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Reviewed by:
  • Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship
  • Josiah McC. Heyman (bio)
Charles R. Hale , ed. Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008. 417 pp. Paper, $34.95.

Engaging Contradictions addresses collaborative research with communities, mainly for social justice ends. It centers on advocating for work of this sort, by contrast with conventional noncollaborative academic practices, whether critical of social arrangements or not. Though weighted somewhat toward anthropology, it includes several other fields—ethnic studies, American studies, economics, geography, and sociology. It is valuable for both penetrating insights and revealing case studies, though (as with most edited works) it is uneven. I have read and reread parts of it often.

Themes that extend across the volume include, not surprisingly, a reconsideration of the objective/subjective distinction, arguing that such a distinction is not simple and neat, perhaps not even useful, and [End Page 270] that explicit value orientations are honest and helpful in the social sciences. The authors challenge the standard power hierarchy of the social scientist coming into a field site to seize data with at best passive consent of "subjects"; the alternative developed in this book is a more equitable relationship in which research goals and designs, and use of data, emerge through dialogues between thinkers-actors, some being community members and some being social scientists. The authors are often sharply critical of would-be academic radicalism for being unconnected to actual social struggles, producing instead commodified "critical" writing ("'luxury' knowledge production," in Hale's words, 16). The book is only intermittently attentive to actual challenges and contradictions in engaged scholarship, as indicated by the title; more such work is needed.

Hale's introductory essay is of great importance. He particularly tackles the question of whether engaged research is scientifically poorer than arm's length research. As he points out, the learning process may well be richer because of the mutual confidence and extended interaction with community collaborators, and the challenge of praxis in the world often makes for strong tests of our research analyses and models. He argues that engaged research can make good use of scientific standards and methods. (He also critiques the deceptive idealization of perfect objectivist science.)

Hale's other agenda is to delineate the alternative power relations in engaged research, which at one point he characterizes as the equitable returns model of academic work, by contrast with the maximum output model. He considers some of the challenges of institutionalizing this alternative social arrangement in universities, and more generally he acknowledges the difficult balances and contradictions of activist scholarship throughout his review of the field. One covert theme, however, deserves to be brought to the surface: Hale in particular, and more inconsistently the other authors, tends to view activist scholarship merely as community-based research. Research, as in the creation of new knowledge, is only one scholarly capability and practice, however.

Turning now to the case study chapters, Gilmore's addresses prisoner/ prison community activism in California. She brings in Terry McGee's elevation of the Malay word desakota to describe communities as multi-locational networks of people and issues. Her chapter is a fascinating study of an activist movement, often sharply insightful about [End Page 271] the importance of knowledge in political struggle, and she mentions roles of some students and scholars, but there is little about the concrete process of academic-activist engagement. Nabudere's chapter, by contrast, is largely about constructing an institutional framework for a new kind of scholarship, community-based schools (including a research component), and most recently a university on the same model. His study addresses the important process of decolonizing knowledge in post-colonial educational systems, specifically in Africa.

Lipsitz broadly follows Hale in directing his critique toward the reified division between distant, objective science and passive community. He points historically and in the present day to the positive value in bridging this divide. An interesting side to his exposition is his emphasizing that activists will also need to change and move to meet the academic side as well as the other direction. We are left to wonder how this happens, and how often. Pierre...

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