Research for Justice and Multi-Issue Movement-Building

• In Event: 63.034 - Research for Justice: Challenging Discriminatory Policing, School Closures, and Youth Unemployment

Abstract

This philosophical paper analyzes the conception of research for justice that emerges from the conferences and papers comprising the journal special issues and explores its relation to traditions of education as a practice of freedom (Freire and Horton, 19XX). It engages with the discussions, art and creative activities, and explorations of the praxis of studying across, with, and beside communities organizing for equity and justice as they interconnect struggles around education, policing and criminal justice, employment, immigration, and voting rights. Engaged scholarship linked to public schooling (K-12 and higher education) and public education projects grounded in the resistance and transformation of aggrieved communities can be fulcrums that leverage struggles against structural violence and they can also be contested spaces that permit creative, democratic and even radical possibility across sectors.
Because single sector research betrays the complexity of today’s “wicked” problems, activist scholars studing the interconnected circuits of dispossession and possibility can more fully support the social policy and organizing campaigns to reclaim and reconfigure the public sphere. The siloed academy and its disciplines and dominant modes of knowledge production and mobilization must also be sites of struggle over curriculum, access and reward structures, and warrants of epistemic validity and ethical responsibility and accountability themselves. The paper argues that transformed academic communities of practice can sustain public scholarship and the formation of activist-community-university coalitions to impact substantive change. Many are working to create such empirical and political linkages to bring a renewed democratic and liberatory perspective to education and public schooling.
Yet such research for justice actually runs counter to core US higher education institutional commitments. For example, universities are committed to disinterested scholarship that remains neutral in the public sphere, which is offered in exchange for noninterference from state and church, protecting academic freedom in the academy. Facts are meant to more or less speak for themselves, and to be separate from value, except when no longer research and taken up in advocating for this or that particular policy. Scholars, it is presumed, stay out of the fray, objective, seeing multiple sides, and let a rational and democratically deliberative policy process work their way toward the best solution to social problems. Related sets of issues arise within higher education traditions of research ethics, which separate ethical and epistemic realms, and elide the ongoing fraught negotiated ethical realities of research, whether or not collaborative and community based.
This paper explores an alternative vision of research for justice geared into the active struggles to renew, heal, and transform aggrieved communities, and geared into the ongoing struggles to contest the epistemic injustices that plague the academy and deprive aggrieved communities of the critical knowledge they need to effectively intervene in and transform oppressive realities (Fricker, 2009). It situates research for justice within possibilities for creating emergent scholarly communities of practice that can insure that knowledge production mobilizes the power to make change by mobilizing and organizing aggrieved communities, students, teachers, and others to make a more progressive school and community possible.

Authors

• Ronald David Glass, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Brett Stoudt, City College of New York - CUNY