Social Science Research Council

CONVERSATIONS ON DISPLACEMENT AND COLLABORATION: AN ACTIVISTS' RESPONSE
By Sophia Woodman

I really appreciated your very thoughtful and thought-provoking piece. My only quibble with it is that you seem to assume that all GSC fellows face the same set of dilemmas and are being displaced in a similar direction. From my point of view, the direction and engagement are rather different.

As a "practitioner" (I don't even identify with that word, I call myself an "activist") encountering academic discourse and concerns, I personally felt quite alienated at times during the Belfast fellows' conference. The perspective of activists was rather neglected and "invisible," but of course I was part of a tiny minority among the fellows and grantees. Most of the discussion focused on scholars' approaches to skills and audiences of research and the assumption appeared to be that the methodologies adopted by the academy should apply to all of us; in other words, "practitioners" ought to learn to work like academics if they were going to fit into the program.

Jibrin Ibrahim brought up the issue of how activist organizations deal with the demands of scholars for information. But what about how academics view research by NGOs? In the China field, I often marvel at how academics claim so much from a tiny amount of data (of course interwoven with all kinds of jargon and engagement with the latest theories), but many do not even bother to read the research put out by human rights NGOs because they assume that it is not "rigorous." These attitudes may not be the same everywhere, as they are partly a function of the polarized nature of discussion on China and the way human rights groups are shut out of the country.

The questions you raise about the representativeness of NGOs and the dominance of donor funding in setting the agenda are very important. Why is the idea that NGOs should be politically neutral accepted so unquestioningly? Depoliticizing issues like human rights, the systematic exclusion of the poor, the invisibility of certain populations and issues seems to me a recipe for ensuring that all the work of NGOs will be only a band aid, and will not disturb the established order.

Sophia Woodman is a GSC professional fellow and a visiting scholar at the Center for Comparative and Public Law at the University of Hong Kong. Her project is entitled "The Impact of The Lack of Systematic Human Rights Monitoring in China on Internationally Funded Legal Reform Programs." She is currently researching international assistance to legal reform in China as a strategy for improving human rights conditions. Prior to beginning her research project, for 10 years she worked at the NGO Human Rights in China as research director and editor of the journal China Rights Forum.