About

Concept

In the recent era of Black Lives Matter, the “wall” against Latinx peoples in the U.S. or barriers against migrants elsewhere, renewed attacks on people of Asian ancestry—and, in a general and longer vista, the buildup of concerns for racial, ethnic, indigenous, immigrant, and non-binary gendered people as well as for economic precarity and many other walks of non-privileged life—what should, or can, research be to mold “scholar activism,” “applied research,” “research impact,” or “community engagement” to today’s activism trying to change society?

In turn how is activism reshaped by today’s research, including new digital and networked methods? What are the traditions, innovations, and problems of blended research activism—in higher education and other organizations (community, NGO, arts, etc.)? How do different disciplines theorize and practice such work? And how does the U.S. compare to other national or regional research frameworks in this regard?

These are questions posed by our Research + Activism Bibliography, part of the Antiracism Initiative that our UC Santa Barbara English Department started in 2020-21 in answer to a call for such intiatiaves by our university’s Humanities & Fine Arts Division. In our immediate context, we wanted to know how new paradigms of research + activism can be integrated in university hiring, promotion, governance, curricula, student outreach and recruitment, public communications, and funding development.

But as we worked, it became clear that the scope of opportunities and concerns about “research + activism” is much wider than any one kind of institution or domain of society.

How wide should the scope of our bibliography be? We focus on the intersection marked by the plus sign (“+“) at the intersection of research + activism. We don’t intend to collect works that are only research (even if about activism) or only activism. Those are different projects. Our goal is a conceptual map of the between zone—unstable as it may be in organizational, disciplinary, methodological, sociopolitical, cultural, and other dimensions—where research and activism mix, and in so doing mix up how we think about the relations (just as one example) between a scholar-activist conducting research in a university and a community activist group pursuing investigative research.

The following principles define our bibliography’s scope. We phrase them in the form of the cascading series of questions and issues we posed to ourselves when testing if a work should be added:

Bibliography Organization (Tags Scheme)

How do we organize our bibliography? We’ve put a lot of thought into making an organized classification of entities and their relationships—e.g., causes, issues, movements, concepts, disciplines, geopolitical areas, methods, theories, organizations, and social groups. It’s a complex, evolving mesh we want to weave between the actors and objects of research + activism (each such entity corresponding to a different page of citations in our bibliography). We seek a sensible scheme of labeling and classifying that mediates between free-tagging (which runs the risk of chaos and insensitivity in naming causes, social groups, and other entities) and an overly rigid “controlled vocabulary” of the who, what, when, where, when, and how of research + activism.

So we created a partially formalized “ontology” or system of “tags” for citations in our bibliography—an evolving (not yet fully defined) controlled vocabulary that grows and flexes. (As Wikipedia defines, “In computer science and information science, an ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming and definition of the categories, properties and relations between the concepts, data and entities that substantiate one, many, or all domains of discourse. More simply, an ontology is a way of showing the properties of a subject area and how they are related, by defining a set of concepts and categories that represent the subject.”)

Specifically, we created a partial implementation of an ontology in the Semantic Web‘s OWL (Web Ontology Language). It is “partial” because at present we are concentrating only on tagging citations as OWL “property” classes (think of them as categories of things that can be named in nouns) and not developing the “relationships” that semantically define how properties interrelate (e.g., the fact that an “event” can be relationally “part of” a social “cause”). Keeping the syntax of our ontology incomplete at present is how we are keeping it open to rapid, agile change. We can add or revise classes of citations without needing to adjust the fine grain of their relations. In the future, we hope that our project or others can take the start we have made on a research + activism ontology and develop it into a full-scale ontology with defined relationships between properties. (We use the Protégé ontology tool, in its online WebProtégé version, to manage our ontology.)

Technology Infrastructure

The specific research infrastructure we use to create the Research + Activism Bibliography includes Zotero (the base platform and tool we use to collect, store, and organize our bibliography); WordPress (the content management system we use to present our bibliography online in a form allowing for more narration and organization than Zotero’s native online interface); and Katie Seaborn’s Zotpress plugin for WordPress (which we use to automate pulling in citations from Zotero into WordPress through filtering by tags).

We also acknowledge that our project in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is sited on unceded Chumash land and waters (more info). This is a foundational “infrastructure” or “platform.” Recognizing this is part of the ethos of our research + activism project.