About

COMING SOON

In this boasblog, we will examine the widespread science and activism-dichotomy and aim to challenge the distinction between activist and non-activist science that is repeatedly made within anthropology as well as other disciplines, and that usually evokes the possibility that knowledge practices with an agenda can be distinguished from knowledge practices without an agenda.

We will thus focus on the topic of “activist science” and “scholar-activism”, and invite a debate among international scholars that could address questions such as the following: Who calls whom an “activist” and for what reason? What epistemological and ethical assumptions are implicit in such a decision? How are the  opposites of, or alternatives to, activist research conceptualized? Is such a distinction even possible? And what are the consequences of such conceptions for anthropological research and teaching?
In his Theses on Feuerbach Karl Marx wrote the famous sentence that the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, was to change it. Vijay Prashad offers a twist with the quip that it would be impossible to know anything about the world without wanting to change it in some way. So now we would like to raise the question: Those who want to understand the world without wanting to change it: what do they claim to do? 

Literature

Bobel, Chris 2007. “I’m Not an Activist, Though I’ve Done a Lot of It”: Doing Activism, Being Activist and the ‘Perfect Standard’ in a Contemporary Movement. Social Movement Studies 6, 2: 147–59.

Hale, Charles R. (ed.) 2008. Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship. Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.

Marx, Karl 1938. Theses on Feuerbach. In: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Prashad, Vijay 2020. You Can’t Know the World Unless You’re Trying to Change It. CAN TV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSk_MXUgtEs. [20.06.2025].

Editorial team

Julia Eckert, Universität Bern
Erella Grassiani, Universiteit van Amsterdam
Mihir Sharma, Universität Bremen
Sahana Udupa, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Ehler Voss, Universität Bremen
Martin Zillinger, Universität zu Köln