Abstract
Market adaptation, fragmentation and precariousness have been widely documented as problematic features of knowledge production processes in the university. This article follows an undercurrent of critical scholarship to explore how paths of resistance can be opened up by researching otherwise. The article builds on autoethnographic notes from a collective and non-funded research project aimed at gathering in situ narratives from people who experienced the 2013 Stockholm Riots. The research strategy behind this project, its organization as well as its results and reception, is here used as a point of departure to scrutinize the conditions of the possibility of critical knowledge production. The article draws attention to a critical place for doing research – in the cracks of the university – which arguably complicates the academic–public divide and keeps open discursive spaces during troubling moments of closure.
Highlights
As too many of us may have experienced, critical research is not always encouraged in the university
Whether we have tenured positions, or in the lack thereof are involuntary members of the academic precariat (Nöbauer, 2012; Standing, 2011), current conditions often make it difficult to intervene in society as critical intellectuals
Interest structures the production of knowledge and how the demands of the market define the boundaries of what is considered to be valuable research (Davies and Bansel, 2007; Giardina and Newman, 2014; Giroux, 2014b). These boundaries operate to guarantee that scholars are, as Edward Said (1994: 55) points out, ‘marketable and above all presentable, uncontroversial and unpolitical and “objective”.’
Summary
As too many of us may have experienced, critical research is not always encouraged in the university. The promotion of internationalization and the spreading of research outcomes occur primarily within closed academic communities, risking detachment of knowledge production from its social context It is against this backdrop that we understand Stuart Hall’s statement that ‘the university is a critical institution or it is nothing’. One example is the body of scholarship stemming from Kurt Lewin’s ‘action research’ (1946), an approach that construes social research as an intervention marked by a collaborative knowledge production between academic and non-academic spaces (Bradbury, 2015; Eikeland, 2015) This body of scholarship, which is often engaged in exploring or magnifying marginalized voices (Fine, 2006; Krumer-Nevo, 2009), includes a more explicit activist-scholar approach that places political conviction as starting point for social movement studies (Guajardo et al, 2017; Gutierrez and Lipman, 2016; Jeppesen and Sartoretto, 2020). We summarize our arguments and stress the urgency of always finding new ways of resisting the operations of power in the contemporary university
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