Doing committed social research: what are the dangers?

This is an edited version of a keynote address to a postgraduate student conference held in 2012 at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University on the theme of ‘Global New Social Activism’. It suggests and considers some of the dangers of committed social research that fails to meet the disciplines of Gramsci's ‘pessimism of the intellect’. Those dangers include ‘verificationism’, spontaneism/voluntarism, and inadequate analysis of both the objective and subjective conditions of potential constituencies and agents of (radical) social change with whom researchers identify and seek to support. Research should always produce new knowledge of the contradictions of social existence, practice and struggle.