The last of my current work-related re-reads, so again I’ll keep my comments brief. I originally read this one quite a bit more recently than the others – only about five years ago – and not only did I do my usual review but I actually interviewed the author about this book and related things for an episode of @TalkingRadical Radio (https://talkingradical.ca/2016/01/20/trr-learning_activism/). Despite that, I’d still kind of forgotten how resonant this book’s ideas and preoccupations are with my own. Choudry draws on his extensive experience in working within social movements as an organizer, researcher, and educator, combined with his more recent experience doing similar tasks in university contexts, to write about knowledge production, theorizing, and learning in and by movements. He argues that we need to take the knowledge produced by movements and the learning that takes place in the course of struggle much more seriously than we do, and explores why that is and what it might mean for those doing related work in a variety of contexts. Not that we should relate to knowledge produced by movements any less critically than we do to knowledge produced elsewhere – this is not about romanticizing movement knowledge, about ignoring the ways it can substitute ideological mystification for grounded investigation, about pretending that it doesn’t sometimes reproduce the same oppressive hierarchies among knowers and known that happens everywhere. But we must resist the mainstream (and scholarly) tendency to dismiss such knowledge, and instead recognize just how valuable it can be for our efforts to understand the world and each other, and for our struggles for collective liberation.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.