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Activist labour and academia as extraction

Dutch East India Company: Getty Images

Academia as a colonizing structure is built on the extraction of knowledge from communities. 

In the academic study of resistance, community struggles, social movements, and transformative organizing turn into data, as sources of information to be extracted. 

Embedded within the colonial architecture of the modern University, the academic study of activism and resistance strategies replicates the colonial habits that are widespread in the everyday organizing of academia. 

Intrinsic to the organizing of the academic study of activism and resistance is the lack of commitment to the actual labor of the struggle in the community. 

Resistance as the field is an object to be mapped out, categorized, and drawn out into conceptual threads. Hegemonic theories of resistance thus draw on the actual production of distance between the academic and the struggle, normalizing the lack of commitment among academics.

This lack of commitment takes various forms. 

In most visible ways, the lack of commitment takes the form of distance from the ground. 

From a quick trip to a movement location to then write up journal articles and entire books, to easy-to-do interviews with activists and community organizers, to focus groups with activists, these methods of the mainstream invisibilize the question of commitment. 

In other instances, you have academics as ethnographers conducting participant observations of activist organizing, while maintaining their distance from the actual work of activism and safeguarding their cushy jobs. 

Activism as a cultural site turns into a specimen to be observed, taken notes on, and extracted from for scholarly publications.

Academics can claim radical credentials, far removed from the harms, violence, and threats deployed by power toward resistive struggles at and from the margins.

The culture-centered approach (CCA) agitates against this extractive impulse of academia by foregrounding the concept of "body on the line."

In the CCA, the theorizing of community-led resistance as the basis of structural transformation is embedded in solidarities that are carefully stitched together by community organizers, academics, and activists. 

The role of the academic, with our "bodies on the line," is held in friendships with communities and activists, responding to the day-to-day challenges of organizing, doing the material labour of organizing at the margins, gathering material resources, and most vitally, responding collectively to power when it targets the struggles.

The academic labour of the CCA is also activist labour, is intricately weaved into the rhythms of community organizing, co-creating communicative infrastructures for the voices of the margins to emerge. These voices of the margins, nurtured and supported by caring relationships and networks of solidarity, become the registers through which social change is materialized.

The theory of social change in the CCA thus has to begin with the change. It has to incessantly commit to decolonizing the very habits that constitute the academe.

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