for our workshop. One of CAPA's principal activities—organizing to contest and end police abuse—requires extensive research and documentation. In Zinzun's presentation we learned of the thousands of files CAPA keeps on police abuse, and of the tracking and cross-checking methods used when a south central resident comes to the organization with a complaint. During breaks in the discussion we saw documentary videos made in conjunction with CAPA—including an especially powerful one that examines the connections between the CIA-funded war against the Sandinistas and the spread of crack cocaine on the streets of LA. In his interventions throughout the two days, Zinzun exerted a powerful grounding influence on group discussions, insisting on the close coupling of theory and practice ('we don't want to build boats that never get tested in the water'), pushing us to carry out analysis that speaks to the struggles at hand, contributing a wealth of experience-tested analysis of his own on a wide range of topics, from transnational racial organizing in Rio de Janeiro and LA, to the workings of racism in the contemporary US, to problems of democracy and internal hierarchy in community organizations. Finally, in the long-term collaboration between CAPA and Joao Vargas, we had close at hand an example of the mutually beneficial and productive relationships that scholars and community organizations can build—a principal topic of the workshop deliberations.

The group congealed, and worked wonderfully together. Nearly every session provoked disagreement, critique, and at times spirited debate. An especially dramatic moment of disagreement came with the statement of Mr. Collins, a CAPA associate, quoted above. The group handled this radical criticism skillfully, by engaging, probing, talking through the issues, returning the challenge, (in part during the session, in part during the lunch break), and eventually reaching a provisional mutual understanding. Many other critical issues arose and provoked debate, from the role of white privilege in the constitution of social science research (both mainstream and activist), to the critical interrogation of discourses of "black emancipation," to the many contradictions that any notion of "activist research" brings to the fore. Something worked throughout the two days to keep even the more heated discussions constructive and solidary. One factor was the group itself: smart, accomplished and committed individuals, who placed success of the collective endeavor above the various mundane and ego-centered considerations that often predominate in academic exchanges. We allowed humor to mediate and punctuate more serious discourse. The other principal factor, clearly, was the tone set by having the workshop in CAPA: a collective spirit, and a constant reminder of the broader goals and the high stakes of the activist research endeavor.

Part 2: The Issues

. . . [T]the organization of social science work life on most campuses now is incompatible . . . with conducting any form of action research. In action research, the researcher must be flexibly available to the local partners, able to work with them when they need support, not only when the researcher has a sabbatical, does not have a faculty meeting to attend, does not have to hold office hours, etc. In other words, a system of work organization has been created that is inimical to any meaningful form of activist engagement. This, of course, is a set of institutional patterns that do not arise from the laws of gravity; they are administrative creations and they can be changed, should the will exist to do so.
—Davydd Greenwood

In the concluding session of the workshop, Ted Gordon enumerated ten issue areas that, in his appraisal, the papers and discussion had helped us to delimit. That list directly informs the contents of this section, although the organization is somewhat different. Many of the issues raised fall into four categories, which correspond to four phases of the research process: 1) formulation of the topic; 2) theory and analytical framework; 3) research methods; 4) research outcomes and their dissemination. The rest of the issues are organized in two additional categories, which involve stepping back and reflecting more broadly on the activist research endeavor: 5) contradictions and ambiguities; 6) institutional conditions. Far from exhaustive, this list of issues can only be evocative: of the good discussion and solid advances toward clarity, and of the many questions that remain to be worked through.

Ted began his summary with the observation that the workshop did not produce clear answers to the central questions: What is activist research? What kinds of projects qualify? This perhaps was both a weakness and a strength of our efforts. As the project moves forward and generates additional activities, there will be an increasing need for a definition or at least a further demarcation of the field. As part of this demarcation, we will need to position our conception of activist research more explicitly in relation to already existing parallel initiatives, which Davydd knows especially well, and on which he provided a wealth of information (for details, see the "Resources" section of this report). There was a strong sense, however, that to engage in definitional exercises early on would exert a deadening influence on an otherwise lively discussion; there may even be a causal relationship between this pre-mature move to definition, and the at times recipe-like formulations of activist research endeavors, which in turn contributes to their separation from more theoretically oriented social science. In any case, the discussion proceeded with the implicit assumption that each participant does "activist research" according to his or her understanding of the phrase; this allowed discussion to focus on interesting, troubling, or challenging elements within that understanding. The task ahead is to build inductively from these diverse papers and conversations, toward a shared notion of activist research, sufficiently bounded to allow it to become an object of collective effort, sufficiently open to keep always present the spirit of critical inquiry, so important to the success of this workshop.

