Learning with political movements: social reproductive politics as a scholar-activist methodology
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This paper makes critical contributions to progressive and radical traditions of scholar-activist investigation in social movement studies, drawing on my research with the No Evictions Network in Glasgow, a migrant-solidarity space that challenged the large-scale eviction of 300 asylum seekers by UK Home Office contractor Serco. Pushing forward radical research practices, the paper introduces a focus on ‘learning with political movements’ that centers the knowledge produced by grassroots communities. Through suggesting social reproductive politics as an integral research ethics and a methodology, this approach seeks to break divisions between ‘intellectual’ and ‘material’ scholar-activist labor in these spaces, foregrounding their mutually constitutive dimension. It engages with questions of positionality and reflexivity, interrogating the politics of scholar-activism in contexts of racialized, gendered, and classed exclusion. My research demonstrates how the scholar-activist practicing of social reproductive politics fosters the formation of non-hierarchical relationships of friendship, comradeship, and care with precarious communities, allowing a focus on ‘learning with political movements’. Finally, I analyze how the prefigurative effect of these politics contributes to the sustainment of social and material spaces of political struggle, challenging neoliberal notions of academic impact.
Source: Social movement studies
Author: Ana Santamarina
Institution: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Urban Studies Foundation
OpenAlex ID: W4407851898