Introduction The Imperial University

Collaborative research for justice and multi-issue movement building: Challenging discriminatory policing, school closures, and youth unemployment

“…This vision of research for justice must contend with the fact that social science gains power, legitimacy, and influence when its outcomes are seen as detached (Sandoval, 2000), and it is certainly not the active norm for professional training for research doctorates today. Indeed, in the name of neutrality and independence, university communities of practice still often purposely distance themselves from and actively discourage grounded immersion in the most pressing and violent oppressive issues of the day (Chatterjee & Maira, 2014). Most social scientists are taught to value the pursuit of objectivity, even if ultimately unachievable; they are taught that their impartial intellect applied through systematic methods is the recipe for "truth" but their emotional and political selves are a source of contamination; they are taught that "original" scholarly insights are produced by exceptional researchers who build upon previous and contemporary exceptional researchers published in exceptional venues -an individual sport isolated and singular in focus, absent of direct intimacy and reciprocity with their "subjects" (Sprague, 2016).…”

“…Yet, for all the ways academic research has been and continues to be worthwhile, we find it still wanting. Researchers remain too limited in their commitment to the least advantaged, still involved in the appropriation of land and removal of the poor, particularly indigenous people and people of color, and still too unmindful of the historical, ongoing, and potential for violence in the quotidian practices of academe (Chatterjee & Maira, 2014). Indeed, scholars have effectively demonstrated that university research has too often served the powerful and privileged by rationalizing, justifying, legitimizing, and sometimes even manufacturing oppressive conditions in ways that extend a colonial project (Patel, 2015, Walter, 2003.…”

“…Therefore, to do this work, the academy must also be a site of struggle and transformation for engaged scholars. This includes struggles against the globally imposed neoliberal restructurings that are realigning the curriculum toward the needs of capital, growing adjunct faculty exploitation, and introducing an "audit culture" that reduces the already constrained space for public scholarship and for the formation of activistcommunity-university coalitions (Chatterjee & Maira, 2014). Colleges and universities remain among our culture's primary institutions for legitimating certain forms of knowledge-creating that not only shape our futures but that also provide the forms of understanding that enable or disable ways of grappling with particular presents and of curating conflicted and tangled pasts.…”

Researching at the community-university borderlands: Using public science to study policing in the South Bronx

“…Academia, the social science disciplines, and university research involve complex communities of practice steeped in hierarchies, expectations, values, incentives, and limitations. This significantly shapes the trajectories of scholarship -what questions are asked, methods used, interpretations made, audiences spoken to -in ways that often limit deep public connection and impact (Chatterjee & Maira, 2014). More problematic, it increases the possibilities of producing scholarship that maintains, justifies, and normalizes oppressive structures harmful to marginalized communities (Patel, 2015).…”

“…Like policing, neoliberal universities also help reproduce and preserve state power and privileged interests in ways that too frequently extend a colonial project (Chatterjee & Maira, 2014;Patel, 2015). One needs to look no further than Brett's own home institution, John Jay College, for an example.…”