Part front matter for Part I Why Policy and Local Action Matter

Corey Dolgon

I was a pastor for 40 years, almost 30 years at one church. When people die because they don’t have health care, I had to bury them. When people are stressed out and die, stroke out because they were working so hard, I had to bury them. And I could not stand up in that pulpit and say, God called them home, and this was a natural death. This is policy murder.

—Dr. William Barber—Founder of Yale University’s Center for Public Theology & Public Policy, Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival

The roses of resistance are born in the asphalt. We receive roses, but we will be with our fists clenched speaking of our existence against the push and pull that affects our lives.

—Marielle Franco—Brazilian sociologist, feminist, socialist, and human rights activist; city councilor, Municipal Chamber of Rio de Janeiro for the Socialism and Liberty Party

It’s easy for me to get nostalgic about old graduate school debates over reform versus revolution. It’s just as easy to disparage these passionate dialogues as the machinations of a misguided, young, naïve, and privileged Left. Despite what may have too often unfolded as either immature and overly abstract utopian ramblings or rigid (and just as abstract) dogmatic diatribes, I have come to believe that there is always room for the kinds of meaningful reflection and practice-based theory that such conversations did (at least sometimes) produce. For those of us committed to both indigenous, anticolonial traditions and revolutionary historical materialist paradigms, humility and patience are key. Old (and for young radical scholar activists today perhaps new) debates challenge both our critical thinking and our critical practice. The more important question may be this: What role might such debates have for us as we develop theory and methods—strategies and practice—for radical scholarly action?

If I go back to some of the work that inspired me “in those days,” Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution (1908) immediately comes to mind as something I returned to time and again. While she might sound dogmatic in her refutation of reformism, her sense of revolutionary consciousness and practice was far from either simply doctrinaire or overly romantic. While the ultimate collapse of a capitalist economy remained primary and foundational to her conception of social transformation, Luxemburg presented class consciousness as equally fundamental. Various reforms may have more, or less, radical intentions and outcomes, but the democratic struggle for justice—which may include a more equitable distribution of institutional power and capital—plays a crucial role in composing what radical class consciousness might be. Luxemburg (1908: 66) writes:

If democracy has become superfluous or annoying to the bourgeoisie, it is on the contrary necessary and indispensable to the working class. It is necessary to the working class because it creates the political forms (autonomous administration, electoral rights, etc.) which will serve the proletariat as fulcrums in its task of transforming bourgeois society. Democracy is indispensable to the working class because only through the exercise of its democratic rights, in the struggle for democracy, can the proletariat become aware of its class interests and its historic task. In a word, democracy is indispensable not because it renders superfluous the conquest of political power by the proletariat but because it renders this conquest of power both necessary and possible.

Contemporary struggles for democratic rights should be understood within this framework. If the trappings of liberal democracy seem problematic to so many capitalists, budding fascists, and their state functionaries around the world, then we ought to fight for restorative and expanded democracy because victories will be necessary for, and can be indispensable to, radical work. But policies and reforms resulting from these struggles must be understood as neither overly optimistic “evolutionary” steps toward transformation, nor solely and inherently accommodationist in their achievement. Just as the outcome required the praxis needed to fight for change, so does the meaning of the result require persistence and vigilance. We cannot see the expansion of democratic rights, educational accessibility, housing rights, and so forth, as ends in themselves, but as “ah ha” moments crucial for revolutionary consciousness.

If you read the first part of this collection, you know that theory is presented as integral to developing sociology for social justice. But the next section of this book turns primarily to a range of scholar-activism that supports social justice projects in various ways. Each project recognizes the ways in which policy work and local organizing can be part of small battles that both understand global and systematic justice struggles and see themselves linked to raising the radical consciousness of students and teachers, workers and residents alike. Melinda Messineo returns us to the famous Middletown of Robert and Helen Lynd and centers the city of Muncie as vital to recognizing how and why Ball State University (in specific) and higher education (in general) must be democratically engaged with residents’ struggles for racial and economic justice if they are to generate similar justice dynamics within higher education itself. As she answers the Lynd’s question, “Sociology for what?,” she concludes:

