2 Academic Activism Reconsidered – between Societal Impact and Emancipation

Abstract

Abstract: In this essay, I argue that the meaning of academic activism focusing narrowly on direct, immediate, political, and visible forms of action and agency needs to be supplemented by a more nuanced understanding including dimensions of academic re-action, co-action, and inter-action. In universities today, we are witnessing an entrepreneurial turn of research environments with an ever-increasing focus on the roles of professionalization and employability in researcher education and careers. As a counter-view, the essay aims to open up the conceptual understanding of the interconnectedness between research and its societal contexts. I shall argue that these relationships cannot exhaustively be described through current discourses about societal impact but need a broader and more inclusive vocabulary including terms like societal engagement, societal responsibility, societal value, and societal dialogue and commitment. I shall work from a philosophical foundation in the critical realism of Roy Bhaskar coupled with recent discussions within the literature of academic activism.