1) formulation of the research topic
From the outset, and throughout, there was ample consensus that activist research involves a radically different process by which we formulate the research topic. At least two important elements come into play here. The first is a frank acknowledgement of the role of one's political analysis and commitments in this decision; a critique and rejection of the notion that social science research is, or could ever be, "value free." There was relatively little discussion of this point, perhaps reflecting the consensus of the group, and the strong currents of endorsement of this conclusion in various social science disciplines. Yet Samuel Martinez provided us with a forceful reminder that this stance, even in its more moderate ("social science as inter-subjective knowledge creation") form, is far from universally accepted, even within anthropology. From a different angle, Ted's summary emphasized the need for further work on this question: it is one thing to make the generalized observation that all research is politically positioned, and quite another to be able to describe or delimit the specific politics of activist research.

The second key element in the formulation of the research topic—quite apart from the specifics of political commitments—is the relationship between the researcher and an organized group of people in struggle. We benefited enormously here from the dialogue between Joao Vargas and Michael Zinzun, focused on how Joao came to work with CAPA, came (gradually) to gain the confidence of CAPA staff, and to have his anthropological research agenda grow out of that relationship. Ruthie's work introduced a variation on this theme, when activist research leads to the articulation of novel analytical positions (in this case the connection between prisons and environmental racism), which in turn gives rise to organizing efforts that had not existed previously. Jennifer Bickham-Mendez drew attention to yet another variation, in which work conditions of academia itself, more specifically, its dependence on low wage, racialized immigrant labor, create the context for activist research (in this case, with a living wage campaign on her campus). We agreed that it is very important to recount those stories, to make them a transparent and legitimated part of our account of our research methods.

This topic brought an issue of some complexity and controversy to the fore: what is the role of the researcher's social location (racial identity, gender, national origin and place of work, sexuality, class, etc. etc.) in the development of this activist research relationship? Discussion of this question started well beyond the elemental, and not especially helpful, distinction between "native" and "outsider," which often informs rigid proclamations that given line of analysis could only be pursued by a "native." Our starting point was to affirm that when the researcher forms part of the organized group in struggle, this matters deeply: not as a mechanical consequence of identity politics, but because this affects the process through which confidence and solidarity is forged, and, as both Ruthie and Ted affirmed in different ways, because under these conditions one tends to have, or develop, a special kind of deep and direct stakes in the research outcome. We also acknowledged that the very position of "researcher" (especially with an academic appointment) entails a certain socio-economic privilege, which applies and must be confronted analytically regardless of other affinities (e.g. common racial identity) that may exist. We made less progress, perhaps, in thinking through the implications that follow from the range of complex social locations, which form our points of departure. For example, we reflected briefly on how Davydd's practice of activist research would look different if it focused on marginalized people of color in the Americas rather than the relatively privileged white workers of Scandinavia and Europe; We thought through how, in Jennifer's case, family ties with Nicaraguans directly subject to the political processes she studies mediates race and class privilege. In general, a number of key questions surrounding this issue of social location and activist research were articulated, but did not receive systematic attention.

2) theory and analytical framework
The use and misuse of theory in relation to activist research was a constant theme that ran through the entire workshop discussion. Zinzun set the tone early on, as noted above, with an insistence on the close coupling of theory and practice. While the generalized endorsement of this point may have been easier said than done, it did clear the way for the subsequent question, which occupied much energy throughout: What kind of theory? What is our analytical frame? In response, it is only possible here to invoke a few prominent themes: Ruthie, in good geographer form, repeatedly brought us back to questions of scale, to importance of understanding social process as unfolding in a series of nested relations, from the local, outward. Zinzun gave a powerful example of this analytical approach in the recent history of CAPA organizing, which started with cockroaches (and CAPA efforts to eradicate them among low-income city dwellers) and ended with a blistering indictment of racial capitalism. This framing dovetailed with a central importance placed on transnational or globalized social process, present especially in Jennifer's research with maquila workers in Nicaragua, Sam's with race and grassroots organization across the Haiti-Dominican border, and Joao's exploration of transnational connections between black organizing in Rio and LA. It almost surely helped give coherence and focus to the workshop proceedings that all the participants came with a analytical frame that assigned central importance to issues of racial formation; we spent almost no energy on the all too familiar question ("does race matter"?), which in turn allowed much more time for analysis of how race matters. In this context, we thought through Ruthie's novel, parsimonious definition of racism—"conditions that lead to racially differentiated pre-mature death"—which in turn reiterates the importance of the analytical emphasis on scale.

