Abstract
The Activist Academic describes the authors’ development of an activist pedagogy set in the context of their personal and professional relationships and identities—Colette Cann, a black woman, and Eric DeMeulenaere, a white man. Further, the book offers a critical examination of the inherent conflicts of basing a successful academic career on an activist trajectory. The Activist Academic is well-written and organized sequentially over 7 years, making transparent much of the development of these authors as activists and academics. It will provide moral and ideological support for activists laboring in academia. The academy, particularly in social work and education, is widely accepted as a bastion of liberal intellectualism, where the relationship between pedagogy, teaching, and research intersects with anti-oppressive ideals of equity and inclusion. The Activist Academic challenges this notion and suggests that the academy continues to support the values and ideas of dominant society. The institution may tolerate subtle challenges to this status quo, but it neither invites nor rewards scholarship or action intended to dismantle this dominance. Therefore, the activist academic does not get rewarded in typical academic fashion for community activism, scholarship, or research but conversely may find that these pursuits negatively affect their professional trajectory and tenure process.
The authors posit that, for the academic interested in promoting social change, the traditional scholarly work of research, writing, and teaching proves inadequate and presents a professional/ideological quandary. They raise the question of how to follow ideals of social justice while trying to get tenure and promotion. This book will resonate most with academic readers struggling with their own dilemmas of engaging in community activism while trying to succeed in their university positions. The book gives voice to the contradictions many activist academics experience, validates their experiences, and supports the idea of developing like-minded supportive communities as a survival mechanism.
The Activist Academic utilizes praxis (dialogue, reflection, and action), critical theory, critical race theory, and activist pedagogy as the theoretical basis for a co-constructed auto-ethnographic narrative style in which the authors describe the development of their own teaching, research, and community action styles using their developing relationship as the vehicle. The narrative structure of the book presents a descriptive development of their ideas, providing examples throughout their community activism and participatory pedagogy. They each describe encounters over time in which they must struggle with external and/or internal dominant culture ideology that threatens their work and use their process of recognizing these forces to inform their growth as activists. In Chapter 2, Eric raises a colleague’s concern that this kind of unorthodox process is interfering with his tenure process. Colette responds that her standing in the university is always a question because her “personal self” is not really welcomed in this setting.
While the authors delve nicely into identity issues in structural terms and how the issues play out in their classrooms and their community activism, unfortunately, they do not convey how they grappled with the unanswered questions about their own identities and how these are evidenced in different parts of the book. One poignant example was a discussion in Chapter 2 where Colette said that, “coming upon critical race theory was like an academic homecoming for me” (p. 35). Eric countered that he felt uncomfortable using his white voice in this theory and did not want to include critical race theory in their co-constructed work and preferred to leave that space for scholars of color. Although seemingly at an impasse, they later include critical race theory in their work. While the authors clearly did the work to resolve this impasse, the reader would have benefited from reading about their process.
By Chapter 3, the authors begin to frame their work in critical social theory. They review the important historical and theoretical foundations of a social justice stance in academia—framing its roots in critical theory, critical pedagogy, and critical race theory. They explore the use of praxis/reflective action both informed by and linked to progressive values. They present the primary theorists for each of the theories and look for intersections between them. Even in their review of critical theories and history of activist thinking, they find that dominant voices—white men—are overprivileged and the voices of women and persons of color are not equally represented. Theories used to counter dominance are, in the end, largely developed by those with the most dominance. We all experience this paradox at some point in the work and can learn from their process of exploration and seeking alternative theories.
The authors move forward in Chapter 4 to describe three central themes of importance for their activist research: an ideology that provides a counter-narrative to hegemony, the degree to which their research results in material change for the community in which they are working, and the scale of how many people are affected by the work. They both describe past experiences in which enacting anti-oppressive research topics felt, in the end, exploitive with few positive effects on the participants once published. For example, research that results in blaming students for the “achievement gap” but excludes an examination of the systemic drivers of outcome inequities is both deficient and regressive. They conclude that not all action research is activist research that focuses on social justice and/or changes; social justice research must challenge the dominant structures that produce social inequities. Rather than replicating the colonial-like relationships often reinforced in the name of research findings, the authors argue that activist research should challenge the hegemony rooted in the myth of meritocracy.
These same views are then directed to developing critical classroom pedagogies and community activism, both using critical race theory to facilitate the use of double consciousness. The goals are to enhance the students’ abilities to critique and transform readings and history with a liberatory potential and to balance academic information with the knowledge that comes from “lived experiences.” The authors provide several examples of academic/community collaborative projects undermined by the overvaluing of university knowledge by the academic partners resulting in personal harm to some community members and which jeopardized ongoing relationships. It was a learning moment for the authors in terms of how they provide a true participatory environment in which “lived experience” is framed as expertise leaving them with several questions. What kinds of questions and dialogues are needed to counteract the dominant forces in the classroom and community and to provide room for shared expert status? How do we better navigate discordant communities in both teaching and activist spaces?
The narrative style of the book is engaging and tends to soften the use of dry academic language that is intuitively opposed to the theories on which the book is based. It is well-positioned to speak to the emerging academic and may provide sustenance and clarity to the experience of doing activist work—in education or social work—that seem to be the stated goals of these professions. The reader may be disappointed that, while the change-oriented anti-oppressive strategies presented are clearly applied to racial oppression, the book falls short of the same level of equity building around gender disparities. It does not provide a clear feminist orientation in the research, teaching, or community activities described. A book that did add a feminist perspective would be an excellent companion text for someone to author, and I hope this gap is addressed by these or other future authors.
The Activist Academic contributes to a body of work that is practically applying theoretical concepts to a range of academic activities. I recommend the book for those activists who are struggling with the barriers to succeeding in a traditional academic trajectory when moved by passion and belief in social justice to continue activist work.
