From Theorizing in the Ivory Tower to Creating Change with the People: Activist Research as a Framework for Collaborative Action

What Is Activist Research?

As someone who identifies as an activist-scholar, I was eager to learn if other researchers embraced activist research, why they made the choice, and how they went about it. Like most academics, I was taught to strive for objectivity, root out researcher biases, and distance myself from the participants I studied to ensure the validity of my work. As I became more engaged in grassroots advocacy and activism, I found traditional education research limiting and less appealing. Although the shift from positivism to critical social justice oriented research gave me the strength I needed to finish my doctoral studies, it still felt as though activism should be disconnected from research. Perhaps activism could be a party of my service, but my scholarship should be based on “real” research. This thinking led me to stray from doing any research and focus on my activism, until I decided to investigate if others had found a way to bridge their activism with their research.

It turns out that there is an emerging research framework—activist research—that is inclusive of multiple disciplines including educational research (Cushman, 1999; DeMeulenaere & Cann, 2013; Fine & Vanderslice, 1992; Knight, 2000; Malone, 2006; Nygreen, 2006), anthropology (Hale, 2006; Speed, 2006; Urla, & Helepololei, 2014) social movements and other social science research fields (Chatterton, Fuller, & Routledge, 2007; Choudry, 2014). A review of the theoretical frameworks, methodologies, findings, ethical issues, and challenges has allowed me to identify three characteristics that delineate activist researcher from other types of research: (1) combination of knowledge production and transformative action; (2) systematic multi-level collaboration; and (3) challenges to power. The rest of this paper will explore how each characteristic is utilized in activist research. Next, I will review two youth participatory action research studies to provide an example how they utilized an activist research framework, and a third youth participatory action research study that does not fit the criteria for activist research. Then I will discuss implications for theory and practice and limitations of using activist research as an emerging methodology. Finally, I will conclude by providing an answer to the original question, what is activist research.