An especially intense and productive discussion around theory and race politics arose in connection with Denise DaSilva's paper, which critically engages the underlying premises in widely circulating notions of "black emancipation." This paper was perhaps unique among the eight in that, while deeply motivated by critical reflections on past activist work, it was framed not around an ongoing dialogue with an organized group in struggle, but rather, as an intervention in efforts to theorize one such struggle. Our discussion critically probed this analysis, both the theoretical alternative it puts forth, and the politics of that alternative. This paper also served as a counterpoint of sorts to Charlie's, which proposed a central analytical distinction between "cultural critique" and "activist research." We needed to go much further, both substantively—coming to terms with Denise's critique—and in a programmatic sense—probing the relationship between theory in this register and the broader project of activist research. In any case, the discussion added a crucial element of critical reflection, which became important to our emerging inductive understanding of what activist research is, and could become.

3) research methods
Another theme that ran throughout the discussion, though in very different registers, took off from the much cited problem of the "master's tools": to what extent and in what way do research methods need to be transformed, in keeping with the broader objectives of activist research? The presentations of Joao and Ruthie raised this question most pointedly, by focusing on how activist research can bring about a transformation of consciousness among those who participate. In Joao's work, the transformation in question is a cultural and political identity as black, understood not as known endpoint, but as a continuous process of "becoming." Ruthie's activist research on prisons and environmental racism also brings about transformations in consciousness, as people work at the intersection of these two processes, and develop a deeper appreciation of the connections between them. Examples of transformations of this sort are present to varying degrees in all our work, almost inevitably, given that activist research involves active engagement with ongoing political processes. Even traditional research methods, which explicitly oppose or renounce such engagement, do have an impact on the "research subjects"—an impact on how they view themselves and the world around them. The difference is that activist research welcomes these transformations, and insists on making them the focus of our analysis. Yet this does open an enormously complex set of issues: how to track a process, whose content and direction we, as activist scholars, are directly involved in shaping? We barely began to confront this question. The tendency, even in activist research, is to attribute the transformations in question to the broader political process, and thereby minimize the specific role of one's research; while in general this inclination seems sound and appropriate (the opposite, to exaggerate the role of the researcher, would be much worse), it does lead us to defer this crucial methodological discussion.

The "masters tools" issue came up in other registers as well. We discussed the research methods that CAPA employs to advance its organizational goals, and found them to run the gamut from the creative, innovative use of video to explore issues of racial identity and politics, to what appear to be much more traditional methods, which document, track and analyze patterns of police abuse. The guarantee that the research connects with and advances a broader political vision appears to lie more with the organization, and with Zinzun's insistence on keeping theory tightly coupled with practice, rather than with the research methods per se. Ruthie and Sam, in different ways, also emphasized the need for activist research to make recourse to a wide range of methods, including some quite explicitly framed in the language of traditional social science (e.g. to document rights abuses, or to prove environmental toxicity). On the other side of this question, Jennifer's presentation forcefully brought forth a series of ethical-political concerns about the research process, that activist research must address in order to avoid outright hypocrisy: stubborn inequities between researcher and subject, additional more hidden inequities that make even "activist research" possible (the "who cleans your house and minds your children" questions), global political-economic relations in which any such research is embedded. These considerations brought us back again to the pressing need to develop different research tools, more consistent with the broader principles of the endeavor. When Joao stressed this point again in the concluding discussion, calling for research methods that seek to decolonize social science, and to embrace the "utopian" glimmer in the political struggles with which we are aligned, the group seemed to agree. Yet on this point too, our main achievement was to frame the issue, rather than to confront and work through the complexities that follow.

4) research products and their dissemination
Some examples of dissemination activist research came to the fore. As an activist organization CAPA places strong emphasis on research that makes a difference; each empirical or intellectual product fits clearly within the organization's plan for current or future work. Ruthie's research on prisons also yielded an excellent example of a widely disseminated product: a manual titled "how to stop a prison in your town," which emerged from collective research efforts, and will be used as an organizing tool. A close reading of the papers, and the projects on which they draw, would surely generate a longer list of these products.

