The activist university: Identities, profiles, conditions

Abstract

At first sight, the very term ‘the activist university’ may seem strange. Universities have to be active in all manner of ways – insofar as we can attribute actions to large complex institutions – but ‘activist’? An activist is someone who takes up the cudgels in a cause, who contends against an enemy and demonstrates for and even fights for a cause. Students may be activists in movements of radical politics and can be seen resisting and even attacking the forces of the state. But what might it mean for their university, indeed any university, to be an activist university? I argue that the term ‘the activist university’ opens to different meanings. The concept of the activist university is a space in which alternative interpretations jostle with each other. These different readings are expressive of competing senses of the responsibilities of the university and its place in society. Academic activism lends itself to a panoply of stances. Nevertheless, I argue that academic activism is a universal category that gains its fullest realization when it is exhibited in a situation of epistemic injustice and is an expression of epistemic agency.