Scholars and Activism

It is not uncommon to be told that scholarship must be neutral, objective, unbiased, while activism should be purposeful, passionate, and engaged in the world. This distinction is often held to in order to maintain the academy as a supposedly apolitical, disinterested space, when in fact there have always been strong cases to the contrary, in terms of both conservative and progressive scholars. This course will not only show historical cases of scholarship informing activism, and vice versa, but also delve into questions of knowledge production and praxis, particularly with regard to the study of race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, and ecologies.