Scholar-Activist or Activist-Scholar?

This week I am thinking about the perspectives of scholars engaged in activism and social justice. I am wondering what the impetus is in their individual and collective lives, and I wonder how their backgrounds influence their perspectives. Personally, I have struggled with the lines of power that are represented by universities. I am a first generation college student from a low socio-economic background—meaning that I did not know a single person who had been to college outside of my experiences as a student until much more recently.

As I think through what my experiences mean for my academic interests, I also am thinking about how my academic interests may shape my perceptions of my experiences. It is not until I actively began considering graduate school that I really began to understand how my background impacted my experiences as a graduate student. It was through my pursuits in education that led me to better understand how people with different backgrounds experience systems of power in fundamentally different ways.

So I wonder, how does this impact the way we research, teach, and become active members in our communities.

Dana L. Cloud gives a nice overview of how her ideas came to action, and how she uses her position of power to be an activist. She writes:

I began my scholarly career a structuralist, emphasizing the role of ideology in maintaining social stability (“Limits,” “Hegemony”). Now I have learned, through involvement in political activity, that the struggle for hegemony is never one-sided. Ordinary people come to a sense of themselves and their own agency in spite ideological and institutional forces arrayed against them.

What I find interesting about this moment in Cloud’s writing is how it represents a scholar applying her knowledge, and everything she encounters in her activist life is filtered through her scholarly ideologies. But earlier in the text, she says she is “a longtime socialist” (13), and she recounts many movements that she has supported. But Cloud became an activist as a result of her academic pursuits: “I began my political life as a feminist at Penn State in the mid-1980s” (12).

Lee Artz offers interesting insight into what it is like to come into academia already rooted in social activism. His years of experience as a laborer and rights activist seem to be what led him into the academy, which seems to be a very different path than those of other social justice authors we have been reading.

Increasingly, I am interested in not only understanding the arguments being made in scholarly writing, trying to see how they fit in with other scholars to map ideas, but I am also actively thinking about the application of the ideas. I wonder how could I put these ideas into action and what would be the result.

So, I am thinking about how my previously existing views impact my academic work and how my academic work now changes the way I see the world.

Since I am interested in pedagogical concerns, I am reminded of the different ways I have thought about the classroom in my life. Now, as a teacher, I see the classroom as a complicated nexus that is the manifestation of many different perspectives coming together (multiple sites of power—the teacher, the department, the discipline, the administration, and the expectations and evaluations of students). Each of these perspectives inform the way the classroom is constructed before the semester begins.

But the classroom did not appear that way to me as an undergrad. There was little complexity at all. The classrooms were a series of challenges that were designed by individual teachers who knew more than I did. They were places to collaborate and compete with my peers.

And before college, the classroom was an entirely different thing. It was the place where I had to spend my time, and was glad to. It was a place of structure, order, and fairness that I did not have in my home. School was a place where people acknowledged each other, supported each other, and worked toward bettering themselves.

What I am seeing is a complicated overlap in the classroom that functions as a site of power while also inviting criticism of power structures and encourages students to take ownership over their lives and communities by empowering them through the development of social awareness, tools, and skills. The classroom can be many things, and again I wonder, how does the background of the teacher and of the scholar overlap and conflict with the many backgrounds and personalities of the students–and how should this play a role in the development of socially responsible research and teaching practices?

For now I will keep pondering these questions because I do not think that these questions invite simple answers.