Principles

Concept

“Research + Activism” refers to the past and present convergence of research work and activist, advocacy, or other public work, including in the wake of recent social justice movements. Now and in the past, researchers want even “pure” research to make a difference; and activists have needed to research to help guide initiatives and policies, or help make them persuasive.

What are the traditions, innovations, and problems of mixed research and activism? How do different research disciplines and fields, whether in universities and think tanks or many other kinds of organizations, practice activism? How do activists conduct or draw on research? How is mixed research and activism accommodated in today’s antiracism initiatives, research and product strategies, and hiring and promotion policies? And how does the U.S. compare to other national or regional research frameworks in this regard?

The specific research instrument we are creating to understand the present landscape of research + activism is an online, public bibliography. Making a bibliography for a rapidly evolving area is exciting because it requires both basic research (in this case, about practices, theories, policies, and examples  of research + activism) and high-level synthetic thought (in this case, to develop a taxonomic ontology of research + activism [see Tags]). The conceptual map of a field represented by a well-done, public bibliography—especially if accompanied by conceptual principles—can help those doing research for activism, or engaging with activism in research, share resources, methods, and goals.

Scope

The Research + Activism Bibliography concentrates on citations for works, projects, and organizations in the zone marked by the plus sign (+) at the intersection of research + activism. The project team behind the bibliography followed these principles of inclusion:

Principle of focus: The litmus tests for deciding whether to include works are as follows:

• Does the work discuss, or is it about, research + activism? For example, discussions about “scholar activism” or university policy statements regarding freedom of speech in actrivist research clearly belong in the bibliography because they are “meta”-discussions of the topic. Also, works that are primarily about an applied topic (e.g., an essayon the Watts Riots of 1965 in Los Angeles) but that also contain discussion or theory about research + activism (e.g., a section reflecting on the problems scholars faced in interviewing citizens involved in the event) also belong in thebibliography.
  • If the work does not meet the conditions of the above test, then it could also be included iif it meets the tests of these questions:
    • Is it clear from a work’s content, context, tone, or other indicators that, as research, it is part of an individual or collective activist agenda (e.g., is part of anti-racism or environmental justice movements in scholarship today)? An example is  Leon Litwack’s scholarship ( see New York Times obituary).
    • Or, is it clear that the work or project, as activism, also has a scholarly research goal (e.g., is not only a direct activism statement, manifesto, demand, etc.).
• Limit Cases
  • One limit case are works that are mainly pure scholarship about activism or activists. Consider, for instance, a hypothetical book that is a study of historical events in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, or another hypothetical book about American fiction influenced by that movement. Imagine that in looking at these books’ abstracts or introductions, we see no evidence of any explicit discussion of R + A that meets the criteria set forth in the above tests. Then, the decision on whether to include it in our bibliography must be a judgement call. Our judgement can be based on what we learn from the context in which we discovered the work (e.g., the fact that other works we collected often cite the work), from book reviews, from biographies of the scholar (e.g., looking at a bio page and seeing that the scholar is in some way identified with activism), etc.

Another limit case concerns journalism. In general, we are not collecting journalistic newspaper or magazine articles. However, substantial longform journalistic works might be included. Also, “public intellectual” publications or op-eds by scholars in mainstream newspapers/magazines or academic newspapers (e.g., Chronicle of Higher Education) could be included.

Yet another limit case concerns what to collect related to what librarians call a “corporate entity” (an organization, project, initiative, etc.). In the case of a project related to R + A, for example, we would collect the home page of the project. But what else from the project site, if anything, should we collect? That would be a judgement call.

In difficult cases, members of our research team should feel free over Slack to ask for an opinion from the rest of the team about whether a work belongs in our bibliography. (Consultation can be especially useful at the beginning of our project, when we are collectively getting oriented to the project.)
Principle of parallelism: It is important that our research includes areas related to antiracism (the motivating reason for the R + A Bibliography). But it is also important that we cover parallel areas of “research + activism” (e.g., related to environmentalism and environmental justice, feminism, LGBTQ rights, disability, economic inequality and “precarity,” immigration, etc.). This will provide important context and comparative understanding of shared or different issues of “research + activism.”
Principle of multidisciplinarity: For similar reasons of comparative understanding, our research should be multidisciplinary (e.g., covering the social sciences as well as the humanities).
Principle of internationalism: Also, our research should as much as possible be international so that the American context of issues can be complemented by that of other areas of the world with different social, educational, and other systems.
Principle of (partial) multilingualism: We will necessarily be collecting citations mostly of English-language works. But if possible, we should include some works in other languages. We should also always fill out the language metadata field in Zotero, even if the work is in English (“en”), so that the English language is not an “unmarked” condition of the bibliography.