Yet in general, we talked less about this crucial dimension of activist research than might have been expected. Perhaps this is because to do so would have required us to enter, in much greater detail, the particulars of each participant's work. One ingredient of the discussions that probably led to their overall success was that we remained focused, for the most part, on questions and problems of activist research common to us all, rather than empirical particulars, about which our knowledge is inevitably uneven.

Running through many or all of the presentations and discussions, there seemed to be an assumption that the efficacy of activist research could be demonstrated both in the "validity" of the results, and in the impact or usefulness of those results in the political process with which one is aligned. Davydd's paper made the first point most forcefully, arguing that appropriation by the subjects of research is a much more rigorous and reliable means of validation that those available in traditional social science methodologies. Ruthie argued, more generally, that activist research requires much greater attention to empirical precision and analytical care, because the stakes are so high. People's lives and welfare can be in the balance. Charlie argued in his paper that "political efficacy" is a crucial part of activist research, but that it is often not an appropriate or productive dimension to introduce into discussions in academic settings; in effect, Charlie argued, to carve out a space for activist research within academic institutions, the practice must be justified in traditional academic terms (although working for transformation in the way research is evaluated can be an important medium term goal). Ted returned to this issue in his summary, noting that we had not really confronted the central question head on: can and should we make the argument for activist research in intellectual terms? Does it make for "better" social science (and if so, how should the term "better" be employed)? Can we make a case in this way, while avoiding the trap of undue complicity with the "masters tools"? These questions remain on the agenda for future work. Finally, Ted also observed that pedagogy is a crucial facet of activist research, which we too often neglect.

5) contradictions and ambiguities
An exhaustive account of issues that fall under this category would take this summary beyond the bounds of its purpose and utility. We can only note a few brief illustrative examples, such as the "organized group of people in struggle" question. One of the common doubts raised about activist research is that in many situations that one may choose to study, there is no clearly congealed "organized group of people in struggle"; or no such group with whom the researcher would choose to be explicitly aligned; or, the mandate is not viable because the group itself is too ridden with internal conflict and hierarchy. This may mean that activist research methods are not appropriate for the topic at hand; it may mean that insufficient prior work has been carried out to establish the kind of alignment that activist research requires; it may mean, further, that activist research methods would direct one toward alignment with an emergent position, helping it more fully to take shape. In any case, the process of thinking through these (and other) possibilities would almost have to be an enormously productive analytical exercise for any researcher interested in political dimensions of the problem.

A related ambiguity, raised initially by John Tirman and echoed by Ted in his summary, has to do with research methodologies that do not involve intensive interactions with living groups of people. Is there such a thing as "activist historical research"? Our discussions were full of references to historical research that has inspired and helped to guide the activist research in which we are engaged—Ruthie's mention of Linebaugh's recent work (2000) comes to mind. We needed to probe this question further—perhaps beginning with the idea that historical research connects with activist research methods in certain phases (formulation of topic, dissemination of the results), but not in others (the "nuts and bolts" archival work).

A related contradiction has to do with the very assumption of "doing good" (as opposed to the traditional social science mandate to "do no harm"), which underlies much of the practice of activist research. Denise challenged Sam, and by extension, the entire group, to address the possible continuities between activist research and older forms of colonialist benevolence. The focus here is not on the researcher's intentions or explicit political principles, but rather, on unintended consequences, and broader processes to which research of this sort is inevitably articulated. How can we be sure that human rights documentation, for example, does not simply have the effect of adding to the archive available to those who would use the data for oppressive ends? Ted contributed an anecdote along these same lines: in Nicaragua during the 1980s, the US embassy library was full of well-used copies of the social science research that "activist scholars" had produced in support of the Nicaraguan revolution. A related challenge has to do with competing notions of "the good society": With what prerogative does the activist researcher intercede in this contention? What are the ethical-political consequences of politically aligned activist research, when one group's good society is another's nightmare?

Provoked especially by Jennifer's paper, we also talked a lot about the contradictions produced by doing activist research within a profoundly inequitable global political economy: how does one maintain a semblance of accountability to a particular organization or community when separated by physical space and relative privilege? A number of related questions follow, most of which were already noted above in the "methodology" section. One might add, even more pointedly, the contradiction between the austere setting in south central, where we held the workshop, and the much more luxurious conditions on Sunset Avenue, where most participants ate and slept.