As sociologists we need to get our students and ourselves out of the classroom and into the community. We need to use our research and organizing skills to support our neighbors as they seek equity and justice. We must engage in long-term reciprocal partnerships that move beyond providing “course deliverables” and create actual change. As academics, we miss opportunities to apply antiracist and equity-focused approaches to our own workspaces, either in the service of removing barriers to students or by supporting our colleagues. We are always at risk of perpetuating the inequality that these structures facilitate, but we have the knowledge, skills, and empathy to avoid that fate. Together we can fulfill the promise and leverage our collective strengths as a means to increase social justice.

Like other authors later in the book, Messineo argues that access and diversity policies need to be connected to local action for justice not only to create real change within institutions but also to encourage and empower new kinds of collective action to challenge larger systems that maintain structures of injustice.

In similar fashion, Krinsky and Caldwell suggest the need to explore the dynamics of scholar activists embedded in social movement organization and community groups. Using Krinsky’s own failed attempt to present scholarly “expertise” to a Community Land Trust (CLT) group, the authors explain that most generative from his “clumsy attempt” to apply professional methods and present to the organization his own short-term assessment was the resulting dynamic that rendered “what the group thought familiar, in a strange form.” The resulting “problem” required everyone working collectively to derive new conceptions of both process and strategy. The authors argue that, “The distance between this and, say, bringing the original network synthesis to print in an academic publication as a movement-aligned academic is precisely the distance between sociology for social justice as a critical practice, and sociology for social justice as a performance of professional credibility. They conclude:

The principal point here is that to the extent that academic sociologists practice critically, they do so as part of, and in dialogue with, movements whose practice also represents a criticism of present arrangements. In this way, a critical practice of sociology within movements involves synthesizing and rearticulating the critical potentials of the movement itself. That, for example, CLTs’ focus on land—and not just housing—challenges the categorical boundaries of contemporary policy divisions, means that those who putatively make policy must be challenged, as well.

Thus, Krinsky and Caldwell help us understand the process and practice of dialectical collective research and activism that may result from the very predictable mistakes made by professional (even radically motivated) scholars. By being embedded in and working collaboratively with social movement groups, committed and class-conscious activist faculty find their own consciousness raised while helping to shape the collective class consciousness of a whole group.

The challenges for professional scholars who do engaged policy work is the focal point of Greg Squires’s piece—one that he admittedly suggests he has spent an entire career thinking about. In a fair-minded but critical appraisal of institutional (higher education) and professional (sociologists) engagement in community-based research, Squires finds that—while there is some institutional support and faculty have produced effective strategies and practices—both need to do much more and much better if they are to fulfill Mills’s promise that a sociological imagination can result in social transformation. But we must be prepared to “break the rules.” He writes, “Universities can do more. But it will take bottom-up pressure from interested students and faculty, and top-down pressure from supportive administrators to change the reward structure…. It is time to reignite one of our discipline’s long-standing traditions—that of engaged social justice scholarship.”

Like Krinsky and Caldwell, Thomas Piñeros-Shields presents a chapter that begins with a research project that failed—in this case an effort to complete research on the “citizen children” of undocumented immigrants (“Dreamers”) in hopes of informing and supporting an organization—the Student Immigrant Movement (SIM). But in analyzing the challenges the group faced from both external political forces and historical conditions, as well as inadequate strategies and methods, the author recognizes both the strengths of participatory action research (PAR) in general and the need to be as collaborative and process-focused as possible. Piñeros-Shields explains, “the project failed to engage the adult citizen children themselves in the process of narrative construction, and instead, deployed the type of ‘knowledge/power’ by constructing the interviewees as ‘subjects’ rather than participants in the research.” Partly, these results revealed “important lessons about timing, orienting new participants as coresearchers, ownership, standpoint, shifting political contexts, and the audacity of action goals,” that could contribute to future PAR within similar social movements—especially those involving youth. On the other hand, Piñeros-Shields suggests, “Even though the project did not meet its action goals, the past ten years showed that motivations of the 14th Amendment Project proved to be a prescient predictor” of the threat Donald Trump’s presidency would pose. As all research and activism has demonstrated historically, failures constitute a crucial part of the process toward successes and victories—as long as reflection and analysis remain linked to action.

