Drawing from an ethnography with a feminist anti-violence collective, this book explores how we can reimagine the relationship between academia and activism to create novel opportunities for social change. The book tells two interconnected stories: the story of a collective fighting gendered violence in an ever-shifting non-profit sector context and the story of an ethnographer learning from the collective about identity and social change. Rather than offering a prescriptive account of how academics can collaborate with activists, these intertwined stories ask us to question how we draw lines ... More

Drawing from an ethnography with a feminist anti-violence collective, this book explores how we can reimagine the relationship between academia and activism to create novel opportunities for social change. The book tells two interconnected stories: the story of a collective fighting gendered violence in an ever-shifting non-profit sector context and the story of an ethnographer learning from the collective about identity and social change. Rather than offering a prescriptive account of how academics can collaborate with activists, these intertwined stories ask us to question how we draw lines between what counts as academic/activist, theory/practice, reason/emotion, and mind/body. Unfixing these lines helps us to develop our imaginative capacity for identifying and dismantling injustice and share tools to (re)build a more just world. This book is an account of the social justice tools of feminist anti-violence activists including strong emotions and alternative organising, the unsettling the gendered body, and storytelling about feminist identity. This book is also an account of how those tools were taken up to reimagine academic activism. Beyond asking us how we might ‘do good’, however, this book asks us what we might become.