Description
How can academic research be emancipatory while being intimately implicated in the reproduction of hegemonic hierarchies of people, themes, and practices?
This dilemma has been crucial for engaged researchers, with the debate coalescing around two responses: upholding the separation between one’s academic and political personas, or fusing the two in the figure of the ‘scholar activist.’ While animated by the best intentions, the latter has resulted in setting agendas that are not only hardly achievable, but often counterproductive.
The paper addresses this dilemma through a reflexive engagement with ethnographic fieldwork carried out among Jewish-Israeli activists for Palestinian rights. Having observed how their split identity and power-laden positionality mirror those of the engaged researcher, the paper draws attention to how some of these activists eschew unattainable ‘pure’ political stances to carry out instead ‘imperfect’ struggles which – through messy, grounded, affective engagements – disrupt colonial relationalities and subjectivities.
Learning from these endeavours, the paper suggests that rather than trying to ‘solve’ the paradox of engaged research we should ‘stay with’ it: embrace the tensions this ‘contradictory location’ entails and work through them towards the achievement of a “less comfortable social science” (Lather, 2000) but one that can produce, precisely for this, profound subversive contributions.
