Reflections of an activist-academic

Leal, Débora de Castro

doi:10.4337/9781788977616.00020

Cited by 2 publications

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“…With particular reference to development economics or to Global South scholars, there have been no studies or surveys comparable to the AEA Professional Climate Survey , but there are a few narrative accounts of personal experiences. For example, a student in a German doctoral program recounts the difficult position she found herself in when she was “the only student [in the program] who came from the ‘developing’ world, and the only one to have direct experience of the social and symbolic violence that is imposed on subaltern peoples” (de Castro Leal 2020, p. 94). Scholars for whom the “historical trauma of colonisation in the world” is in some way part of their personal biography may feel marginalized when questions of poverty reduction or economic development are approached merely from a Western perspective.…”

Section: Epistemic Injusticesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Poverty Research and its Discontents: Review and Discussion of Issues Raised in Dimensions of Poverty. Measurement, Epistemic Injustices and Social Activism(Beck, V., H.Hahn, and R.Lepenies eds., Springer, Cham, 2020)

Flechtner

2021

Review of Income and Wealth

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Edited volumes have low prestige in economics. Fortunately, the anthology Dimensions of Poverty. Measurement, Epistemic Injustices and Social Activism, compiled by Valentin Beck, Henning Hahn, and Robert Lepenies (2020), proves that edited volumes can be more than a loose collection of chapters unworthy of becoming journal articles. The editors have produced an important collection of 20 chapters around the conceptualization, understanding, and measurement of poverty, which brings together debates from economics, philosophy, political science, public policy, and sociology. The outcome is more than simply the sum of its parts: there is something to be learned both from individual chapters and, specially, from their cross-fertilization.The volume is concerned with the conceptualization and measurement of poverty. Yet, this topic is placed within the context of two other important and timely debates (see Figure 1). First, the volume establishes a link between the quality of poverty research and the perspectives that feed into it. A central theme here is epistemic injustice following Fricker (2007): it is argued that Global South perspectives are often undervalued or outright ignored. This is at the detriment of research quality because, in the view proposed, poverty research must carefully consider particular societal contexts. Hence the inclusion of scholars from diverse backgrounds and with society-specific knowledge "is not only a question of fairness (…) but also highly instructive" (Beck et al., 2020, p. 11). Various contributions also emphasize the importance of the views of those who live in poverty themselves, as well as of those who work in policy-making and poverty reduction outside academia. Second, the volume discusses how the way in which academics conceptualize, define, understand, and measure poverty has important implications for the actual lives of people living in poverty. In the words of one contributor, "[c]onceptual issues are not merely abstract and fringe discussions; they have an impact and influence on how reality is perceived, how it is shaped and how it should be changed. Concepts drive actions" (Schweiger, 2020, p. 163).On the topic of poverty, the anthology brings good and bad news. The bad news first: there will never be a definitive answer to the question of how to conceptualize or measure poverty, and we will never be done researching poverty. There are too many dimensions to poverty, too many normative judgments to be

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Section: Epistemic Injusticesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Poverty Research and its Discontents: Review and Discussion of Issues Raised in Dimensions of Poverty. Measurement, Epistemic Injustices and Social Activism(Beck, V., H.Hahn, and R.Lepenies eds., Springer, Cham, 2020)

Flechtner

2021

Review of Income and Wealth

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On Activism and Academia

Leal

Strohmayer

Krüger

2021

Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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In recent years HCI and CSCW work has increasingly begun to address complex social problems and issues of social justice worldwide. Such activist-leaning work is not without problems. Through the experiences and reflections of an activist becoming academic and an academic becoming an activist, we outline these difficulties such as (1) the risk of perpetuating violence, oppression and exploitation when working with marginalised communities, (2) the reception of activist-academic work within our academic communities, and (3) problems of social justice that exist within our academic communities. Building on our own experiences, practices and existing literature from a variety of disciplines we advocate for the possibility of an activist-academic practice, outline possible ways forward and formulate questions we need to answer for HCI to contribute to a more just world.

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Reflections of an activist-academic

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Poverty Research and its Discontents: Review and Discussion of Issues Raised in Dimensions of Poverty. Measurement, Epistemic Injustices and Social Activism(Beck, V., H.Hahn, and R.Lepenies eds., Springer, Cham, 2020)

Poverty Research and its Discontents: Review and Discussion of Issues Raised in Dimensions of Poverty. Measurement, Epistemic Injustices and Social Activism(Beck, V., H.Hahn, and R.Lepenies eds., Springer, Cham, 2020)

On Activism and Academia

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