Aziz Choudry - Learning Activism: The Intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements

LEARNING ACTIVISM

LEARNING ACTIVISM

THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

AZIZ CHOUDRY

Copyright University of Toronto Press 2015

Higher Education Division

www.utppublishing.com

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisheror in the case of photocopying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), One Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Choudry, Aziz, author

Learning activism : the intellectual life of contemporary social movements / Aziz Choudry.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-4426-0791-0 (bound).ISBN 978-1-4426-0790-3 (pbk.).

ISBN 978-1-4426-0792-7 (pdf).ISBN 978-1-4426-0793-4 (html).

1. Social movements. 2. Political activistsIntellectual life. 3. Social reformersIntellectual life. I. Title.

HM881.C46 2015 303.484 C2015-901439-5

C2015-901440-9

We welcome comments and suggestions regarding any aspect of our publicationsplease feel free to contact us at .

North America

5201 Dufferin Street

North York, Ontario, Canada, M3H 5T8

2250 Military Road

Tonawanda, New York, USA, 14150

ORDERS PHONE: 18005659523

ORDERS FAX: 18002219985

ORDERS E-MAIL:

UK, Ireland, and continental Europe

NBN International

Estover Road, Plymouth, PL6 7PY, UK

ORDERS FAX: 44 (0) 1752 202333

ORDERS PHONE: 44 (0) 1752 202301

ORDERS E-MAIL:

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders; in the event of an error or omission, please notify the publisher.

This book is printed on paper containing 100% post-consumer fibre.

The University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

Printed in the United States of America.

CONTENTS

---

FIGURES

---

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

---

As this book argues, knowledge and learning in social movements and activism are often produced collectively and in interaction with others. Learning Activism emerged from, and is very much influenced by and produced through collective efforts in which many people were engaged, both in the past and in the present. This includes too many conversations, shared experiences, and back stories to do justice to here. I started a list of people to thank, but it would be an impossible task to do justice to everyone who should be acknowledged. You know who you are.... Despite that, the primary responsibility for the books contents, including any shortcomings, is mine. I am profoundly grateful for the Indigenous Peoples of Aotearoa and Turtle Island for providing me with places to think and write over many years. I am particularly indebted to Dave Bleakney, Leigh Cookson, Radha DSouza, Michelle Hartman, Tony Kelly, Orin Langelle, Dsire Rochat, and Salim Vally, who read and commented on earlier drafts of some or all parts of this book. The section on migrant and immigrant workers and knowledge production in earlier drafts of this book. Finally, I am grateful to Anne Brackenbury at University of Toronto Press for her invitation to write this book and for her support in seeing it through with discussion and editorial input, and to Leanne Rancourt for her careful copyediting and Ashley Rayner, Anna Del Col and Beate Schwirtlich for their efficient assistance.

Note: Some of the material in is adapted from the following articles:

Choudry, A. (2013). Activist research and organizing: Blurring the boundaries, challenging the binaries. International Journal of Lifelong Education . doi:10.1080/02601370.2013.867907Choudry, A. (2013). Activist research practice: Exploring research and knowledge production for social action. Socialist Studies , (1), 128151.Choudry, A. (2014). Activist research for education and social movement mobilization. Post-Colonial Directions in Education , (1), 88121.

All royalties from this book will go to the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal.

Footnote

PREFACE

---

I am a bit of a hoarder. When I interviewed for a tenure-track academic position in McGill Universitys Faculty of Education in 2007, I arrived as a doctoral student without any university degrees except for a one-year graduate diploma but with some two decades worth of baggage of activism, popular education, and organizing work. This was not just metaphorical baggage. I actually turned up to the interview room with a suitcase full of publications, DVDs, and other documentation that I had written, edited, contributed to, researched, or had otherwise been directly involved with in the course of my activist work. This material was published in numerous countries across the Asia-Pacific, North America, and Europe by movements, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), trade unions, and independent progressive media, often with little or no involvement of academic researchers. I spread it out on a table before the interview began. I did this not just to illustrate my productivity but to make a point to the hiring committeemy soon-to-be colleaguesthat this material was important. I wanted to show that popular/activist knowledge produced outside of the academy and academic scholarship can each have their own integrity, strengths, and weaknesses.

I played a film clip of a workshop on resistance against bilateral free trade and investment agreements that I facilitated at the November 2004 Peoples Convention on Food Sovereignty in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Among the publications on the table was a book I had edited on strategies for confronting transnational corporations in the Asia-Pacific, reports I had written on topics including childcare and workers rights, and a controversial overseas aid-funded forestry development project in the Philippines. There were fact sheets on subjects like free trade and the Pacific Islands, intellectual property rights, corporate control over agriculture, and threats to the future of rice. There were pieces that I had written for Australian migrant and refugee justice networks on racism, colonialism, and immigration detention policies, and a critical analysis of a major US environmental NGO that was published in Spanish in a Latin American magazine on biodiversity. And there were interview articles with a range of activists and organizers adapted from transcripts of broadcasts of a radio show that I co-produced and hosted in Christchurch (Aotearoa/New Zealand) in the 1990s. All of these resources were shared as examples of the education, thinking, theorizing, and other forms of knowledge produced in movements and activist circles. This intellectual work is too rarely acknowledged in faculties of education or universities as a whole. This public show-and-tell activity with some of my personal activist archives was intended to emphasize its importance and to challenge the fact that these kinds of knowledge, research, and ideas are not often seen to be on equal terms with academic knowledge.

The ideas in this book took shape out of reflections on the approximately 30 years of my own political engagements. By drawing on my experiences and research, I highlight the intellectual contributions of the knowledge produced, informal and non-formal learning, and research within activism. I also connect all of these to the fields of education and learning. Through this, I propose that social, political, and environmental activist movements can best be understood if we engage with the learning, knowledge, debates, and theorizing that go on within them. I draw on my own experiences and learning in my activist involvements to share what I have learned and to inform and inspire further reflection and critical inquiry in others. These experiences and the ideas behind them are drawn from many places, times, and struggles. They range from organizing experiences in Aotearoa/New Zealand to progressive social movements and peoples organizations in the Philippines, and from support for Indigenous Peoples struggles for self-determination to migrant and immigrant workers struggles in Canada to the 2012 student strike in Quebec.

Next page