Political Activist Ethnography

As activists strategize, build resistance, and foster solidarity, they also call for better dialogue between researchers and movements and for research that can aid their causes. In this volume, contributors examine how research can produce knowledge for social transformation by using political activist ethnography, a unique social research strategy that uses political confrontation as a resource and focuses on moments and spaces of direct struggle to reveal how ruling regimes are organized so activists and social movements can fight them. Featuring research from Aotearoa (New Zealand), Bangladesh, Canada, Poland, South Africa, and the United States on matters as diverse as anti-poverty organizing, prisoners' re-entry, anti-fracking campaigns, left-inspired think-tank development, non-governmental partnerships, involuntary psychiatric admission, and perils of immigration medical examination, contributors to this volume adopt a "bottom-up" approach to inquiry to produce knowledge for activists, not about them. A must-read for humanities and social sciences scholars keen on assisting activists and advancing social change.

Agnieszka Doll is a socio-legal scholar in law, health and regulation and assistant professor at the Department of History and Sociology at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She held postdoctoral fellowships at the Faculty of Law, McGill University, Faculties of Law and Medicine, Dalhousie University and Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. Laura Bisaillon is a political sociologist and associate professor in the Department of Health and Society at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She is the author of Screening Out: HIV Testing and the Canadian Immigration Experience (UBC Press, 2022). She is the director of the documentary film The Unmaking of Medical Inadmissibility (2020). Kevin Walby is associate professor of Criminal Justice, University of Winnipeg. He is co-author of Police Funding, Dark Money, and the Greedy Institution (Routledge, 2022). He is co-editor of Disarm, Defund, Dismantle: Police Abolition in Canad (BTL Press, 2022) and Changing of the Guards: Private Influences, Privatization, and Criminal Justice in Canada (UBC Press, 2022).