Activist-Scholarship as Method: Re-Thinking Knowledge Production, Community-based Sociality, and Liberatory Futurities

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel examines activist-scholarship, or community-centered research, as method. In the midst of imperial violence, ongoing colonialism hidden as commonwealth, new appeals to Manifest Destiny, neoliberal modes of capitalism, and deepening economic and environmental precarity, community-based activists have been forced to rethink their approaches to political organizing and scholars to their research relationships with organizers. This panel examines academic-organizer models for co-creating the change we envision for emancipatory life and material conditions in different spaces. Melanie Brazzell and Tash Nguyen reflect on an ongoing scholar-practitioner collaboration with Restore Oakland Inc (ROI), a Black, Indigenous, and people of color-centered organization that advocates for restorative and economic justice. Their participatory action research project built the organization's "structuring capacity," or its ability to architect its power and its people towards greater impact on health and justice issues in the Bay Area. Their project examines ROI's unique healing justice methodology that enables the organization to organize both for health outcomes as the ends (e.g, improved funding for mental health services), and through health practices (like circle-keeping) as the means. Gaye Theresa Johnson engages the unique issue areas faced by organizers and social justice organizations in non-urban areas, whose organizing models are often distinct from those of urban areas. Recounting the creation of the Central Coast Social Justice Academy in California, Johnson reflects on what it has meant to support community organizing efforts in the region and to enhance movement-building skills, leadership, and local networks in a time of great peril for the base. Diane C. Fujino explores the model of activist-scholarship developed by scholars and community organizing working together in the Organizing Knowledge Project (OKP). Arising from questions posed by organizers, OKP’s collective research projects analyze how power works in the housing and agricultural industries in predominantly Latinx and Indigenous communities in California’s Central Coast. The project utilizes GIS mapping to examine who owns what and interviews with tenants and farmworkers to reveal the unique geographies (both suburban/urban and rural), mobilization of power, and social movement building on the Central Coast. In addition, Fujino explores the development of a solidarity campaign between Lajas and San German, Puerto Rico, and Santa Barbara, California, centered on turning spaces of abandoned school sites into community building and mutual aid in the midst of US administrative rule in Puerto Rico. Together, the panel reflects on the challenges and opportunities of collaboration between political movement organizations and academic researchers: the risks and rewards of trying to measure intangibles like power and healing and how social movement and power-oriented research with organizational leaders differs from participatory action research with more vaguely boundaried communities. We shine light on political organizing and collaborative research, rooted in relationships of sociality and trust, and aimed at creating emancipatory futures in the face of precarity, war, and dying and renewed appeals to empire.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• How to architect healing justice? Reflections from an organizational design experiment with Restore Oakland - Melanie Brazzell, Harvard University

• Movement Work and Healing Justice: Building the Base in Non-Urban Spaces - Gaye Theresa Johnson, University of California-Los Angeles

• Organizing Knowledge: Analyzing Power in Housing and Agriculture, and Reflections on Activist-Scholarship as Method - Diane Fujino, University of California-Santa Barbara

Chair

• Diane Fujino, University of California-Santa Barbara

Biographical Information

Melanie Brazzell (they) is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Civic Power Lab and Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, where they are continuing their participatory research on movement organizational structure, "Building Democratic Structure Shapes." They are currently turning their dissertation into a book on the pasts, presents, and futures of the movement for transformative justice for gender-based violence. Melanie’s participatory research, community engagement, and movement support are housed within the “What Really Makes Us Safe?” Project and draw upon their involvement in the abolitionist feminist movement for over twenty years in both the U.S. and Germany. Most recently, they published a report with Interrupting Criminalization about transnational transformative justice. Tash Nguyen (they/she) is a queer community organizer and circlekeeper working to build racial and economic justice. For over 10 years, they’ve been organizing to decarcerate jails, halt jail expansions, and redirect resources out of carceral budgets and into life-affirming community solutions. Tash is trained in restorative justice, mediation, and various conflict resolution techniques. They believe that we must practice cultivating skills that move beyond punishment if we are to meaningfully break cycles of violence and create a world rooted in shared prosperity. Tash was born and raised in the Bay as a child of Vietnamese refugees. Their dedication to resisting systems of domination is fueled by the deep ties she has in her community and her broader vision of liberation. They love noodles, backpacking, and nerding out over music and poetry.

Gaye Theresa Johnson is Associate Professor in the Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies, and Associate Director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. A historian of freedom struggles and cultural politics who is deeply invested in social justice movements, Johnson is an award-winning scholar and teacher with an international profile in studies of Black radicalism, Chicana/o cultural politics, and expressive culture. Johnson is the author of Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement (UC Press, 2013); Futures of Black Radicalism, co-edited with Alexander Lubin and published with Verso Press in 2017; and Rings of Dissent: Boxing and Performances of Rebellion, which is forthcoming with University of Illinois Press June 2025. She is an advocate, facilitator, and healing justice trainer for grassroots organizations and foundations, primarily in movement base-building, reproductive justice, arts activism, and secondary school social justice teaching.

Diane C. Fujino is professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the immediate past co-editor of the Journal of Asian American Studies. Her research explores Asian American activism, Black Power studies, Afro-Asian solidarities, and Third World internationalism. She is author or co-editor of several books including: Contemporary Asian American Activism: Building Movements for Liberation (2020); Black Power Afterlives: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party (2020); Nisei Radicals: The Feminist Poetics and Transformative Ministry of Mitsuye Yamada and Michael Yasutake (2022); Samurai among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life (2012); Wicked Theory, Naked Practice: A Fred Ho Reader (2009); and Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama (2005); as well as an special issue of Amerasia Journal on Asian American activism studies (2019). She has long worked on community-based praxis projects, including as co-PI of the Organizing Knowledge Project and with the Cedric J. and Elizabeth P. Robinson Archival Project. Her commitment to ethnic studies includes co-writing chapters for the UCLA Asian American Studies’ multimedia textbook, being core faculty with ÉXITO at UCSB to develop future ethnic studies educators and provide resources for current teachers, and as a core member of Ethnic Studies Now! Santa Barbara. Her work and ideas have been featured in media outlets, including the New York Times, NPR, Democracy Now!, Rafu Shimpo, and Discover Nikkei. She is currently working on two research projects that uncover the violence of erasure of Asian American activism by recovering radicalism in two historical periods: the early Cold War against the turning of Japanese Americans into model minorities and the anti-imperialist internationalism of the 1960s-70s.