Amie Thurber’s chapter on neighborhood story projects (NSPs) presents an example of practice and theory merging in an effort to create both a radical process and a transformational outcome. By supporting local communities facing devastating gentrification and industrial relocation, her work chronicles how recovering histories of identity and place creates a “narrative resistance” that supports communities in their efforts to protect and defend where they live. She writes, “findings from the Neighborhood Story Project affirm the ability of groups of engaged community members to counter dominant place stories, to add to the historical record, and to expand the voices that are uplifted, legitimize, and recognized as ‘expert’ within a given community.” While these efforts have mixed and often limited results in facing off against capitalist expansion, Thurber explains the unmitigated success that NSPs pose for all involved as they add powerful stories to a legacy of struggle:

For me personally, just as the drive to launch the Neighborhood Story Project was both political and personal, so too have been the rewards. I have celebrated the increased power of residents who had too often been ignored or silenced, and I have also been deeply moved by the place-stories they have shared, emboldened by the demands residents make of their communities, and inspired by the visions residents have for their neighbors and neighborhoods. In gentrifying urban neighborhoods, and in rural neighborhoods facing economic and population decline, the fierceness of residents’ commitment to their communities, their deep love of people and place, and their investment in strengthening their communities has modeled for me the kind of neighbor, practitioner, and researcher I strive to be.

Thurber’s gift is her ability to mesh her own story of acquired (and credentialed) tools with the community’s stories—not only the historical roots of place and identity but also the evolving narrative of new solidarity and commitment.

Finally, Yasser Arafat Payne and his coauthors begin as embedded urban community researchers whose commitment and power emanate from similar solidarities developed over generations of mutualism and struggle. The authors present “Street PAR” as a dynamic methodology that links democratizing social science research skills with an acute recognition of the knowledge production neighborhoods create outside the gaze of scholarly expertise. Thus, The Wilmington Street PAR Program trains and pays community members to be not only methodologically adept researchers but also critically engaged with the literature and theoretical approaches relevant to their areas of investigation. While the Program targets specific policy areas like gun violence and poverty, Payne et al. are adamant that, “the primary goal of grassroots PAR and especially Street PAR is accomplishing structural change and sociopolitical ‘power’ through the aggressive practice of research and activism.” Therefore, the Street PAR’s embeddedness and focus on local knowledge and expertise link contemporary scientific research and policy action with a critical awareness and incorporation of generational violence, racism, exploitation, misogyny, and urban immiseration. The irony of the authors’ transformative work is that it not only seamlessly integrates reform policies and revolutionary praxis but also produces better social science—methodologically, theoretically, and in its ability to fulfill the promise of a sociological imagination. And, as Payne et al. acknowledge, despite myriad barriers to radically engaged work, hardships “have not prevented a growing and durable collective of active grassroots scholars from being committed to concretely establishing a grassroots PAR movement. They conclude:

there is enough energy or a substantial opportunity to eventually produce a truly transformative, translational program. And with this energy, grassroots scholarship will have to establish clearer pathways of communication; better empirical training of PAR associates; stronger analysis and more empirically based publications with associates, reputable publication outlets, or platforms; well-planned academic conferences; opportunities for resource sharing; development of brick-and-mortar institutions in and out of local neighborhoods; commitment to community-level programming; and deeper involvement with policymaking. Although extremely ambitious, attaining an authentic, reciprocal and cooperative relationship between formal researchers and the researched is more achievable than it has ever been before; and surely worth the grind, risk, and sacrifice that will certainly be incurred in the process.

Radically engaged scholarship committed to social transformation has always proven to be hard and even dangerous. But for those of us unwilling to settle for death by policy, or what Black Panther Dhoruba bin Wahad once called “democratic fascism,” what else is there but the struggle?