Proposal Newsletter:

"Activist research: practice(s) to challenge the investigaction"

The European guide for social transformation would like to realize a newsletter around this subject "Activist research: practice(s) to challenge the investigaction" and for this purpose we do propose you to participate developing a reflection or sending us a paper that you have already develop around this subject.

Activist research, a definition's tentative:

The period of effervescence of social mobilization that we are passing through is accompanied -most distinctively in Europe and Latin America- by the proliferation of experiences with multiple trajectories that emerge form the intersection of political action and investigation, and that we could frame as ‘activist research'. With this contribution we would like to bring into consideration a series of elements [and invite to their exploration], that ‘swarm' around what could be understood as activist research. It is far from our intention to give a closed definition or to present what we believe is -or should be- activist research:

"Research from the action” conducted by movements for social transformation. Research implied by the needs, directly or indirectly expressed by the social movements and excluded sectors of the population. Research carried out from the own situation, that is, from the own experience, choosing for a strategy of partiality from below. Nomadic and travelling research, adapting to changes.
Research towards action for a critical transformation of the present reality. Research that pursues the creation of a knowledge that is valued for its practical effectiveness in generating changes, as opposed to an objective and contemplative theoretical knowledge in the traditional academic fashion; knowledge that gives visibility to conflicts that can then be added, like another element, to social mobilization; knowledge that generates and maximizes action; a knowledge that transforms reality when generating a new reality, and whose fruits serve the process of constituting new antagonistic subjectivities.
Research springing from the relation between the subject-investigator (the investigator as subject) and the subject-investigated in a composition process... Non-instrumentalist research; investigation without an ‘object'; rather than treating the social movements like objects of investigation, they –as well as the investigator- are subjects in a process in which everybody is left reconstituted. It is not ‘about' Social Movements; rather it is from and for Social Movements but in immanence, that is, rather than locating it-self on a position already codified, it produces the terms of the situation.
Research that generates free, public, inclusive, common and non-discriminatory knowledge for universal use, without property, copyright or under mercantilist aims; in accessible formats and of agile diffusion. It denounces the merchandising and privatization of knowledge as one of the causes of social exclusion.
The principles under which it is organized are: decentralization, horizontality, autonomy and the will for coordination and cooperation.

As we may notice the approach about what could be understood as activist research "activist research" is quite large and inclusive, nevertheless this newsletter will try to focus in still enlarging, activating and challenging this concept and confronting to its actual reality world wide. For those reasons we do list these questions/fields for the development of this newsletter:

- The origins of the "activist research" and its links with other methodologies of investigation: like the French "recherche action", the Italian "con-ricerca", the Latin-American "action participant investigation" for example.

How does those "schools" of methodologies focused on the investigation of social, cultural, economic and political issues do related and influenced one to another? Where are the links and the differences? How did they have been inspiring each one and shaping new forms of investigating with and about social dynamics and movements?
This reflection should focus in the practical description of the nature of those methodologies and try to investigate how the history and past of the groups developing those methodologies has been influencing nowadays concepts.

- Actual practical experiences of activist research.

Who do what, where, with whom and how do they realize activist research? What are the limits and challenges of their research? Problematic, hypothesis, difficulties, results, spread of the results, proposals, methodologies etc. This first proposal to map contemporary "activist research" could perhaps help us to determine in which camps/fields this "activist research" is being more active? (For example: urban social movements, media-activist FLOSS camp, inside the ESF processes, etc???)

- The legitimacy of activist research for the social movements /and for the academic search world:

What is legitimacy when we do research? Is it a social acceptance of the public utility of our research? Is it to get resources to make possible those researches? Is it recognition (professional, human, etc) by other colleagues making research? Is it a mix of all that? Or perhaps is the legitimacy an updated concept that just reveals a degree of acceptance of the utility of what we are searching by conventional institutions involved in the reproduction of social injustices? Do we still care to be legitimate? Is that concept still related to the possibility to make useful research?
Those questions would be focused essentially with real situations and experiences. In this case we would like to compile narratives and articles of people that have something to tell about this precise question, or related to the social movements or with the academic world.

- The gap between academic/traditional research and activist research:

I in this part we would like to have contributions related to point the essential differences between one world and another, the respective limits and challenges to make research from the academy or from social movements and try to develop some proposals of criteria and protocol to help to flexibleness and get more active the exchanges of information and knowledge between actors from those different spaces.
In a sense, the traditional limitations of searchers inside academic and institutionalized places like their liberty to move around, to make a research from their own subjectivity and the capacity to get arid from traditional hierarchy inside the academic, are great arguments to try to get out investigation from universities and begin to make activist research with, by and from social movements; but in the other hand, those kinds of dynamics are also subject to serious inconvenient such as lack of material and human resources, lack of visibility and legitimacy inside the searching movements, difficulties to unify your activist subjectivity with your searching identity. Sometimes those two personal inscriptions just don't work fine together and gets you to have greats problems with your own on going subjective identity, and with the rest of groups you are involved with (for social movements activist you are not enough “active” and for searchers in academic places you are too much “active”).
R elated to this last point, we would like to involve searchers inside academic places (working on social movements) to reflect about their own practices and their definition and perception of what is activist research. Those contributions could perhaps be managed to develop some dialogs around those subjects.

Deadline for contributions: 15 May
Send it to: info@euromovements.info

The Newsletter will be broadly spread through social movements and/or activist research e-list, posted on the web www.euromovements.info , and send to the contributors

CARTOGRAPHY ON THE INTERSECTION OF POLITICAL ACTION AND INVESTIGATION: 

The Action Research Network in Europe is building a directory on activist research groups, experiences and resources. If you would like to contribute to it, please send information on collectives and experiences of activist research to include at directory@euromovements.info .

We are also developing a map of clusters of experiences around points of gravity in the interaction between political action and investigation, such as:
The experiences on collective production and creative common (Conresearch and research for and by social movements); “intellectuals” movement's role and academivism searches. The directory and the cartography will be accessible online at this website.