Research, Political Engagement and Dispossession

Indigenous, Peasant and Urban Poor Activisms in the Americas and Asia

Dip Kapoor, Steven Jordan, Dip Kapoor, Steven Jordan

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786994431
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

This collection considers academic research engagements with indigenous, small peasant, urban poor and labour social activism against colonial capitalist dispossession and exploitation in Asia and the Americas. Bringing together contributors from a range of different disciplines, Research, Political Engagement and Dispossession demonstrates how research done for and with these struggles against dispossession by mining, agribusiness plantations, conversation schemes, land-forest grabs, water projects, industrial disasters and the exploitation of workers and forced migrants, can make productive contributions towards advancing their social and political prospects.

1 | RESEARCH FOR INDIGENOUS, PEASANT, AND URBAN POOR ACTIVISM: CAPITAL, DISPOSSESSION, AND EXPLOITATION IN THE AMERICAS AND ASIA

Dip Kapoor and Steven Jordan

Introduction

Dispossession, pauperization and the exploitation of labor by a historical process of colonial capitalism continues to be met with resistance by indigenous peoples, small/landless peasants/workers, development-displaced persons (DDPs) and semi/urban poor and (racialized-gendered) forced migrant and labor/working classes in the neo/colonies. Praxis and the production of movement-relevant knowledge as research are central to the work of their organic intellectuals and organizational leaders, including local and trans/national activists working with(in) these struggles and movements (Fanon 1963; Gramsci 1971; Kelley 2002). Academic researchers located in post-secondary institutions also engage with these struggles. This collection seeks to contribute in this vein as engaged academic researchers draw on their respective research relationships with and for these struggles and movements in the neo/colonial regions of the Americas and Asia. It is our intention that this contribution is of use to researchers in academia as faculty and graduate students alike and to organic movement intellectuals, activists, and researchers. We extend our initial international perspectives on participatory action research (PAR) collaboration (Kapoor and Jordan 2009) but now in relation to engaged academic research broadly defined (including variants of PAR) and specifically in contexts of neo/colonial capitalist dispossession, pauperization and urban poor labor/working-class exploitation (Jordan 2013; Jordan and Kapoor 2016; Kapoor 2017).

Kapoor’s anticolonial PAR work over two decades with Adivasi (Scheduled Tribes or original dwellers) and Dalits (Scheduled Castes or outcastes/avarnas) in rural eastern India in the state of Odisha and Jordan’s engagements with the James Bay Cree in northern Quebec (Canada) (2013) and Immigrant Worker’s Center or IWC (Montreal) (2009) have prompted this conversation with other similarly engaged academics. Contributors to this collection were included based on our long-term relationships with some of them and from related networks of academics selected via personal familiarity with their work or based on referrals from those known to us and acquainted with our engaged research contributions.

The collection is informed by the interdisciplinary social sciences and includes engaged academic research methodologies (and methods) variously labeled as: comparative (historical-dialectical) ethnographic approaches; critical oral histories; participatory research (PR); anticolonial participatory action research (APAR); “Third-Worldist” PAR and PAR; grassroots-oriented (insurgent) research; waste-picker ethnography; guerrilla history (class struggle); public sociology and scholar-activism; activist ethnography; and praxis-oriented research. All approaches are informed by (depending on the politics of social groups and/or classes being engaged) an anticolonial, anti-capitalist, anti-dispossession, anti-proletarianization, anarchist, labor/socialist and/or an (indigenist) environmental politics addressing colonial “racial capitalism” (Robinson 2000) in select locations of ongoing contributor research in the Americas and Asia.

As editors we sought to include the work of those academics who were engaged with struggles variously addressing the historical continuity of the coloniality of Euro-American capitalism and power including a comprador national bourgeoisie and growing transnational capitalist and consumer class. These struggles continue to address a political-economic and cultural system of racial (gendered) social domination created by colonial conquest and the emergent system of capitalist accumulation and exploitation connecting all forms of control of work (slavery, servitude, simple commodity production, reciprocity, capital) to produce (through a racialized-gendered division of labor) initially for Europe and then the capitalist world market. The process is centered around the hegemony of a system of states wherein populations classified as inferior in racial terms (indigenous peoples, small/landless peasants, pastoralists, nomads) are excluded from the formation and control of this system (Quijano 2000; 2005) or are simply in the way of if not deemed superfluous for the reproduction of colonial (racial) capitalism.

Hence the struggles against (or to replace) colonial capital and the related research relationships are variously located (in terms of politics) in these chapter contributions. For instance, where capitalist relations are relatively established, struggles defined by the labor–capital dialectic (accumulation as expanded reproduction) or a class politics are paramount. Where such relations are still emergent (contexts of colonial accumulation by dispossession from land) “a dialectics of colonial domination and anticolonial resistance (internally penetrative and mutually constitutive of each other)” (Kapoor 2017: 21) or land-based territorial politics takes precedence. The uneven development of capitalist social relations also ensures the prospects and possibilities for contradictory responses and resistance, if not other historical projects which pre-date capital.

