To participate, please send us a short email to warsensing@europa-uni.de. Before the workshop starts, we will send you an updated schedule and program and ask for your preferences for the working groups.

We invite you to participate in our workshop to explore ways of organizing ethical collaborations between academics and activists beyond academia. Hosted within the framework of the CRC “Media of Cooperation,” the workshop is situated in media studies and related fields, examining emerging forms of collaboration between activists, journalists, and researchers in order to reflect on existing methodologies.

“Politics and Ethics of Activist Research” aims to strengthen and reflect on these collaborations, giving particular attention to the power dynamics involved. We want to address the challenges that may arise from the differing values, interests, geographies, and priorities of academic and non-academic actors, and we are specifically interested in the conceptualizations, forms of value, and reflections that emerge from activist-academic collaborations.

On the one hand, in recent years we can observe the emergence of cooperations and so-called Third Mission projects funded by research agencies ranging from citizen science to collaborative art and activist projects in media studies, sociology, anthropology, and the like. Activists and researchers create knowledge for marginalized groups and develop research questions together, thus radicalizing the paradigm of participation (Brown and Strega). On the other hand, academics have been criticized for being too activistic in their research (cf. Issop, 2015). These accusations are, ironically, themselves political, challenging the role of contemporary reflexive scholarship. As studies have shown, knowledge construction is situated in knowledge infrastructures and framed by socio-political interests (Choudry, 2014; Maddison and Scalmer, 2006; and Choudry and Kapoor, 2010). Moreover, the interweaving of activist concerns and academic research have contributed to progressive social and epistemic transformations ranging from the women’s, gay and lesbian, environmental, anti-nuclear, black liberation, civil rights, and peace movements of the 1960s and 1980s to contemporary practices such as data and mobility activism. 

Activist research and science-based activism go hand in hand with both productive collaborations and new problems. Within these tensions, questions arise about how to move from participation to an accurate form of activist research (Strega and Brown, 2015). In the workshop we will discuss:

• How can potentially conflicting priorities and needs be negotiated? 
• How can extractivist approaches to science be mitigated and research results developed with and fed back into communities in ways that meet their needs and priorities? 
• Who owns the data generated by scientific research and who has the right to re-use it? 
• What forms of collaborations already exist in the field of media studies and related fields?
• What are strategies for ethical interaction when scholars work with people from zones of war and conflict?  

The workshop invites activists and scientists from different disciplines to present and discuss their perspectives on these questions. The aim is to address the complex challenges of activist research together.