Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Activism, Ethnography, and the Political ed. by Jeffrey S. Juris, Alex Khasnabish (review)

Insurgent Encounters is one of those books that found me—somewhat by accident—and left me with more, as artist Jon J. Muth has reputedly said. Out of several possibilities of books I could review for the journal, I was assigned the review of this collection, which I had originally considered the least favorite of the options. I was quite wrong, it turns out. Juris and Khasnabish have edited an insightful book, one that features entertaining snapshots at times and offers room for theoretical sophistication that advances the study of social movements. Insurgent Encounters has the potential to inspire students and seasoned scholars alike, but above all, and also because of this, it is an important book. It is important because all contributors manage to create tangible accounts of what activist scholarship can look like in ways that illustrate that activist scholarship does not have to compromise either activism or scholarship. Indeed there exists a real (third) option that such an endeavor can be enormously enriching.

Space does not allow me the in-depth review of each of the individual 14 chapters, plus editors’ introduction and conclusion, which are split into four parts, so I will focus on a broader view instead.

The book itself is the product of an engaging discourse that has spanned many interlocutors inside and outside the academy but originally focused around two poles at Northeastern University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. This may be a guidepost for readers familiar with this intellectual landscape.

The introduction by Juris and Khasnabish functions as the intellectual guide for the whole book, and the editors are to be applauded for having created an equally dense and concise, while quite accessible, overview of the ideas that one should be looking out for when reading through the contributions. The overview is itself already a toolbox for creating innovative ethnographic itineraries.

The first part, Emerging Subjectivities, which features the editors’ own contributions, obtains its quality of freshness from delivering a feeling of what situatedness in the field means for an ethnographer who cannot but acknowledge the political stakes of his/her work being reflected in the subject he/she observes— himself/herself included. The point is that the subjectivities so emerging are precisely those of the reflective activist ethnographer who not only observes but serves as an example of what reflection can affect politically to those he/she studies. Thus, I think, a major lesson of this book is that ethnography can become the very Subversive Technology that is addressed in the fourth and final part.

It is, however, the second part on Discrepant Paradigms that could make or break—and in this case, makes—the book a contribution of true scholarly value. The book’s scholastic value is not only due to the fact that it serves to introduce a clever take on the concept of the “paradigm,” which enables us to think with it (to adopt Marilyn Strathern’s vocabulary) about the interrelation of local-global knowledge in innovative ways, but, more importantly, because it offers reflections on the dangers of the practice of activist scholarship, for example in an insightful essay by David Hess. While Hess is probably the most cautious and cautionary of the contributors, his voice is, precisely because of his careful attitude, an important addition to the very forceful writing of most of the other authors; his voice is one that the editors are clearly receiving, as their introduction and conclusion show, to balance the many vibrant movements that they bookend between Insurgent Ethnography’s covers.

The third part is aptly titled Transformational Knowledges, describing very much the experience that readers of this book will have. Insurgent Encounters works because it presents not merely accounts of transformational experiences and lifeless analyses of social transformations, but also paradigm changes in our knowledge of social movements. The...