Dip Kapoor and Steven Jordan (eds.), Research, Political Engagement, and Dispossession: Indigenous, Peasant, and Urban Poor Activisms in the Americas and Asia (London: Zed Books, 2020). 328 pages, $76.
As a social scientist with long-running political commitments, the question of how my work contributes to projects of social justice and liberation is important to me. Concerns about the contribution of one’s research to liberatory political projects are especially central for researchers who deal directly with people engaged in political struggle in social locations that are distant from centers of power, especially academic institutions in the global North. For anyone who wants to examine the ways people seek to build relations of solidarity across social locations with differential access to institutional power, this book provides a diverse array of potential strategies, all richly detailed with personal reflection and practical advice. Research, Political Engagement, and Dispossession delivers what it promises, building beyond the Participatory Action Research (PAR) focus of the editors’ 2009 collection to offer additional methodological models directly from researchers putting these models into practice in collaboration with social movement activists around the world. Readers are all but guaranteed to learn something that will improve their relationship to the people and movements they engage with in projects of emancipatory knowledge production.
This book explains how PAR has at times been limited, coopted, and de-politicized, as described by co-editor Steven Jordan in his chapter in the 2009 collection. Co-editor Dip Kapoor offers Anticolonial Participatory Action Research (APAR) in his own chapter of this latest book, grounding its approach in an explicit critique of colonial relations – in contrast to the approach of non-governmental organization (NGO), government, and traditional researcher-led projects that often use a veneer of participation to manufacture consent for development projects that replicate and deepen longstanding power inequities. Kapoor grounds his method not only in the Freirean philosophy widely cited by PAR methodologists, but also in Gramsci, Fanon, and Ramajit Guha. He offers an account of complex but fruitful collaboration with forest-dwelling communities resisting dispossession in the Eastern Indian state of Odisha. Hasriadi Masalam likewise emphasizes the explicit power analysis in his work with indigenous and small peasant populations in Indonesia facing dispossession not only from palm oil plantation projects, but also from top-down conservation projects backed by international NGOs. Each chapter presents novel methodologies, including Pablo Pozzi’s “guerrilla history” and Hsiao-Chuan Hsia’s “praxis-oriented research” as well as other diverse applications of participatory and grassroots-engaged research.
A major contribution of this book is its attention to the ways contemporary projects of development dispossession are often masked by a veneer of appealing to social justice – and to how research that is truly accountable to grassroots political struggle can work against these currents. One example is evident in the previously mentioned examination of conservation dispossession explored by Masalam. In another case, Bijoy Barua discusses the “NGOization” of social problems faced by the rural poor in Bangladesh, which he argues constitutes a “neoliberalism from below” that channels discontent into microfinance loan programs that demobilize and depoliticize the people involved. While NGO microfinance programs create a proliferation of debt and money lending, Barua works alongside landless people in a project of PAR through which harmful Eurocentric land-and-water management systems are challenged and the people who depend on the land for their livelihood are able to re-impose traditional methods of management, while building capacity and support for social struggle. These examples confirm the findings of other movement-engaged researchers, such as contributors to Brian Tokar and Tamra Gilbertson’s recent Climate Justice and Community Renewal, which presents numerous cases of development dispossession masked by language of sustainability and carbon reduction. Continued scholarly attention to these deceptive projects will be necessary to expose the wolves of dispossession in the sheep’s clothing of fashionable social concerns.
Also of great value in this collection is the inclusion of candid practical advice from the experience of researchers engaged in cross-locational solidarity. Kapoor discusses the challenge of managing differences in academic and activist cycles of activity and relates his experiences of generating publications for tenure and grant opportunities alongside movement work, demonstrating ways in which academic access can be mobilized to benefit a movement. Pablo Pozzi describes his experience navigating conflicts that emerged between a group of workers with whom he conducted an oral history project, and their union leadership who felt that the project did not portray them well. He also reflects on culturally ingrained self-censorship on the part of both interviewers and interviewees carrying the scars and trauma of life under dictatorship. Patrick O’Hare and Santiago Sorroche compare two very different approaches to doing critical ethnographic and participatory movement research with waste-pickers in Argentina and Bolivia, reflecting on the strengths and limitations of a researcher’s nationality and distance from the people they engage with, and the advantages and disadvantages of working within established government channels of legitimacy and contestation.
The tension between academic and political objectives is evident throughout and is often directly addressed, but many of the writings in this book emphasize navigating these tensions rather than asking how they might be overcome. Throughout the book, the latter possibility is evident. From the early chapters on the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST) in Brazil and their creation of grassroots movement-controlled research and pedagogy, to Hsiao-Chuan Hsia’s call for researchers to think of themselves as “self-conscious wolf-men” who must build autonomous movement capacity as if they might abandon the movement at any time, the authors demonstrate a rigorous and honest grappling with the power relations involved. However--as the authors would probably agree--no amount of grappling will dissolve the structural problems, as structures replicate through material relations and access, not only through behavior and choice. While the book is consistently critical of capitalism and identifies private control of capital as being at the root of the evident inequities, the research projects highlighted aim at various forms of resistance, mostly at local levels, within this structure rather than its abolition through large-scale revolutionary transformations in productive relations. My hope is that revolutionary projects – with part of their aim being the dissolution rather than navigation of unequal power relations – will be addressed in future work with the same level of care, reflection, and analytic ability as is evident throughout this book.
Zachary T. King
Department of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara
- D. Kapoor and S. Jordan, eds. Education, Participatory Action Research and Social Change: International Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
- Brian Tokar and Tamra Gilbertson, eds., Climate Justice and Community Renewal: Resistance and Grassroots Solutions (Abingdon, UK: Taylor & Francis, 2020).