The list certainly could and should go on. In some cases, concrete answers to pointed doubts and questions are required. But in general, the group's continued enthusiasm for activist research in the face of these ambiguities and contradictions seemed not to be grounded in a sense that fully satisfying answers would be forthcoming. Rather, the enthusiasm rested on two other observations: that traditional social science methods face a much more serious array of contradictions and ethical quandaries, which often go largely unacknowledged; and that to engage these contradictions is always productive and educational, although also, always without guarantees.

6) institutional conditions
Davydd inspired us to think systematically and critically about the history of the social science disciplines in which we have been trained, and to trace the processes through which activist commitments (or even, more modestly, commitments to producing socially useful knowledge) have been methodically forced outside their scope and mandate. He also laid out, in his paper and discussion, a scenario of deepening crisis of the social sciences, which forms part of broader transformations of higher education in the US and internationally. Ted picked up on this theme in his summary comments, and highlighted the implications of Davydd's argument, that this crisis could be read as opportunity for advocates of activist research. We did not pursue this issue, but it clearly merits further attention. Jennifer's discussion of the rise of "service learning" becomes relevant in this context, as does Denise's work to involve undergraduates in social justice research in urban areas surrounding UCSD.

At the same time many, including Davydd, expressed deep skepticism about the possibilities for change within the university, given entrenched interests and academia's great capacity to domesticate radical political challenge. Ted's phrase, the university as the "quintessential space of contestation," comes to mind: the implication is that such contestation is important, and yet, fundamentally contained, cycled into and appropriated by fundamentally conservative institutions. Since the participants work with a range of institutions, with broad similarities and important particular differences, it was difficult to push the specifics of this discussion further. There was, however, a fair amount of discussion of the University of Texas (spurred on by the fact that three of us hold positions there)—where modest institutional change favoring activist research appears to be underway. We need to carry out more analysis along these liens, drawing centrally on the wealth of information that Davydd has made available, of the "success stories" in the institutionalization of activist research (in some variant), and of these programs' achievements in the face of the constant threat of "domestication."

We talked also about the vulnerabilities of activist research within universities. Untenured professors face the possibility of punishing responses from the gatekeepers; the response, even in the very best of worlds, appears to be studied indifference. The more expansive goal of having activist research "count" as an enhancement in merit reviews, in some form, is next to inconceivable under current conditions. Another related vulnerability is the range of problems created by the sheer additional workload that activist research requires. The quotation at the beginning of this section captures a widely felt critique—the fact that commitments and energy related to activist research are often not compatible with the organization of work life in academia, and the distribution of rewards, in economic, political, and symbolic terms.

But the final line of that same epigraph also very much expresses the sense of group: with political will, energy, vision and strategy, institutional change that would create safe and legitimate space for activist research is possible. This concluding affirmation serves as a bridge to the following section of this report.

Part 3: Ideas for moving forward

We won't struggle for ya . . . but we will struggle wit'cha
—CAPA motto

• Papers posted and website discussion

We agreed to post the papers on a website, and to solicit comments from readers. The idea would be to generate a dialogue on each paper prior to publication. We could perhaps ask the person who commented in the workshop to kick off the process. We may want to consider publication of the comments (or some portion of them).

• Preparation and Publication of an Edited Volume

We agreed in principle to the idea of some sort of edited volume, although the precise form and content remains to be worked out. There was strong support for introducing innovative elements into this final product—a final section on resources, comments after each chapter, perhaps more collectively written papers that encompass the collaboration on which the activist research was based.

Charlie has agreed to take the first step toward this end, by sending each author comments, and working with the SSRC to get the paper up on a common website.

We almost certainly will need to complement the existing papers with a few more carefully selected and solicited contributions; this task has yet to be confronted.

• Activist Research Summer Institute

This idea caught the imagination of many: to create an educational setting, for two or three weeks, where students can learn about and discuss the practice of activist research. The idea remained incipient, with many questions to answer, but it appears to be a functional and exiting means to keep the process going.

• Activist Research Collective (ARC)

We tentatively agreed to create a "collective" that would serve as a network of activist scholars interested in continued work on these topics. The actual functions of this group remain to be defined, especially in relation to the many other ostensibly similar networks already in place. One key issue in this regard, as noted above, is whether the approach that we have begun to sketch out, through these papers and discussions, has unique elements in relation to other existing networks. If so, then the rationale for moving forward with the ARC will become much stronger.

