Activism and the Academy

We often use editorials to fulminate about the state of the world, and offer suggestions as to how to make it better. I am not comfortable with either of those options for the moment (though I have done my share of both in the past). Rather, I would like to worry away at what seems to be an unexplored bifurcation in my political-academic life and, I suspect, in the lives of others. Put crudely, my anxiety centres on the fact that we tell ourselves and our students that everything is simultaneously political and theoretical, yet we seem to have a hard time connecting the two outside the university. On the one hand, I am involved with a section of the academy – well represented by readers of and contributors to this journal – that likes to call itself such things as oppositional, critical, progressive, and even emancipatory. I have just come back from the San Francisco meetings of the Association of American Geographers. As usual, the sessions that I attended were thick with calls for challenging power and contesting hierarchy. I have been an active participant in these conversations, many of which I find useful and politically engaging. However, these battle cries, all too frequently, were in a language that made sense only to the cognoscenti. There was little if any talk of the political purchase of critical ideas beyond the walls of the classroom or the pages of academic journals. At the same time, I have found myself increasingly embroiled in political activism outside the academy. This includes work around neighbourhood organizing