Social-Movement Led Methodologies
by Nadine Naber and Eujin Park
5.5 x 8.5, 120 pgs., $22
ISBN 978-1-962365-11-6
Forthcoming in 2026.
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Part of the series Essays in the Critical Humanities
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This book decenters the university as the primary site of knowledge production. It contributes research methodologies that affirm the expansive forms of knowledge that are produced out of the everyday practices of social movements. It applies indigenous and feminist of color concepts of “lived knowledge production” to social movement spaces in order to affirm them as crucial sites for critical theory-making and analysis about state violence and liberation. It is based on interviews with university professors who have committed most of their lives to social movement work beyond their academic pursuits alongside community organizers who have partnered with scholar-activists working within university settings.
Social-Movement Led Methodologies strives to decolonize dominant colonizing approaches to research about (or with) social movements and to university-movement or university-community partnerships. Specifically, it highlights the kinds of methodologies—whether decolonial or abolitionist—useful for disrupting the “activism” vs. “academic” binary and why this matters to reclaiming the university as a site for nurturing liberation and alternative futures. In addition, readers will walk away with strategies for university based scholar-activists to build sustainable relationships with movements and communities; enact accountability and ethics in movement/community-partnerships; and ensure that their research contributes to social movement goals. This book is especially meant for scholar-activists committed to equipping themselves with viable liberatory methodologies in the face of intensified university repression, scrutiny, and gatekeeping, and for anyone committed to transparency and accountability in research practice.
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Nadine Naber is a Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago in Gender and Women’s Studies and Global Asian Studies. She is author/co-editor of five books, including Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism (NYU Press, 2012); Race and Arab Americans (Syracuse University Press, 2008); Arab and Arab American Feminisms, winner of the Arab American Book Award 2012 (Syracuse University Press, 2010); The Color of Violence (South End Press, 2006), and Towards the Sun (Tadween Press/George Mason University, 2020). She is lead author of the policy report, “Beyond Profiling and Erasure: Cultivating Strong and Vibrant Arab American Communities in Chicagoland” (IRRPP/UIC, 2022). Nadine is the founder of Liberate Your Research Workshops, board member of the Journal of Palestine Studies and is active with organizations such as MAMAS Collective and the Arab American Action Network.
Dr. Eujin Park is an Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. She draws upon critical theories of racialization, Asian American Studies, and community engaged research to examine the processes through which Asian Americans actively shape and challenge race via education. Her book in progress, Conflicting Lessons: Korean Immigrants, Education, and Negotiating Race in Community, ethnographically investigates how Korean Americans in the Chicago area navigate dominant racializing discourses within their community-based educational spaces. Conflicting Lessons argues that, far from a monolithic racial category, understandings of Asian Americanness are highly contested, even within one Asian ethnic community. In addition to publishing and presenting her work in academic venues, Dr. Park draws upon her research to work with Asian American and other youth of color in community-based organizations.