Activist research and organizing: blurring the boundaries,challenging the binaries

This article draws from ongoing research into the practices and processes of activist researchers. It discusses social relations of knowledge production located outside of academia with/in social movement milieus. Focusing on the politics of research in people’s organizations and social movement organizations in the Philippines, it builds on interviews with activist researchers. It argues for a Marxist theory of praxis which insists upon the unity of thought and action, contending that research and organizing in this context are mutually constitutive and that knowledge production in these movements is dialectically related to the material conditions experienced in struggles for social and economic justice.