This collection shares experiences of how and what is entailed in engaged academic research with and for these struggles and movements understood as “sustained challenges to powerholders in the name of disadvantaged populations living under the jurisdiction or influence of those powerholders” (Tarrow 1996: 874), while demonstrating the many ways in which academic research engagements can be productive for movements, despite the potential contradictions and challenges of such cross-locational socio-political work. The emphasis is on political solidarity through relationship with organized groups engaged in struggle which in turn demands significant changes in conventional academic research methods given the recognition that to be (critically) aligned with the politics of subjects in struggle is to recognize that knowledge is situated, intersubjective, and produced through a continuous praxis between movement actors and engaged academic researchers. The primary emphasis is on yielding political processes and outcomes that are of use to the struggle, as research-education/pedagogy-organizing and mobilization are often, methodologically speaking, indiscrete and in relation to political action addressing the structures and conditions of colonial (racial) capitalism.

What counts as academic research contributions to struggle in this volume is mutually defined (movements and academics) and largely dependent on the politics of the agents of struggle themselves. While knowledge production is central to any form of research engagement and is a primary contribution, academic research relations with social struggles can also include a much wider set of possible contributions determined through ongoing dialogue with movement actors.

These non-discrete possibilities, at the risk of over-simplification, could include for instance:

a resource support via academic grants/other sources when deemed politically appropriate by all concerned including related deliberations around means and ends;

b stimulating trans/local networks, coalition building and social mobilization (existing and/or encouraging new socio-political relations);

c helping establish movement (research/other) organizations with a long-term commitment to knowledge for movements;

d pedagogical engagements (e.g. social movement memory/historical projects for movement development);

e formalized (specific) research inclusions in movements (e.g. around MST schools and rural education in Brazil);

f pedagogical work with movement activists (with potential multiplier effects over time) and movement constituencies in strengthening research–organizing–education and mobilization depth/width (e.g. stimulating activist reflections on their own movements or engaging in tactical knowledge contributions);

g international/regional linkages and public education/advocacy and the potential amplification of movement politics by public intellectuals in the context of engagement and beyond; and

h using academic researcher social, cultural, political, and economic capital to legitimate movement claims or engage with hegemonic social groups and classes, institutions, and actors.

These potential examples regarding academic contributions (always mutually constitutive with movement actors) are intended to be illustrative as opposed to exhaustive.

Engaged academic research(ers) and fault lines of academic contention

Engaged academic research(ers) seeking to work with and for movements occupy a contentious location in academic–movement relations as such work is subject to a variety of possible questions and criticisms from within academia and movement circles alike for different reasons. Traditional intellectuals (Gramsci 1971) claiming objectivity and the ability to transcend or stand outside class locations (otherwise equated with bias and sectoral interests) thereby seeking scientific legitimacy and authority for their prognostications on movements for academic knowledge production predictably take issue with engaged academic research as being partisan, biased, and sectoral and therefore beneath the necessary level of scientificity (legitimacy) to qualify as being anything but trivial (illegitimate) knowledge.

Traditional intellectuals in turn have been scrutinized by activists and engaged academic researchers alike (Bevington and Dixon 2005; Choudry 2015; Choudry and Kapoor 2010/2013; Jordan 2003). These criticisms range from parasitic knowledge appropriation and claims to expertise thereof based on an alleged disengaged observation and objectification, to an elitist class-defined preoccupation with theoretical innovation for academic consumption (of little relevance for movements) and hegemonic knowledge production in the interests of maintaining and enhancing dominant and ruling ideologies and social relations. This could potentially include misrepresentation and distortions of movement (real) politics for the purposes of reproducing these dominant interests. Associated claims around asserting scientific (ill)legitimacy amount to little more than attempts to insulate knowledge production for dominance (=bias), while simultaneously sealing out and delegitimating knowledge(s) informing social action that is potentially disruptive, if not structurally destabilizing in terms of the status quo of unequal and oppressive social relations of colonial (racial) capital.

Oppositional research in academia takes on both divergent and convergent possibilities. For instance, various post-isms advancing “cultural criticism” (Hale 2006; 2008) define their critical and/or oppositional work and potential (qualified) alignment with the politics of movements/struggles primarily if not exclusively in terms of their political commitments to academic institutional space. This is expressed through a penchant for the continuous production of theory and theoretically innovative emancipatory knowledge or “luxury production” for “individual careerism”, according to Gilmore (1993: 73) often characterized by a demand for analytical...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• About the contributors
• Acronyms and abbreviations
• 1 Research for indigenous, peasant, and urban poor activism: capital, dispossession, and exploitation in the Americas and Asia
• Part I: Research and Indigenous and Peasant Activisms
• Part II: Research and Urban Poor Activisms
• Index