2 - Resourcing Struggles for Social Justice from the University

Summary

What is the relationship between scholarly knowledge and social justice? I used to believe, mistakenly, I now think, that to promote social justice I needed to develop an intimate knowledge of radical frameworks and diligently apply those frameworks to observed injustices, in order to chart their manifestations, their impacts and their entanglements. What made a framework ‘radical’, I thought, was the object of its critique. I used to think that knowing more in a scholarly register about racialized dispossession, for example, and publishing that knowledge in scholarly journals was a way to disrupt the processes that produced it. Much has been written about the obvious inadequacies of the ‘ivory tower’ and its paywalls for bringing about meaningful change that need not be rehearsed here. I am not really interested in that anti- intellectual argument (though my positions and work are sometimes interpreted that way). Instead, I want to argue that the intellectual enterprise itself is a site for the realization of justice, but just not, perhaps, in the way that it is often assumed.

I used to love to debate. I grew up north of Boston in a loud extended Irish family of teachers and lawyers for whom teasing, storytelling and comedic timing are an art form. If you want to hang, you had better come armed with a thick skin, a solid point and a fast- moving story. To be effective, you have to fully commit to the argument; hesitate and you create space for your entire argument to be toppled. The point is not to persuade or be persuaded, the point is to hold the spotlight, to entertain, to show off, to win. I came to the kitchen island (and later, to social interactions and intellectual inquiry) ready to press my case, think on my feet, not take things personally (at least in public) and never back down.

This training served me well enough for a while. I came of age in the early 1990s, when the neoliberal consensus was so strong that the political space left of centre was spacious terrain. To be a middle- class white woman against racism, patriarchy and homophobia felt rather uncomplicated and morally righteous in my racially and socially homogeneous New England town.