I’m halfway through the 2nd year of my PhD in Politics at the University of York and I’m a YCEDE scholar. Outside of academia, I’m a community organizer and activist. When I applied to my PhD program in 2022, I had one career goal in mind and that was to use my platform to advocate for social justice issues through activist anthropology and decolonial/Marxist politics. 1 year later, I continue to find it difficult to reflect and understand how writing and academia can be ‘activist’, especially as academics we spend most of our time researching rather than protesting and campaigning.
When I saw an opportunity to attend the Autumn Keynote Speech at the Stuart Hall Foundation with Professor Robin D.G Kelley, I believed it could be a perfect way to actively engage in the field of critical scholarship and network with other researchers who employ decolonial approaches in their work. The keynote aimed to respond to ‘Catastrophe and Emergence’ by tracing the histories constituting and the political and creative possibilities that emerge from it. In 2024, there is no shortage of pertinent social justice issues. This year alone we witnessed fascist riots that saw Muslims, migrants and refugees targeted on the streets of the UK, Israel’s destructive attacks on the besieged and occupied Gaza Strip and the United States’ continued criminalization of refugees and asylum seekers. I ask again, how can academia or praxis, be put into practice to instill social change?
Professor Kelley’s talk reflected on major social and political issues through an understanding of the violence of ‘capital.’ How the Grenfell Tragedy (which claimed the lives of 72 people) is a product of neoliberalism? Or how multinational companies like G4S depend on the violence of incarceration in prison systems to turn a profit. Kelley teaches us that our activism and writing should trace how oppression is ‘never complete, never finished’ and is always ‘emerging.’ By doing so, academics can strive for and want to effect change in the world.
Through this talk, I have learnt that our work as activist scholars may not always involve going to marches but can also be writing in a way in which our work fits within the context of society. Our work should intersect with what’s happening in our communities. This is also an act of protest.