• Creation of a ListServe and resource clearing house

This process has already begun. Davydd has set up a listserve through Cornell University, called: ARC-L@cornell.edu

We already have exchanged resources, with results that we report on in the fourth and final section.

Part 4: Resources

This section is still very much in construction. It will compile a bibliography of key sources, a of organizations that do activist research (in some variant), and other information. Hopefully it will grow and develop with the input from all.

{Geiger, 1986 #1161}
{Linebaugh, 2000 #1162}
{Whyte, 1997 #1163}
{Hall, 1982 #1165}

Black Radical Congress [?]
CAPA Videos
CAPA Manual against Police Abuse
Prisons manual


Action / Activist Research Networks

Southern Cross University: Bob Dick's AR resources: http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/gcm/ar/arhome.html

PARfem: A Cornell-based site built around a participatory action research/feminism effort that centered on a conference with Patricia Maguire: http://www.einaudi.cornell.edu/parfem/

Cornell Participatory Action Research Network: An organization and website, which will soon again include the PARchive, an online set of hundreds of hard to find AR materials that can be downloaded directly: http://www.einaudi.cornell.edu/cparn/

The Participation Project at the Institute for Development Studies, University of Sussex: Includes the Learning Participation Dialogue series, a set of ongoing online discussions of AR practice: http://www.ids.ac.uk/ids/particip/index.html

The Loka Institute: A repository of materials on democratic social change initiatives: http://www.loka.org/

The Institute for Community Research: A major organization for doing community-based participatory research in urban settings: http://www.incommunityresearch.org/about/about.htm

ALARPM (Action Learning, Action Research, and Participatory Management): The largest umbrella organization for international AR work, holds biennial world congresses on the subject, the next in Pretoria: http://www.alarpm.org.au/

Organizations to include in a network

Southern Cross University s AR program:
Cornell Participatory Action Research Network
The Participation Project at the Institute for Development Studies, University of Sussex
The Institute for Community Research
The Syracuse Social Movements Initiative
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
Michigan State University Action Research initiative

Institutionalized programs for Activist Research

Anthropology, UT at Austin http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/anthropology/activist/
Highlander Research and Education Center: http://www.highlandercenter.org/
AVANCSO in Guatemala
Society for the Study of Social Problems http://itc.utk.edu/sssp/
Center for Community Action and Research http://www.hbg.psu.edu/hbg/commaction.html
Anthropology, San Francisco State University (see Brooks and Knowles 1995:8-9)
Black Studies, Ohio State University (see Brooks and Knowles 1995:50)
Advancement Project (Activists Scholars Network) http://www.advancementproject.org/

Social justice organizations that conduct research

Act Now to Stop War and Racism (ANSWER): http://www.internationalanswer.org/news/update/030403m15intl.html

50 Years is Enough Network: http://www.50years.org

Global Exchange: http://www.globalexchange.org

International Forum on Globalization: http://www.ifg.org/

Preamble Center: http://www.workinglife.org/theygetcake/preamblec.html

Institute for Policy Studies: http://www.ips-dc.org/

Corporate Watch: http://www.corpwatch.org/trac/

Heinrich Boll Foundation (German foundation closely aligned with Germany's Green Party) http://www.boell.de/

Public Citizen http://www.citizen.org/pctrade/tradehome.html


Appendix

Invited Participants

1. João Costa Vargas—US and Brazil João Costa Vargas is Assistant Professor at the Center for African and African American Studies and Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas in Austin. His research specialties are race, politics, and social inequality, cultural studies, social theory; U.S., Brazil, and African Diaspora. His monograph, tentatively titled Blacks in the City of Angels will be published by the University of Minnesota Press early in 2003. His Ph.D. is from University of California, San Diego.

2. Jennifer Bickham-Mendez—US Jennifer Bickham-Mendez teaches in the Department of Sociology at the College of William and Mary. Her areas of interest include gender and work, globalization and transnationalism, social movements, Latin American/Hemispheric Studies. Her current research analyzes the political practices of a Nicaraguan women's labor organization, the topic of a monograph to be published by Duke University Press in 2003. Her Ph.D. in Sociology is from the University of California, Davis.

3. Davydd J. Greenwood—US Davydd Greenwood is Goldwin Smith Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. His research interests include participatory action research; industrial democracy; ethnicity and ethnic conflict; organizational culture; Spain: Basque Country, Salamanca, La Mancha. Among his recent publications are Industrial Democracy as Process: Participatory Action Research in the Fagor Cooperative Group of Mondragon, co-authored with Jose Luis Gonzalez, (1992); and Introduction to Action Research. Social Research for Social Change, co-authored with Morten Leven (1998). He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh.

