Description
An important challenge of academic research is its reliance on relatively fixed analytical and conceptual frameworks. The dissonance between these established frames and the conceptual thinking often taken for granted becomes particularly visible in the researcher’s engagement with local communities. This paper explores how thinking through struggle – an approach grounded in attention to collective experiences and local agency – can address some of these limitations and offer more cooperative ways of organising social inquiry.
Thinking and looking through struggles allows us to remain attentive to how communities’ aspirations and politics are articulated, and through this attentiveness, local agency can be recognised. This, in turn, shifts the analytical focus away from ‘actors with guns’ and towards the complex ways in which political visions are enunciated.
Drawing on doctoral research with Black communities and social organisations in Colombia’s Central Pacific region, the chapter situates thinking through struggle within a broader framework of cooperative research, where inquiry becomes a reflective, collaborative exercise grounded in engagement, relationality, and proximity. Ultimately, thinking through struggle is not only a methodological stance but also an ethical, epistemological, and ontological commitment that must be carefully navigated within the institutional realities of neoliberal academia.