4. Ruth Wilson Gilmore—US Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Among her research interests are race and gender, labor and social movements, uneven development, politics and culture, California, North America, and the African Diaspora. Her recent publications include Golden Gulag: Labor, Land, State, and Opposition in Globalizing California (forthcoming); "'You have dislodged a boulder': Mothers and Prisoners in the Post Keynesian California Landscape," Transforming Anthropology (1999). Gilmore received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University.

5. Edmund T. Gordon—US Edmund T. Gordon is Director of the Center for African and African American Studies and Associate Professor of Anthropology, both at the University of Texas at Austin. Previous to these positions he worked in various "activist research" capacities in Bluefields, Nicaragua (1981-90). His principal research interests include, racial formation and racism, Black masculinities, race and education, marine ecologies, theories of consciousness and resistance, and the politics of development in the Third World. He is author of Disparate Diasporas: Identity and Politics in an African-Nicaraguan Community (1998); and "Anthropology and Liberation," In F. Harrison (ed.) Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving further toward an Anthropology of Liberation (1991), among numerous other works.

6. Dani W. Nabudere—Uganda Dani W. Nabudere is Director of the Africa Study Centre at Mbale, Uganda, and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at the Islamic University in Uganda, Mbale. He qualified as a barrister at Lincoln's Inn in London, and later practiced law as Advocate of the High Court of Uganda and the Eastern Court of Appeal. This year he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is engaged in research on globalization and agro-pastoralist violence in North-Eastern Uganda. Prof. Nabudere writes frequently for the Ugandan and international press. His research interests include international relations, study of African civilizations, sociology, anthropology, and Islamic studies. Among his many publications are: The Political Economy of Imperialism (1977), Essays in the Theory and Practice of Imperialism (1978), Imperialism and Revolution in Uganda (1980), Democracy and the Once Party State in Africa (1989), The Crash of International Finance Capital (1989), The Impact of East-West Rapprochement on Africa (1994), Africa in the New Millennium: Towards a Post-traditional Renaissance (forthcoming).

7. Samuel Martinez—US Samuel Martinez, of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut and a GSC Professional Fellow, is a Cuban-born ethnologist. He obtained his Ph.D. and M.A. in social and cultural anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He specializes in the study of migration within the Caribbean region, labor and minority rights, and democratization. Through a book, Peripheral Migrants (1996) and articles, based on fieldwork in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Dr. Martinez has considered how the survival dilemmas confronted by many of Haiti's rural poor seemingly leave them little choice but to accept dangerous, badly-remunerated work, under appalling conditions, including denial of basic liberties of mobility and association. His current project, entitled "Race and Poverty in the Human Rights Agenda and Practice of International and Domestic (Hatian-Dominican) Non-Governmental Organizations," expands on this concern by bringing into critical scrutiny the writings of northern human rights monitors, journalists and social scientists about Haitians in the Dominican Republic.

8. Charles Hale—US Charles Hale is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Associate Director of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, both at the University of Texas, Austin. Previously he taught at the University of California, Davis. His research interests include social movements, indigenous culture and politics, race and racism, and activist research methods, with a focus on Latin America. His recent publications include: Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 1894-1987 (1994), and Racismo en Guatemala? Abriendo Debate sobre un Tema Tabú (1999, co-ed.); and Memorias del Mestizaje: Cultura y Política en Centroamérica, 1920 al Presente (forthcoming, co-ed).

9. Denise da Silva—US and Brazil Denise da Silva is Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California San Diego. Previously, she worked at the Centro de Estudos Afro-Asiaticos of the Universidade Candido Mendes in Rio de Janeiro. Her current work combines recent contributions to the critical theorizing of social and global processes (feminist, postcolonial, queer, critical race theory, and critical legal theory). Dr. da Silva has published several scholarly works including, "Voicing 'Resistance': Race and Nation in the Mapping of the Modern Global Space" in Eliezer Ben Rafael (ed), Identity, Culture, and Globalization (2001); "Toward a Critique of the Socio-Logos of Justice: The Analytics of Raciality and the Production of Universality" Social Identities (7) 3 (2001); Race & Nation in the Mapping of the Modern Global Space: A Critique of Sociology of Race Relations, (forthcoming).